The Unwitting Entrepreneur

Well into month 4 of my entrepreneurial journey, I’m learning that it is super easy for new business costs to quickly spiral out of control. Web site development, PR, marketing costs- all of these things can quickly deplete whatever cash reserves you have if you’re not careful. Finding free or inexpensive ways to develop your website, market and brand your business, or even strategize are essential in order to keep costs low, and hold on to as much cash as [...]

We’re excited to feature an article today from our guest blogger Nicole Duhoski, founder of VineSprout, a social media strategy and public relations firm based in Chicago. Read on for her insightful and eye-opening piece on what you can do right now to raise the profile of your business or organization.   How to Promote Your Startup Using Social Media 5 Steps to Build Your Brand Before your set up any social media accounts, ask yourself, who is your audience? [...]

  So after posting a couple of weeks ago on my desire to have a logo for this website, I spent the next two weeks exploring all of the options I listed (doing it myself, outsourcing, crowdsourcing). The first thing I tried was creating something myself using Microsoft Office, but to no avail- everything looked clip-artish or cartoonish, really not the look I was going for. Next I downloaded a copy of Adobe Illustrator (free trials are available on their [...]

For the past week or so I have been thinking about developing a logo for The Unwitting Entrepreneur.  Something innovative, but not confusing; contemporary, but not trendy, and that readily exudes the character of this site: encouraging, inquisitive, inspirational, self-effacing. After studying examples of many famous and not-so-famous logos, I figured that this was something that I could probably design myself. However, after playing around with various shapes in Paint and PowerPoint, and coming up with vaguely Mondrian-type blocks that exuded [...]