My Vision for Wordful

I’ve taken a major break from blogging here at Wordful, and it’s in large part to some serious shifts in my personal and professional life over the past year. To make a very long and (painful) story short—the down economy and a few other issues forced me to to shutter my office and consultancy and venture to San Francisco to find “a real job.”

On May 6 of last year, I kissed my wife and kids goodbye and left Kona for San Jose on a one-way ticket with $50 in my pocket. My sister picked me up and the next day my dad drove me up to the city, where I met up a good high school friend of mine who works at Google. I’m still sleeping on his floor.

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Are There Enough Great Names to Go Around?

Being smack dab in the middle of tech-startup world here in San Francisco,  I’ve seen more than my fair share of clever names.

Businesses in the Mission where I’m staying all seem to draw on the appeal of one-word randomness, like Beretta (a restaurant), Ritual (a coffee shop) and Revolution (a clothing boutique). Pithy and tidy, these monikers do a good job evoking the zeitgeist of the city hipster.

Naming an online property is not that much different, with the glaring exception that it must be wholly unique to qualify for its own URL. So my question is: In such a crowded but unlimited space of domain names, how do you come up with something original and catchy? [Read more...]

Will Techies Always Have the Upper Hand in Startups?

My hunch when I moved here three weeks ago from Hawaii is now confirmed: The tech scene in the Bay Area is all about—well, tech.

This thriving, buzzing industry is built around a culture of code, of devising niche solutions to niche problems. At its center lie the software engineer, who reigns as queen bee in the hives of the tech giants and startups of Silicon Valley and San Francisco.

So what about the rest of us?

What about the marketers, the designers, the writers and editors, the community managers and publishers of content? Do we get a fair shake at shaping the future in a world gone tech?

I’d like to think so. The question is—how? [Read more...]

5 Resume Writing Tips Taken Straight From Google

Gary Vaynerchuk may be the master of the crushing it with a personal brand, but he was dead wrong when he declared on national TV that the resume was dead. The resume remains the first thing any employer asks to see.

If you’re like me and looking for a great career with meaning and lucrative work, I recommend you take Google’s advice on how to prepare a resume.

You may not be interested in working at Google, but it’s helpful to understand how their reputable hiring prowess can make you a better applicant no matter where you choose to work.

The first two tips are stated directly by Google. The last three are my own which I gathered from “reading between the lines.” [Read more...]

5 Steps to Being Totally Boring and Unremarkable

stereotypical rock star photo for a blog post: mcawesome!If you’ve given up on “kicking ass” and being a “rock star,” don’t lose hope: there’s still plenty of room for being one of the most cliché and predictable personalities on the Internet. We’re talking McAwesome.

The great thing about being boring is that it’s super easy and can happen to you overnight with almost zero effort. And once you’ve ‘made it,’ you can set everything to autopilot and conquer the world absolutely nothing!

Ready to get started? I’m going to lay this out step by step for you, and it’s really important you follow all the steps, otherwise this isn’t going to work.

Here we go! [Read more...]