Is The Name of Your Product (or Blog) Working For You?
Oct 21 2007

Some of you may have noticed that we have changed the name of one of our web applications from Baby Manager to Baby Insights.  Well at least one of you noticed because she (Carole) emailed me asking me when that happened and wondering if she missed a blog post about it and I’m just now getting around to telling the name change story…

So here’s how it all went down.  For the last year or so Erin and I have been wracking our brains trying to figure out a better name for Baby Manager.  My intent when coming up with that name was to imply that the Baby IS the Manager and not that someone could actually Manage a Baby.  However, looking back, it was probably not a good idea to pick a product name when you have been operating on little to no sleep for quite some time!

The topic of changing the name came up every few weeks in our house and then whammy!  The Austin American Statesman ran an article called Gadgets for new parents can ease baby’s first month on September 22, and the reporter wrote “Austin-based Babble Soft LLC’s Web-based program Baby Manager (babies can be managed!?)…”  Ouch!

We were out that same evening on one of our not-frequent-enough date nights and of course the topic of the name came up again.  We now had proof in print for thousands to read that we needed to come up with a new name and do it asap!   I’m sure the waiter at McCormick and Schmick’s wondered if we were crazy.  Erin threw out the name Baby Insights and in that instant I knew that was it because it encompasses what our application does: helps caregivers gain insight into their baby’s patterns so they can make informed decisions about baby care!  Since we spent practically the entire dinner talking about business, I wrote off the meal as a business expense.  It’s good to be married to an entrepreneur!

After we got home, I did a quick search on the Internet and here’s what I discovered:

• http://www.babyinsight.com/ was taken by a Dutch company
• http://www.baby-insight.com/ was taken by a US company doing 3D and 4D fetal ultrasounds

I wasn’t too worried because we wanted to change the name to Baby Insights with an ‘s’ at the end.  I spoke to the owner of http://www.baby-insight.com/, and he was in the process of deciding what to do next with his company.  He told me that he would let me know if he planned to sell the name.  I didn’t bother contacting the Dutch company because I don’t know how to speak or type in Dutch.  The guy who owned http://www.baby-insight.com/ said he had tried to contact the Dutch company before and they really weren’t interested in selling.

I then discovered that http://www.babyinsights.com/ was taken, but it was parked.  I dug through the domain records and found some contact information for the owner.  I sent an email and left a voice message asking them if they were planning to sell the domain.  A guy replied saying he wasn’t sure what their plans were but that he would get back to me.  After a few days had gone by, he told me they would be willing to sell for what seemed to me a very large sum of moola.  Since I have only bought domain names directly from Go Daddy or Network Solutions, my jaw dropped at the price.  I told him I was too embarrassed to even give him a counter-offer because it would be so far away from what he was asking that he’d probably laugh (or cry) right then and there if I tried.  We could build an entire web application or maybe even two small ones for that price!  I told him I would get back in touch if things changed and we got overrun by millions of paying customers at once or happened upon a ton of money, knowing full well if either of those things happened, he would probably increase the price. 🙂

Fortunately, I had speculatively purchased http://www.baby-insights.com/, http://www.baby-insights.net/, and http://www.babyinsights.net/ from GoDaddy.

Add a little time pressure because we had just issued a press release on Baby Say Cheese to the intensity of the whole process and voila a new product name was born:  Baby Insights.

Now if we were AT&T, we would have spent millions of dollars coming up with the brand name Cingular only to change it back to AT&T Wireless soon thereafter.  Since we are currently bootstrapping, we don’t have the luxury of billions of dollars behind us.  Sometimes I think that’s a good thing and sometimes I think it’s a ‘how can I take this company to the next level on my piggy bank’ thing.  That’s a topic for another post.

So what do you all think of the new name?  I hope you like it!

How did you come up with your product or blog name?

Author: Aruni | Filed under: babble soft, baby insights, entrepreneurship | Tags: babble soft, baby care, baby insights, changing product name, domain names, product name | 2 Comments »

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