Our Veterans are Absolutely Remarkable

In honor of Memorial Day today, I wanted to post special mini-tribute to our veterans who have served or are serving.  Among them are my Dad, both Grandpas, two brother-in-laws, and a host of friends and extended family.  Thank you!

You can send a mini-tribute of your own to your favorite veteran, by name, at www.isAbsolutelyRemarkable.com.

P.S.  It is awesome to see the number of mini-tributes that you have been sending.  They make fun congratulations notes, birthday e-cards, and “just because” encourgements…and they are FREE!  Send one today.

It’s still about the humans…making choices

My 5-year-old son has never probably seen us look up anything in a phone book or heard us call directory assistance.  We never had to go the library for anything, but recreational reading.  His only frame of reference includes high-speed internet.  Today, he asked me if I knew why God invented lightning (oh, the questions of a pre-schooler!).  I said that I wasn’t sure.  He replied, “you should look it up on the computer.”  “Hmmm, I am not sure the computer will know what God was thinking…” I start to reply.  “Mom, the computer is really smart!” he retorts. 

I then try to explain to him that it is people that are smart, that put information on the Internet, and develop ways to search.  So, if we wanted to learn more about lightning it was someone who learned about it that posted the information so that we could find it (not to mention God, for “inventing” lightning in the first place, but that is another post all together). 

To this my son replies, “Yeah, but it was the computer that found that cartoon episode of Ben Ten Alien Force.”  True, but yet not so true.  If the animators, storytellers, marketing folks, executives at the Cartoon Network, and IT gurus didn’t create and post the Ben Ten episodes, we never would have found them…no matter how much R&D Google invests in search technology.

All of this makes me realize how easy it is to lose the humaness when dealing with technology.  We sometimes forget that every piece of technology (from our TV remote to a sophisticated ERP software system) is actually the creation of human beings and the collection of tough choices that they made.  Ben Ten could have been live action instead of cartoon.  He could have been called Kevin Eleven (a great name for a sequel, I might add, if Kevin hadn’t been the name of the bad guy).  The stories could only be available online, on TV, or in theaters.  Choices, choices.  And these are just the choices we can see from the outside.  Internally, the development team made thousands of choices about how they would work, what tools they would use, etc that although behind-the-scenes, but still critically important.

As we approach the beta release of Remarkable Tributes, the breadth of these choices are becoming clearer.  We have long selected development platforms and key vendors, but continue to add tools and supplementary products to the business so that we might serve our clients and our customers.  We continue to refine features to make sure they provide the most benefit and allow you to do new things in new ways. 

So, perhaps one day another family will be able to have a discussion about how smart their computer is because they found Remarkable Tributes!

Blog Today, Book Tomorrow

I am a mother of two small children…three if you count this new business.  I am always finding parallels between life motherhood and entrepreneurship.  I figure that one day I will write a book about these similarities.  I might have to hire a ghost writer (maybe that lady who wrote the hilarious Girlfriend’s Guide to Pregnancy), but all of the examples will be real.

Here are a few proposed chapter headings…

• It Takes Two to Tango: How all great ideas are mash-ups of other ideas
• Sharing the News: I’ll tell my boss about the business when I start to show
• Branding: Practicing yelling the brand from the back porch (or possibly “Branding-Branding-Bo-Fanding-Banana-fana-fo-fanding-Me-My-Mo-Manding-Branding.”)
• Trust in the Delivery Room: Finding the best vendors and partners
• Hormone-Induced Paranoia: Testing and retesting the business model
• Bed Rest: Maintaining momentum and urgency in times of lull
• Crawling Before We Walk: Teaching a business independence one army-crawl at a time
• Shower Games: How to launch the new business without silly games
• Your Baby Might Not Be Beautiful: How to take and use feedback without getting defensive
• Family Planning: What is your exit strategy or not

What do you think?  Any other chapters you’d suggest?

Adventures in Branding

Branding for a small business (who aspires to greatness) can be daunting.  On one hand you don’t want to think about it too much, as it can be distracting from the real business of building something worth buying.  That said, it is important and something I have spent some time this past month working on.

So, where does one start to create a brand.  In my case, the whole thing started when I misplaced the high resolution and source files for the Creative Outlet Labs logo (perhaps I confess too much) that a talented friend designed for me several years ago.  I started using the low-res version on www.CreativeOutletLabs.com and on www.isAbsolutelyRemarkable.com, while I searched for the files and even contemplating recreating it.

As a tangent, I love the idea of Creative Outlet Labs.  All of the business concepts that I have toyed around with have been in the creative space, thus the mention of Creative Outlet.  The Labs portion was a nod to technology (another pillar in my business ideas).  My vision is that Creative Outlet Labs would work to push out dozens of great ideas, businesses, applications, and can’t-live-without innovations over time, each of which might have their own identity.  From a branding perspective, the phrase Creative Outlet Labs has some serious limitations as a brand.  For one it is EXTREMELY long at 20 characters and is a bit of a tongue twister.  How you might want to break it up to fit it into a reasonably-sized logo make it look funny.  You put Outlet on its own line and it appears that we are advertising a discount store, for instance.  Perhaps it was destiny that lead me to lose those original logos.  It wasn’t meant to be.

So, work began on the “Remarkable” concept (now in serious development).  At first my thought was to downplay the “Remarkable” piece and put Creative Outlet Labs at the center, but now that I am up to my ears in development, designs are underway, and marketing plans are being fleshed out it became clear this was a bass-ackwards approach.  Demonstrating flexibility, I decided to turn 180-degrees and de-emphasize Creative Outlet Labs and focus on Remarkable for the new launch this Summer.  The company is still Creative Outlet Labs, but in the same way that a company called Obvious made Twitter (wait, they just changed the company name to Twitter Inc, so perhaps that is a poor example) or how the company 37Signals makes Basecamp (while they don’t even own the domain name Basecamp, which gives me hope).

Now, this lead me to all sorts of follow-on choices and decisions, some of which are agonizing and are indicative of the kinds of trade offs a small business makes.  I still have a little website that works great at www.CreativeOutletLabs.com.  At some point soon, I’ll be merging that content into the new site (I’ll leave you in suspense, although you link to Creative Outlet Labs will still work).  However, I can’t do that immediately as I don’t want to take focus off the main development activity to do something that would be temporary.

Furthermore, I have a super fun mini-tribute application that lives at www.IsAbsolutelyRemarkable.com that I plan to rebrand as well this Summer.  This is planned without any disruption in service, so keep sending those mini-tributes and sharing smiles!

I am still several weeks from unvieling the logo designs and plans, but I can tell you about the process to create the logo itself (the manifestation and distillation of the brand into a single image, pretty heady stuff).

I started with some brand characteristics (I know, how “corporate” of me).  These were some things that eventually I’d like the service to be known for.  I am not naive enough to think that I can will this to happen, but if I am purposeful about it, aligning design and decisions around these characteristics, perhaps one day these things will be attributed to me by my customers.  At least that is the concept. 

So, I started with a list of four characteristics (I’ll share those in another post, perhaps as I describe the kind of decisions they have been prompting me to make).  The designer took these, along with example logos that I liked, example logos that I didn’t like, and examples from others in the industry.  I even made a list of characteristics of a great logo that I have developed over the years (having lived through very bad branding efforts, world-class identity developments, and having worked in start-up environments where these decisions are made and for one of the most valueable brands in the world, all of which provided great learnings in this area).  If you are interested, I’ll share some of these brand concepts in a future post.  These formed a starting place for a great discussion and several rounds of back and forth concept design and “narrowing down.” 

We now have a logo that we’ll start using soon and are working on the corrolary items like color palettes, font treatments, and other design language that will drive the brand even further.  I know, perhaps these are only decisions that a marketeer can appreciate.  That said, I have been able to narrow down preferences and really reinforce and articulate the important aspects of the branding through this process.  As with other things, sometimes the journey is more important than the destination (although in this case the destination is very cool).

The whole process reminds me a lot of naming a child, actually.  There is a lot of pressure to do it right and it is only years down the road when you know you might have made a mistake.  Perhaps I should add this as a chapter to the book I may pen someday.  The working title for the book is “How Entrepreneurship is like Motherhood”  (more on that later).  I think I will call this chapter “Branding: Practicing yelling the brand from the back porch” or “Branding-Branding-Bo-Fanding-Banana-fana-fo-fanding-Me-My-Mo-Manding-Branding.”

Support the Troops

Although we absolutely, should provide support for troops fighting to protect and serve, but those aren’t really the troops I was talking about in this post.  I am thinking more about the crowds that will be using Remarkable Tributes once the system is live and how we might best provide support and encouragement to them.

I always find it extremely helpful when site include a searchable “Frequently Asked Questions” or online help system that allows me to solve my own problem.  I would rather not call or email for support, if the answer is easily found on my own.  I imagine I am not alone in this.

To this end, I have begun researching self-service systems for support.  With the growth of wiki technologies and crowd content tools, I see a great opportunity to find a cost effective solution that will fit the bill, but I need your help.  Have you used any Wiki tools that you’d recommend?  Have you used any commercial packages that you would recommend me investigating?

Below are some of the top features I am looking for:

1.  I’d rather pay moderate license fees to avoid having advertisements on the wiki or support site.  If people are looking for answers, I want them to be easy to find in a distraction-free environment.
2.  The service itself should be easy to set-up, attractive to view, with some ability to make it look like part of the site (in terms of templates, color palettes, integration with other site navigation)
3.  Clear ownership of the content I post there.
4.  Over time, I’d like to make this a community-supported thing where members help other members.  I know there are two schools of thought about this.  One school would say to implement approval and workflow controls to keep mistakes from being made (or inappropriate content from being uploaded, etc).   The other would say to allow free reign and make it easy for the community (and moderators) to correct mistakes.  Some say make every contributor/editor log in and “claim” their edits for more accountability (but I don’t want members to have to manage multiple log-ins to the site, which is something that really iritates me when it is required).
5.  I’d like the Wiki or solution to have a search feature of some kind, as I imagine the organization of content might be a little organic and not so structured.

I welcome your tactical or philosophical responses to any of the above.  I look forward to hearing your recommendations.