Hello Theory

Introducing Hopefully Sunny

Fri, 03 Jun 2011 11:10:34 -0400

We’re really excited to announce the launch of Hopefully Sunny! Hopefully Sunny is a really simple web app. You sign up with your email address and zip code, and we email you each day with the forecast for the next 4 days.

Here’s a quick example of what the emails look like:

Hopefully Sunny was inspired by a few core ideas:

Most people check their email before they check the weather. That means that by sending an email we can cut a step out of our lives every morning.

Weather doesn’t have to be complicated. We focus on one location for your daily email. Going on a trip? Just update your location and we’ll send you the weather for that place instead. We just show you the stuff that’s actually important for a quick daily check of the weather. We put a big icon next to each day’s weather so you’ll know if you need to grab an umbrella or not.

Understand the weather at a glance. If you’re like me, you scan email titles. Hopefully Sunny puts useful information - the actual weather - in the subject line of your email so that you’ll know the weather even if you don’t open the email. Here’s how the email looks on my iPhone:

Right now Hopefully Sunny is available only for the United States. We’re hoping to get an international weather source together in the near future so that we can cover the entire globe.

We felt like Hopefully Sunny matched Hello Theory’s goal to be happy and do great work. It’s solves a real, albeit tiny, need in our lives, and we hope it’ll solve the same in your life. We hope you love it!

Go check it out and sign up!

"Now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must..."

Wed, 16 Feb 2011 12:05:05 -0500

“Now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country.”

- Ishmael “Moby Dick”

The making of Field Notes “Raven’s Wing” note...

Fri, 05 Nov 2010 14:01:35 -0400

The making of Field Notes “Raven’s Wing” note book. An amazing process filled with soul, and high standards. I love seeing things being made by hand. There’s a “rightness” to well done work.

Take Time to Rest

Sat, 16 Oct 2010 17:31:00 -0400

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under the trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time. - John Lubbock

The past week has been absolutely exhausting to me. I’ve had some insanely mixed emotions - elation at being chosen to join the amazing team at Carsonified and sadness to be leaving Gnoso. I’ve been working at Gnoso for a little over 3 years now, and in that time I feel like I’ve learned and accomplished more than at any other place I’ve worked. Any time you leave a young company that you’ve put tons of effort into you have mixed feelings. Am I just giving up or am I making a smart decision? Those thoughts left me pretty worn out at the end of the week.

Taking Friday off and spending a restful Saturday at my wife’s parents’ house, though, has recharged me a good bit. I had a quiet walk by myself. I had a nice breakfast with Adair’s dad. I enjoyed the lovely fall weather. Relaxing a bit solidified my opinion that I made the right choice, and brought me back to feeling sane again. It’s given me fresh perspective about taking on what’s ahead.

It’s really important for me to rest. If I don’t, I get myself to a point where I’m doing things because I feel like I’m supposed to, not because I want to see a great outcome. I start acting mindlessly. I need to remember to instead stop, realize that I have a great family and live in an amazing world, and then start back over trying to make things better for my family and that amazing world.

This email by Mint is a great example of a company using humor...

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 11:18:00 -0400

This email by Mint is a great example of a company using humor to lighten the mood surrounding a screw up. However, I’d be pissed if they’d used this tone to announce a security breach. Messaging is all about context.

A place to be happy and do good work!

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 08:19:59 -0400

Taglines can be tricky. They’re supposed to sum up and quickly give you the premise of a brand or product. Creating one can be tough, not to mention a lot of them are marketing fluff. You generally want a tagline to be direct and easy to remember, and the wittier the tagline the better. While all of this is helpful to remember, when you’re trying to come up with a tagline for a new company you’re bootstrapping, the process can get, as I said, tricky.

When Alan and I started working on this blog, we knew that we wanted a strong tagline to capture the vision we had for ourselves. However, everything we came up with either seemed too “businessy” or too corny. During a late night design session I started getting frustrated with the entire process, so in one quick burst I wrote a tagline that I thought summed up everything Alan and I wanted out of Hello Theory: “A place to be happy and do good work!”

The tagline started off as a joke. As ideals they may seem nice, but the phrase seemed a little too optimistic. First off, there’s no way to measure happy and good. And if you can’t put a number on it then it doesn’t count, right? Secondly, no real businessperson would ever take a company seriously who’s tagline seems like a three year old came up with it. A company like that must be full of pie in the sky dreamers, who aren’t grounded in reality. But something just clicked about it. Despite all of our second guessing, we knew we had come across a tagline that fit whole heartedly with our vision.

At Hello Theory our goals are simple. We love creating software, especially software for the web, that solves our problems. We want to create applications that make people giddy because we’ve given them exactly what they need. We want to speak plainly and live honestly. We want to create place to be happy and do good work.