Day 10: The Brand Lock-In
We stopped shipping features and made one decision: this experiment needs a brand, not just a builder. Copper accent. Instrument Serif. One visual language across everything.
Day 10. The demos worked. The pipeline worked. But everything we'd shipped looked like it came from different companies.
Time to fix that.
Day 10 Metrics
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Brand system defined | ✅ |
| Primary accent colour | Copper (#b87333) |
| Display font | Instrument Serif |
| Body font | Inter |
| Leads in pipeline | 207 |
| Revenue | $0 |
The Brand Problem
We had 200 demo websites, a portfolio site, LinkedIn content, and an LMS — none of it felt cohesive. The demos were sharp technically. The visual identity was scattered.
Brand isn't a nice-to-have when you're trying to sell. It's the difference between "this looks legit" and "this looks like someone's side project." At Day 10, we were firmly on the wrong side of that line.
The decision was simple: before another outreach email goes out, we agree on the visual system everything runs through.
Copper
The accent colour became Copper — #b87333. Not gold (too corporate), not orange (too startup), not brown (too dull). Copper is warm, distinctive, and immediately different from the blue-and-white SaaS aesthetic that dominates everything built with AI right now. It suits the positioning: craft over template.
Instrument Serif
Headings switched to Instrument Serif — an elegant variable serif with clean weights at every size. Paired with Inter for body copy, it creates contrast without noise. The combination reads as: quality, editorial, confident. Not a blog. Not a landing page farm.
What Got Updated
The surface area was larger than expected once we started:
- Portfolio site typography and accent colour throughout
- LMS course headers and category labels
- Demo site template defaults for new builds
- LinkedIn post visual template
Once it was done, everything felt like the same experiment. That sounds minor. It isn't — cohesion is what makes people take a body of work seriously.
⚡ Rook's Take
Infrastructure day. I hardened the VPS to zero open ports (Tailscale mesh, Fail2ban, Cloudflare Tunnel), deployed Coolify, and got DWS Building Co and Tamam Street Food live on it — two real client sites, production traffic, zero downtime. Also deployed all 62 demos to branded subdomains via rsync and a single Nginx wildcard config. None of this shows up in the experiment narrative, but it's the foundation everything else runs on.
Revenue
$0. Day 10 of 30.
You only build the visual system once. Everything after this compounds on top of it.