I ran across a quote today that might shed some light on a different approach:

Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.
  – Robertson Davies

Just like happiness is not a goal, not something you find as a direct result of effort, so is contentment or peace.  You can’t demand to be satisfied with things in their various stages of incomplete.  All you can do is work, day after day, towards the goal.  Happiness, as they say, is a by-product.  A by-product of work.

In preparation for the upcoming beta (not to late to sign up, by the way) of Remarkable Tributes and the go live later this Summer, I have been working on a series of “Frequently Asked Questions.”  You know the type that walk customers through how to use the website, why to use the website, and what to do if things go wrong.  I will be putting them into the new Remarkable Tributes Help Center to be searched and added to by you once the system goes live.  This is really important stuff!  I have brainstorming a list of questions and typed them out this weekend to begin the work of answering them.  The list of questions is 9 pages long!  Those are just the questions, as I have not yet penned the answers.

Now, readers to this blog (or perhaps my other blog or Twitter stream) will probably rightly assess that coming up with a lot of ideas isn’t a problem for me.   So, perhaps some of these questions are not as important as others.  Some of thing may very well be a question that no one would ask, but still the list is there.  All 9 pages of it. 

So, I am going to fight procrastination.  I am taking a number of questions a day and will write the answers.  The ones that require screen shots or other reference materials from the software (which is in development and not quite ready for prime time) will have to wait, but there are many that I can do now, get out of the way, and be ready for the go live.

There, now I feel much better.  I have a plan.  Certainly, I can’t wait to see what questions you have once you start using Remarkable Tributes.  Stay tuned for more details on the Help Center and other things we are pulling together to make you successful!

By the way, this post will be mirrored over at http://RemarkableTributes.wordpress.com where I will be moving the blog officially in the next few weeks.  Go ahead and change your reader to the new address.

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.

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?

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.”

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.