As I sat down to write this post, I was planning on writing something really short, just to announce our big re-branding news. However, as I sat here thinking about our experience, I felt compelled to sound off a bit on the subject of how to name your business. But first, our big news must be announced!
Horray! HourTown Changed its Name!
We are extremely excited to announce that tonight, June 24th 2009 at 10pm PDT, HourTown changed its name to BookFresh. In addition to changing our name, you’ve probably noticed that we launched a brand-spanking-new website! We’ve been trying our best to communicate these upcoming changes to everyone over the past couple months, but we realize, people don’t like change and some of you may be feeling like this change has come completely unexpected. Just to clear things up, we started notifying all our customers approximately two months ago, so as the expression goes “don’t say we didn’t warn you!”.
Just to restate it, our company, our team, our product and our mission of serving our customers has NOT changed; it truly is more of a creative/visual/branding kinda thing that we had to do guys. Sorry if it freaked anyone out.
Why We Changed Our Name
As our business has developed and grown over the past year – we’ve increasingly been unhappy with the name HourTown and we had concerns about how it was going to grow with us. Yeah, we thought it was kind of cool and clever when we first started out, but quickly we began to realize that having an Internet brand and domain name that also happens to be a homophone (people hear “hour” and type in “our”) is not a good idea.
Naming is Hard and Fraught with Danger
It seems so obvious now, but as anyone who has ever started their own company knows, there are so many decisions that an entrepreneur has to make in the early days of a company, and they have to be made so quickly, that the kind of time, creativity, vision and craftsmanship that is required to produce a good brand and name, is often never set aside and the task of naming is done quickly and haphazardly. When you’re concerned with other stuff like raising capital, building a team, picking the right technology, and building a great service or product, often times naming takes a back seat and is assigned a much lower priority by the entrepreneur. I would argue however, that it’s just as important if not more important, than many of these other things.
Proceed With Caution, Names are Easily Outgrown
When you start a company you have a very uninformed vision of what you are actually going to become. I feel lucky that we are more or less still focused on doing the same primary thing we set out to do, so a company name that suggest online bookings and scheduling of services still makes sense for us. However, I know many entrepreneurs (typically Internet software entrepreneurs, which by nature, affords an unusually high level of iteration and experimentation) that have completely changed the mission of their business 3-4 times within a 12 month period. It’s normal and I think this is one reason it can be wise for most Internet entrepreneurs to adopt stupid, nonsensical names. If you lack the time, passion and creativity to build a brand and choose a great name, don’t even attempt to do it yourself. Have someone help you. Find that clever writer you know who loves words and has a great time playing with language. This is NOT a logical, left-brained task people. This is pure right brain, non-logical, free-form thinking. Ask your three year old - she’ll probably have a great name for your business.
Ok, that’s all on this subject for now. Thanks to all the fantastic people who have contributed to this website and re-branding process over the past six months. I will recognize all of you by name in the coming days. Till then, Cheers!