IDEADEMIC

Do you ever have trouble keeping your to-do list organized and manageable? Here’s a technique that’s been working for us over the past few months.

We keep our to-dos in Backpack because it’s where all our project information lives, it’s viewable and editable by both of us and it’s web-based, so we can get to it anywhere.

Instead of a to-do list per project or page topic (tried that) we find it useful to have all of our actionables in one place.

Instead of a big long list for Jacob and another long list for me (tried that too) we’ve been more productive with a week view that “rolls” with us.

Keep in mind the basic GTD concept of breaking your work into granular actionable tasks. (Then actually do them.)

1. Make a New Page just for your to-dos. Title the page 2008 To-do so that it stays at the top of your list of pages in the sidebar.
2. Create Dividers for each day of the week. These don’t ever get rearranged.
3. Create a List for each person and title it with their name.
4. Add your tasks.
5. That’s it.

Yes, we realize that’s uber simple, but that’s the point.

With the ajaxy sweetness in Backpack, it’s easy to move items up and down within your week so planning collaboratively is quick and painless. Also nice is the ability to assign a task to someone else simply by adding it directly to their list.

What do you think? Could this work for you too?

If you’ve ever set out to name your company, this post is for you. If you’ve searched for a name that was visually stellar in a sassy serif typeface, a name that could be 100% yours according to the USPTO, a name with a corresponding available domain that was easy to remember and didn’t read like Pen Island’s url when typed in your address bar, then this post is for you.

Last April when things were just starting to come together for this venture we found and became attached to our new company’s new name.

We did our research, our WHOIS check, our US trademark evaluation, and thorough look at all cached material that could possibly be referenced as trademark infringement with the use of our new name, Elementary.

Ten dollars to GoDaddy and quite a bit of paperwork later we were up and running as an LLC with the URL elementaryco.com marking our existence online.

In all that prior research had we come across anything that seemed like a red flag? To us, no we hadn’t.

What we had found was…

• One live trademark on file with the USPTO for E-lementary with the description: Computer services, namely, creating, maintaining, designing, implementing, and managing web sites for others. (No big deal we thought, we’re not building and managing sites for clients.)
• We tied that to a tiny thumbnail image of a site, no longer live, that was described as a web-based tool for elementary schools. (Okay, not what we’re doing. We’re cool there.)
• In addition, the domain utilized for the afore-mentioned service, e-lementary.com, had expired, so we purchased it. (Alright, clearly a no-brainer. The site that the mark was purchased for does not exist, and the domain is now ours. Coast is clear.)

We were wrong.

These are our lessons learned:

1. Beware the pseudo mark: If it sounds the same, it doesn’t matter how it’s spelled. A pseudo mark is a word that is an alternate spelling or intentionally misspelled version of a word that is protected by an existing similar mark. E-lementary is the same as Elementary is the same as Elimintery is the same as 3l3m3ntary.
2. Trademark descriptions are intentionally written as broadly as possible. Even if the actual usage of a mark is quite narrow, the description will (and for your protection yours should) read loosely in order to keep options open as your business develops.
3. Ask yourself, “Is it worth the time and legal expense to fight for a name?” We had to come to terms with the fact that as a new company with no product or reputation yet dependent upon the name that it was best to just let it go. As our lawyers pursued the mark on our behalf, this quickly became evident (and expensive).

So, as damn sexy as Elementary looked tightly kerned in Casalon Graphique EF…

Consider yourself warned. Beware the pseudo mark!

(Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and this is not legal advice. Talk to your own lawyer…)

And just like that, Elementary becomes Ideademic.

Here’s to a moment of evolution among our medley of firsts, iterations and lessons that we’ve experienced over the last four months.

We write to share the stories of Ideademic, past and present, and shed a little light on our up to now decidedly vague startup.

The name change marks lesson number one, our first encounter with pseudo-marks. We’re saving that for a post all to its own because, frankly, it’s a long enough story and doesn’t belong in an introduction.

But we do!

Ideademic is the no-longer-secret love child of Brittany and Jacob Reiff. Actually it’s more of a holding company for our mix of ideas made manifest, but the love child thing got your attention right?

This final week in September finds us wrapping up(for what feels like the tenth time) what we’re calling our kindergarten project, The King. Just a few days ago we completed a live refresh of that site, with an emphasis on conversion and sexying it up a bit. That retelling also deserves its own place, so more to come.

Now we’re moving onward into the real estate space; not coincidentally, our elementary project. We’re pretty sure in this fairly busy space we’ve carved a little niche all our own. Soon, we’ll let you be the judge.

The progression we mention, using the school days metaphor, is how we envision building Ideademic into a self-sustaining, profitable business. Simply put, our approach is to rally around attainable successes, bite off what we can chew, celebrate each victory along the way, then take a bigger bite and do it all over again.

An introductory explanation of Ideademic would not be complete without a mention and tip of the hat to our rad investors and advisors. We hope someday to share their wisdom and experience on this blog, but for now we’re keeping them all to ourselves.

To sum up who we are in one sentence: We’re a husband and wife team living and working out of our dog’s playpen, otherwise known as our little studio in the sky in our favorite city, Portland, OR.

To the Portland community who has embraced us so warmly and with a very fair “WTF do you do?”, thank you for asking. We welcome the interrogation; it keeps us on our toes.