Partnering with The Hype Lab

Since starting bGreen, we've made no secret about our love/hate relationship with free/delayed payment labor.  We've worked successfully with Stephen of Greenstein Consulting to develop our website and blog.  We think he did a mighty fine job.  We've been working with Brian Kramer, our PR guru, to try and get our name out there, and at the same time learn a bit about what makes the PR machine tick.  We've been moderately successful working these connections through friends and family.  Aside from a little bickering amongst friends and a few dinners on the company, the only other cost to this "free" labor has been time.



While discussing bGreen with another entrepreneur, he suggested we stop just thinking about how much actual money we've put into the company, and start thinking about how much time money we've put into the business.  The reality is, our time is worth money, and we've certainly spent plenty of it trying to get the company off the ground.  We've spent probably hundreds of hours working on bGreen, and our free labor has probably postponed our launch by a couple months.  All that time spent equals money spent/lost/not earned.



We decided that to get bGreen to the next stage, we needed to take a serious look at how much more free labor we could handle.  Our plan was once again to leverage the "free" labor and have a friend develop our web store.  Fortunately for our friend, his real job has been keeping him quite busy.  Unfortunately for us, this was going to delay our launch even further.  The decision for us was an easy one.



Enter The Hype Lab.  We met Paul from The Hype Lab a couple months ago at the Boston EcoTweetup.  Paul has been in advertising, design, and web stuff for many years, and his company sounded right up our alley.  They're into the eco-friendly stuff, their design skills are top notch, they're local, and Paul seemed like a good dude.  We contacted Paul a couple weeks ago and pitched him our ideas of what we wanted in our store.  Over drinks a couple days later, we hammered out even more details.  Paul got back to us the next day with a price quote, and we were pleasantly surprised that it jived with what we had been thinking of spending.  The rest is history.



Hopefully this is the start of a great partnership between bGreen and The Hype Lab.  We're eagerly waiting to see what Paul and the rest of The Hype Lab team come up with for our design, and we've even more excited about sharing that with you.  It won't be long now.  Stay tuned.