And the winner is…

The team chose this logo based on it’s clean, bold, and simplistic look.  After deciding on the logo design itself, we needed to finalize the colors we wanted — off to the internet we went in search of color psychology.  We wanted to stick with a two color combination with one being a primary color. An interesting fact is that the most recognizable logos in the world are primarily made up of at most two colors. Below were the color options we were considering…

GREEN:
Green is a calming, refreshing and conservative color. It signifies tranquility, nature, health and freshness. It is widely used in healthcare, construction, real estate and golf logos due to its relevance with the mentioned businesses.

ELIMINATED BECAUSE: We really liked green, however, because of it’s relation to money, greed, and the whole “going green” movement we opted to not go down this path.

BLUE:
Blue evokes authority, dignity, security and faithfulness. It is one of the most popular colors among logos and can be seen extensively in education logos, government and medical logos.

ELIMINATED BECAUSE: The overwhelming popularity of the color in logos (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Dell, etc.) was a turnoff.  We wanted a color that really stood out from the rest.

ORANGE:
Orange represents energy, enthusiasm and demand of attention. This particular vivid color is common among the logos that offer a sense of openness and friendliness to their viewers. It’s attractive, bright and cheery nature captures the attention of the spectators and gives the logo a contemporary look.

CHOSEN BECAUSE: (See description above) It portrays every emotion and feeling we like and is very representative of the company we hope to create.

Color Psychology Source: http://www.logoblog.org/wordpress/color-psychology-of-logos/

Microsoft Provides Assistance to Entrepreneurs

In 2008, Microsoft launched a program called BizSpark. It’s purpose is to assist entrepreneurs during the early stages of the startup process by providing you with many of the necessary technology tools used in the industry today for free and up to 3 years. For Four94, it has proven to be an invaluable program. We have been able to download and use full featured versions of Visual Studio 2010, SQL Server 2008, Visio, the latest Office suite and more. Basically, any software developed under the Microsoft name can be downloaded for free.  The program also provides you visibility to potential investors, clients and partners through their community.

The catch is that you must be a privately held software development company, in business less than 3 years and generate an annual revenue under $1 million. Most software startups shouldn’t have a problem qualifying under these terms.

We highly recommend signing up.  If you have any questions about the availability of software through the program, feel free to leave a comment and we’ll look up something for you.

Staying Lean – Growing Your Company Efficiently

Very good videos on staying lean as a startup. A little lengthy, but informative.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Managing Yourself – The Four94 Stairs Challenge

Welcome to the first blog in a series we’ll dub “Managing Yourself”.  In this series, we look to provide everyday tips that we apply in our own lives – –  everything from maintaining a healthy lifestyle to promoting continuing education opportunities outside work experience.

Maintaining a healthy lifestyle is a value each member of the Four94 team shares.  We all work hard to stay in shape and maintain a healthy diet.

Everyone needs a little break in their day…it’s what you do with that break that’s important.  During our work-day, we have challenged one another to take two small breaks during work to walk the stairwells in our respective buildings.

The goal is not to cram a ½ hour workout into 10 minutes, because let’s face it, who wants to go back to work after that? Our goal is to take a few extra minutes twice each day to walk anywhere between 5-8 floors – – just enough to relieve a little stress, get the heart-rate pumping and burn off a few calories.

We challenge you to do the same – – twice a day take just 10 minutes, grab a co-worker and walk the stairs with us.

We look forward to hearing how you and your co-workers are doing with this challenge!

Evolution of a Brand – The 99Designs Experience

Our first order of business – – Establish an identity and brand for our company.  The first part was easy. We quickly came to an agreement on our name – Four94. This made the most sense since the company was started by four people who are all connected by Chicago’s I-94.  Next up – – agree on our company logo.  Some would criticize us for wanting a logo even before having a fully defined product to sell, but we wanted to begin marketing ourselves and getting feedback from companies on how we could help improve efficiencies for our potential customers.

While we consider ourselves a creative group, we are the first to admit graphic design is not one of our strengths. And as a new company, we wanted to stay as lean as possible, while doing all the essentials to build a successful business.  To us, that meant not adding staff for one-off projects and not spending $2,000 when $200 will do.

Enter 99Designs.  99Designs is a website that gives businesses an opportunity to post a project request for things like a new logo or website design.   With a new project posted, freelance designers submit designs and compete against one another to earn a monetary prize of your designation.  In the event you don’t like any of the submitted designs, you can get a full refund (just don’t guarantee the prize).

They have a variety of pricing levels or custom packages for you to choose from, and they estimate the amount of designs you will get based on that.  When we launched our project, the budget plan they offered was $211 for an expected 35 designs, although prices have gone up a bit since then. With this package, the winning designer would earn $150, while the rest of the money went to 99Designs for processing. How could we go wrong? We were confident there would be at least one design we’d all agree upon from the estimated 35 design submissions. So, at 99Designs recommendation, we set out to be as descriptive as possible in our project brief explaining who we are and what we were looking for in a logo.

And so it began…

Day 1: We launched our project and within 24 hours we had our first 5 designs. The quality of designs were pretty good. And with the added ability to rate each design and leave feedback to offer areas of improvement for each submission. Logo #1 (pictured below) stands out as the favorite after the first round of submissions.

Day 2: We’ve already hit the 35 design mark! This appears to already be paying off! But, we notice this can be quite a bit of work if we leave feedback for each and every designer.

Day 3: 50 designs – –  much more than 99Designs estimated we would get. Now we notice that a lot of the designs share the same qualities as the earlier designs with higher ratings. So, a piece of advice, offer private feedback to each designer otherwise you will see diminishing returns on creativity. Oddly enough, the group still favors the very first logo created, but there are other players in the game now.

Day 4: 85 logos – – we are pleasantly surprised! We are getting some pretty gnarly looking logos though. Some look like graffiti, others look like they were done in Microsoft Word. Let’s hope things pick up.

Day 5: 150 LOGOS!!! Now we realize that leaving personal feedback is no longer an option, so we resort to a quick star rating system from this point forward. This process has become pretty stressful because there are a good number of quality logos to choose from that only show slight variation. One thing noticed from our daily vote is our preference for the color green…Hmmmm.

Day 6: Now up to 180 logos – – time to begin a mass elimination process so we can focus on a select few. Chosen will be the top 5 that have been showing up consistently in everyone’s daily vote.

Day 7: We are 2 hours away from having to make our choice and there are currently 182 designs for an average of $1.16 per design!! Not a single designer in the world would be willing to work for that output. Overall, we feel this has been a good experience and investment on our part.

The group is all casting their final votes for their top 3-4 logos and making one last pitch for their favorite. Help us decide, cast your vote in the comments section at the top. We’ll post our final decision in the coming week… Stay tuned!

Contest Link: http://99designs.com/logo-design/contests/create-identity-saas-company-logo-four-48613

Welcome to Four94!

I’m sure you can tell from our blog title, Four94 is a new company. We are four everyday 9-5’ers looking to embark on a journey that hopefully leads to our escape from the corporate rat race we have chosen for ourselves. Our expectations are realistic–we aren’t starting a company in hopes that we can sell it for millions in X number of years, although I can’t say we wouldn’t consider it if the opportunity came along. Our goals are to create and define our own work environment and make money while doing something we are all passionate about.

Four94’s  goal is to create affordable and easy to use SaaS (Software as a Service) applications for small to medium-sized businesses. SaaS (get your buzzword bingo cards ready) has been around for quite some time, but for those of you who are new to SaaS, it just basically means Four94 will host and maintain all the software from our servers, which enables businesses to cut IT costs. Eventually, we hope to find a niche in this market that we can turn into our flagship product. For now, we plan on producing products that we feel will improve efficiency in small businesses. And, where we benefit is that WE will be our first customers for most of what we build.  We’ll be the first to test our products to ensure it provides the utmost benefit and value to those that may use it.

The purpose of this blog is to assist us in refining our own process by obtaining feedback from the internet community and other entrepreneurs in pursuit of similar goals.  We hope it will become a resource for all new and current businesses who face the same obstacles as we do.

Stay tuned. We hope to see you back here soon!