My first, and probably only one …
We are often asked where the name Broadbean came from, so I thought that was a good enough subject to discuss in my inaugural bean blog. It’s been six or so years since I started this business, or planted the first seeds of our beandom, and a lot has happened since then. But this same question is always asked, as if expecting some mystic answer. The truth is…
that when you start a business coming up with a name is one of the great bits that sends you down paths of humour and “will this sound corporate enough”. For those who have been through this process you will know exactly what I mean. It’s a welcome break from business plans, financial forecasts and please will you invest in our business, or “Dad, I got this great idea and can you lend me 50 grand?”. So after an evening of coming up with what we considered as “dot com” names, such as noodle soup, yep we nearly choose this, we eventually settled for a cool funky name Firebean.com, and promptly celebrated with a few beers. Chatting to my wife, and better half, that evening we discussed the name and I got that look, anyone who has a partner will know what I mean, that look that communicates so much with so little effort. “Ok” I thought, so it’s not that great then. Then in one simple stroke of Genius, she said “I don’t like the fire bit, how about Broadbean!” and thus our business had found a name, not very mystic but it’s how it happened.
This brings me to the next point of this blog, one of my pet hates, domain squatters! After that fun evening choosing the name for the business we got down to the brass tacks of trying to register domain names.
Now if picking the company name was fun, getting the domain was crazy. Every possible combination of name seems to be taken and held by some annoying profiteer waiting for someone to create a business and make them a profit. Don’t get me wrong I am all for people being entrepreneurs but domain squatting is pure cyber thuggery! We, at the time, were a small business starting with very limited funds, and being held to ransom for the tune of 1750 quid for a .co.uk domain. Considering, at the time, that person paid less than £5 quid to register that name, with the sole purpose of extracting cash from some business or other. These people should not be allowed to hold domain names for that purpose or to create ridiculous search pages to get round the current law, yep we got caught again for our .com domain but this time to the tune of several thousand pounds. I hate these people with a passion, they take so much fun out of creating companies or online products because you always end up negotiating with some bloke who refuses to talk on the phone, is convinced that a big insurance company is going to pay more, pretends to be American and lives in Luton!
Kel
by Kelly Robinson
Tags: Broadbean, business, How we got here, Kelly Robinson, our name, recruiting, software, technology, the Bean
hmmm. i liked it.