From your head in the clouds to working the cloud

I’ve been lending a hand to my brother to get a business idea out of his head and into the ‘real world’. It’s an interesting concept called “The Productivity Paradox”, a notion he has been talking about for some time already, which he now wants to turn into something more tangible.

Disclaimer: There are certain aspects to this post that can be construed as self-promotional, but they are necessary for the story.

First things first: a quick check revealed that theproductivityparadox.com and productivityparadox.com were fortunately available, so five minutes and $20 later both were secured. The domains were readied for Google Apps and 10 minutes after that he had email (and a couple of other business tools) up and running on his primary domain.

He signed up to Tank to get a site going and, more importantly, to get going with the idea: throw a couple of ideas and words at the screen and see what sticks. Start writing, start editing, and start over if need be.

Thankfully we are on the same page in terms of simplicity and a certain minimalistic approach, so we didn’t focus on anything else except content at this stage. A couple of revisions later he figured out what to say on his home page: positioning his idea and business through words only.

Somewhere along the way we arrived at a tag for his site: “There is work to be done“. He continued to add a couple of pages and a blog to his site and then it was time for the next step: an identity and a logo.

This is where it got interesting. I had heard about a new site called crowdSPRING – ‘a global marketplace for logo design, business card design, graphic design and website design‘ – and I had been wanting to try it ever since. Here was the perfect candidate.

He signed up and posted a new project, ‘Help answer one of the great paradoxes of our time’, in the ‘Logo and stationery’ category and awarded $250 to the winner. One weekend and 69 submissions later he had a logo. In fact, he had a range to choose from: some bad, some good, some just interesting. He selected the winner and received the logo in pristine vector format, as well as versions prepped for the web.

Now he has an identity, the beginnings of a website, print-ready business cards and letterheads, and hopefully an interesting new business next. It’s far from perfect, but it’s off to a really good start.