This is an entire discipline, and you can spend accordingly. For what it’s worth, your brand is not just your logo. It’s your meaning to people who interact with you – in your logo, yes, but also your colors, fonts, voice, tone, taglines, ad creatives, social media presence, and so on. It should be reflected throughout your websites/apps and product experiences.

An agency can help you navigate all this, and a good one with start with brand strategy - ie, who is your target customer, and what is your promise to them. Getting advice or hands-on help from a marketing person who has led this process before could be very helpful to you, even if you do end up hiring an agency. Otherwise you’ll just end up with a deck.

I’m not sure there’s a distinction between “liquidation” and “sale” preference. They are usually one and the same. In any case, the justification for awarding these preferences is to avoid exactly this situation from an investor’s POV.

Why would you take $1M from someone last year and sell for $1.7M this year and call it a long hard road? You took the money to grow it and sell it for more than that. I don’t blame them for being disgruntled, and it also sounds like you’re getting a crap deal from the acquirer.

Do you have any customers or revenue? The best thing you could do for yourself is to get some, even if only as proof of concept. This would help validate for potential investors that you’ve actually built something people will pay for. It will also help you figure out which of your assumptions are right and what’s missing – in other words to be more specific about what you need money for. You should do all the initial sales yourself (not hire a sales person) for this reason.

If you get some traction this way, you can either raise money or maybe join an accelerator.

I don’t think you can just “marketing” your way into becoming a tech CEO, hoping to hire a technical co-founder along the way. While you can certainly be non-technicaly, you have to be able to market and sell to technical customers and tech-savvy investors and employees. To even develop a pilot or prototype and sell it, even provisionally, to an institutional customer, you have to be able to explain what your product is and does, how it’s differentiated from the competition, how it integrates into their current technology stack, and much more. You’ll also have to make a lot of decisions, including legal and technical ones, about data retention, compliance, and a million other things. You really stand no chance at doing this without a thorough grounding in the industry.

My best advice would be to either work for someone who will mentor you, or try to get involved with an already-going team that has a product and some tech but needs business leadership.

As a customer, I like to see breakdowns because they help me judge if someone is bullshitting me. It’s very typical, for example, when you bring your car into the shop, for them to break down the parts and labor. The better ones will even estimate it in terms of an allocation of time spent per job, ie. brakes is $150 parts and $375 in labor, based on 2.5 hours at $150/hour, or whatever.

Whether or not they’re charging a competitive price per hour or inflating the hours estimate, these are marginal issues compared to an overall level of transparency that makes it easier to trust that I’m not being given some random price.

If someone just handwaves “$500” for some repair job, I don’t know if they’re giving me an honest price or just sticking it into me as far as they think they can based on my zip code. I won’t necessarily know if I’m being bullshitted on a broken down estimate either, but it helps me make a judgment as to $500 being a reasonable number if there’s a $200 mother board replacement involved.

For what it’s worth, I have no intention of shopping around on the price of a part if I can’t do the labor myself. And if I can do the labor myself, I’m not coming to your shop for a quote in the first place.

Also, in this day and age, people are pretty used to price transparency. When you can go online and see the last sixteen tax assessment and sale prices for every home in your neighborhood, why is this repair guy being cagey about the price of a thermocouple as part of a $200 repair job?

If this really bugs you, however, and perhaps if you’re the traditional sort, my suggestion to you in this situation is to simply tell people you are more than happy to quote them a price that breaks down labor at $X per hour and parts at cost [plus 10% if you like] – or to do the job at 1.5X/hour if they supply their own or screw it up themselves.

Based on the word “we” being used repeatedly in your post and assuming it means you have a co-founder, I recommend you hire an attorney. In addition to forming the legal entity of the corporation, which requires issuing stock, which requires dividing the stock, setting up voting rules, vesting/reverse vesting, etc., you also need to tend to some important things like filing an 83(b) election and assigning IP to the corporation, and all the rest of it.

If you’re serious, do it right. If it’s not worth doing right, then don’t waste your time on it at all.