About 12 years ago, my buddy from college – Ted – started building some scheduling software for his brother’s countertop fabrication shop. Not too long after that (in late January 2003), I happened going to Silicon Valley for work, and asked him if he wanted to meet up for dinner or drinks one night. Here’s part of his response:
“I’m quitting my job to start my own software company!…I’d love to get together while you’re in town. Not having a job makes my schedule quite flexible, so I expect we can work something out.“
Ted and I hadn’t seen each other in years, but we had a great time hanging out that evening. Both of us had similar experiences working at startups during the dot-com boom. And, we were both disillusioned about that approach to building businesses. We’d both seen first-hand how having large bundles of investor money changed who you were selling to – in both of our cases, our companies never sold real products… we were in a constant state of selling to stockholders instead of customers.
He seemed incredibly happy to be starting a company, and I realized I wasn’t fulfilled by my job, so I asked if I could help out. Neither of us realized that “helping out” meant that within a few months I’d quit my job, to dive in head-first. Then, when we actually made our company official, Ted & I were partners in the business.
So, how’s that related to a logo? One of the earliest things I did was get our logo. At the time, Moraware didn’t have any money, and spending it on this kind of thing seemed a bit frivolous. I’d been an engineer for my whole career up to that point, and I didn’t place a lot of value on “marketing” or “sales“. I didn’t really even understand what those words meant. Turns out, that having a product is only a tiny part of building a company.
I knew we needed something, so I asked my mother-in-law (who was working as a design-focused marketing person) to help. She whipped up several ideas and after a few iterations, we decided on the initial Moraware logo. I’d always planned on going back to spruce it up at some point, but never quite got around to it.
Fast-forward to 2014. This year, we hired three new people in customer-facing roles. Part of their mission is to improve the overall experience of our sales, marketing, and support. Well, it turns out that our website was pretty ugly, hard to navigate, and barely helped our existing customers and prospects.
After over a decade of looking at the site, I didn’t have a lot of ideas or energy for improving it, but luckily Patrick, Jason, and Kathleen were personally offended by what was there.
We got some help from a consulting company who evaluated our website and made a incredibly long list of suggestions and changes. But, as we started trying to apply new themes to our website, we realized that one of limiting factors was our existing logo. We wanted something with a more neutral color-scheme, a separate image we could use as a stand-alone logo, and that could be used in a variety of media and backgrounds.
We’re making lots of other changes to Moraware – having a new infusion of ideas is helping us re-think how we can improve everything from our website, online support, our help documentation, and the overall experience of discovering, evaluating, buying, and implementing our software.
And so, without further ado, I present to you our new logo.
Want to know more? At Moraware, we make software for countertop fabricators. CounterGo is countertop drawing, layout, and estimating software. JobTracker is scheduling software that helps you eliminate the time you waste looking for job folders. RemnantSwap is a free place to buy and sell granite remnants with fabricators near you.
