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.