When we started blekko, I was fortunate to find myself working with a really great technical team. I'd worked with most of these folks before at various valley companies over the years and knew that they were killer engineers. We were pretty confident that we had the technical chops to build a new search engine from scratch. We also had a bunch of ideas about a differentiated search experience that could be built...
But we had absolutely no in-house artistic talent. It's a running joke around our office that we're really good at building ugly web sites.
I'm envious of startups that are fortunate enough to have a really talented designer in their core team. Unfortunately that just wasn't us. So when we were hunting around for some imagery to go with our brand, we turned to 99designs.
Our product director had the idea that slashtags turn our users into superusers, since slashtags let them kill spam with a single click, quickly pivot through numerous verticals, and x-ray valuable seo ranking data.
But the imagery really got fleshed out during our design competition. We wanted something cool we could put on a tee shirt, beyond the simple 'blekko' wordmark.
Slashtag Man came back from the design competition and everybody loved him. After we made him the default avatar on the site, some of our beta users tweeted that they weren't going to upload their own pic because they liked slashtag man so much.
We had the designers make a Slashtag Girl so we could put her on the back of the women's tees we ordered.
The imagery here worked perfectly for what we were trying to do - empowering regular users to turn into super-users when they search.
To help us celebrate our new super-hero identity, we’ve got 100 t-shirts to give away. If you want one, just send a note to shirt@blekko.com, include your size, let us know if you prefer a women's tee, and of course your mailing address and we'll send you a tee shirt.
We'll also be giving away tees at our booth at upcoming shows - TechCrunch Disrupt, SMX East, PubCon and Defrag. If you're at one of these shows, please stop by and chat and we'll give you a tee if we haven't run out.
Slash the web!
Comments (7)
Hey, great to see! I will be at SMX East, save me a shirt! I definitely want to check you guys out there!
Patrick
Posted by Patrick McKeown | September 21, 2010 6:56 PM
Posted on September 21, 2010 18:56
Hi there ,
Slash tags are awesome ... I will catch you on twitter and Facebook ....!!
save me a shirt!
thanks/
Posted by Kumar | September 22, 2010 1:46 AM
Posted on September 22, 2010 01:46
SWEET!! Do you know how long I have been trying to snag a Bing shirt on #FSF!? Forever!
Slashtag man is awesome too. I think he will do well across the web.
Posted by Brent Rangen | September 22, 2010 6:08 AM
Posted on September 22, 2010 06:08
You guys are awesome! Please never let Google acquire you! :)
-wyrmmage
Posted by wyrmmage | October 31, 2010 3:27 PM
Posted on October 31, 2010 15:27
Thanks for the Shirt!
I like it...
Posted by Armin Wieser | November 9, 2010 2:02 AM
Posted on November 9, 2010 02:02
Hey, great to see! I will be at SMX East, save me a shirt! I definitely want to check you guys out there!
Patrick
Posted by air max 90 | March 2, 2011 10:55 PM
Posted on March 2, 2011 22:55
Thanks to Blekko. I thought the t-shirt will no longer be delivered. But I am so happy that it arrived here in the Philippines... I will be wearing this on my birthday on Friday.
Posted by Joseph Glenn | May 31, 2011 9:02 PM
Posted on May 31, 2011 21:02