I'm the president (and the vice president, and the treasurer, and the...)

I’m the president (and the vice president, and the treasurer, and the…)

I have new respect for the people who charge lots of money to come up with names for products and companies. It’s harder than it looks. What do you think of brightmatter?

The short version is, one of my bigger clients got a new rule handed down from corporate that they weren’t allowed to work with individual contractors anymore, only with vendor companies.

Poof, I’m a vendor company.

The long version is, I’ve decided to look at this as a healthy push towards a decision I’ve been tiptoeing around for a long time: I’ve been a solo freelancer for about five years now. It’s been going really well, but I keep seeing jobs go by that I can’t take on, either because my plate happens to be full at the moment or because the job is bigger than I could handle on my own. I also keep coming up with project ideas that the customer doesn’t necessarily know he needs yet, but which would be a lot more useful (and fun to build) than the projects he thinks he needs.

Also, I kind of miss working with people. Working with clients just isn’t the same.

So I’m going to take the plunge and turn this into a real business.

Was going to wait until the incorporation papers were finally nailed down before announcing this, but I got overexcited and spilled the beans already to a couple of people. So here it is. More detail to come.

2 Comments:

names

Brightmatter is a good name. I like it. Names are hard. You may remember some of the dorky possibilities we came up with before landing on Inkberry.

Rachel

I”m really wishing now that I had saved the index card I using to take notes while I came up with and rejected various names” the ones I remember were

Smooth Pebble Media (This was the first name I came up with. I liked the idea of a smooth river pebble, compared to a polished bit of code; all the rough bits knocked off by constant use. Also the logo would be easy. Emily didn”t get it.)
Bright Box Media (This was the second choice, if it turned out Bright Matter was unavailable. In retrospect I have no idea what I was thinking; it”s a terrible name.)
Savoy Technology, SavoyTech, or Savoy Industries (Emily thought the other people in our, ahem, rural location might find these insulting)
Display Inline (Too geeky)
Shiny Metal Robots, Inc. (Too stupid)
C8H10N4O2.com (Domain name not available, oddly enough. Also, simultaneously too geeky and too stupid.)
Moose Technology (Obviously getting desperate)

At one point that afternoon I even resorted to flipping through Finnegan”s Wake hoping for a catchy nonsense word to leap out at me. Fortunately, none did. Network Solutions also publishes a list of recently-expired domain names, which was entertaining if not particularly useful. (I particularly like the aaa{foo}.com domains, which were apparently reserved by people under the impression that users browse the web in alphabetical order.)