An AndesBeat Legend
We always said when we got around to designing a new logo, we would make a special post to acknowledge Agustín Feuerhake who played an influential role in the process (little did he know). And as it turns out today is the day! You never know the little thing that you say or do that is going to create a huge wave or impact. So BIG AndesBeat love to you compadre! We sincerely appreciate the swift kick in the ass and straight up advice you gave us about our ‘logo drama’. You can now officially put yourself down in the record books as part of the AndesBeat startup legend and one of our favorite startup memories.
And for those of you who are not familiar with the back story…..
Today our hard core fans will awaken to find a brand spanking shiny new AndesBeat logo. Special thanks to you – the ‘AndesBeat 48‘, jejeje, who were the 48 early adopters and true believers who survived with us in some of our darkest and scariest startup hours and bravely clicked the ‘like’ button (and followed us on our Twitter) with our whacky logo so prominently displayed.
For those of you who are ‘noobies‘ here, the ‘inside joke‘ behind AndesBeat logo Version 1.0…(See below) is Carlos and I had been somewhat ‘distracted‘ from the core of our work for a short time because we were focused on getting our logo and branding done before everything else, mas o menos.
That’s until one day….
when we were hanging out at the Co-Work space (dig the new website by the way, you guys), with Agustín Feuerhake, co-founder of QueHambre.cl and the conversation about the logo came up. Carlos and I were having a bit of a heated discussion about logos/branding etc. And Agustín basically says, screw the custom logo and the design, publish something ready made/simple to start with and spend your time on doing what you do best (not verbatim but it is the general idea).
As our disruptive mode is always on (if you haven’t already figured it out), we had to play devil’s advocate and look at all the potential pros and cons. And with 2 more days of intensely discussing this (sin Agustín), Carlos and I decided to take his advice and we finally squashed the conversation and acted on it, immediately.
Confession 1: I was being the difficult one.
Confession 2: Too many startup founders spend way too much time arguing over stupid things and trying to make everything perfect and as a result lose their focus of what they are supposed to be doing in the first place and a whole downline of problems come as a result. It’s usually not worth it. So keep it real, but keep it moving (forward)!
The Startup Life
Agustín’s conversation served as our focal point to make IT happen! It was our startup therapy so to speak. And on November 11, 2011 around our preferred daily work time (midnight madness) we purchased and set up our theme and started focusing our full energy on AndesBeat, in terms of REGULARLY producing high quality content, showcasing startups and working to build deeper relationships and more international exposure for the rising startup and tech talent coming out of Chile and LatAm.
But know that this process did not happen with some struggle. Everything was going pretty ok, until Carlos published – THE LOGO from hell on the front page of our website. And then I once again remembered why I was arguing for a better logo and design in the first place. Sorry, I do love my startup co-founder, I really do, and he has a lot of incredible skills and is the ultimate lifehacker and data miner, but I have to tell you, logo design is not one of his strong points, jejeje.
When I saw that logo, I almost died…twice. And then he put it on EVERYTHING in PUBLIC, the Facebook Fan page, the Twitter page…. Oh my G A W D. I was having nightmares about it and dry heaving everytime I saw it, jejeje. Luckily, Carlos has figured out the fine art of managing my sometimes strong personality and potty mouth, so he used some clever tactics and humorous copywriting to chill me out. So the whole concept of sometimes ‘good has to be ‘good enough‘, never rang so true.
Under the logo on the homepage of the site, he wrote our Facebook Fanpage Like Tagline:
So now you see version 2.0 on the site.
Uber Thanks
Muchas gracias to the AndesBeat 48 who hung in there with us and helped me survive the 38 days and 25 minutes of that logo. Today Version 1.0 of AndesBeat went to logo heaven (lo siento). But I was very happy to see Version 2.0 published on the site and is alive and well. An uber huge thanks and big love to our boys Sebastian Rodriguez and Alejandro Matamala over at Material for helping us to get our current logo designed and show a better reflection of our vision and where we are looking to grow with AndesBeat. Eso!
Who has done something cool for you that influenced something in your startup experience? Give them a shout out in the comments!
