I decided it would be worth the time to begin a bit of a blog to share some my experiences as growing a small web development business. While I’ve been doing web work as part of my job at school and some stuff for friends, after finishing my CS degree at UWG, I thought I would use my skills to grow a small business. Hence, Right Stuff Web Development.
These first few posts will simply be me reminiscing over my journey thus far. For this first post, I will share a bit about the process of choosing a name for the business.
When I first decided that my skills and experience were to a level where I should begin a business, I simply set up a small website under the name “Burton Development” and figured I might get a few hits and get a few little side jobs through the site. Oh, how little I knew about getting a business off the ground.
Thankfully, I have a good friend, Dave Udstuen, who has built a very successful window (and other services) business from the ground up (Energy Windows LLC). Dave really mentored me along as I laid the foundation for the business. Dave told me I needed to choose a good business name without my name in it. He said this keeps many options open as you grow your business. The next step is to create an LLC to formalize the business and provide a little insulation between it and your personal assets. He then said I needed to market the business.
So, the first thing I did was to begin brainstorming for a good business name. I decided that it needed to be easy to spell, have a internet domain name (the readable part of any web address like rightstuffwebdev.com) available, not be too close to other business names, and have a reasonably interesting meaning. This proved to be a tall task and took me weeks of searching for open domain names and then Googling every variation I could think of to see what accidental hits might come up. Ones such name was “Code Red Web Development.” It turns out the “Code Red” is the name of a pretty famous computer worm. I’m guessing having business in the computer service industry with its name matching a computer virus is a bad idea 🙂
After many bad ideas, I finally was thinking about my love of the history of space flight. After tossing around a lot of random names associated with space, I thought back to the old movie, “The Right Stuff“. It seemed like such a fitting name for my fledgling business. The movie is about the first astronauts experiences during the early days of the U.S. space program. They had to be smart, creative, and tough to get the job done. I like to think that I share a portion of those traits.
Thankfully that name had an available domain name, did not seem to be too close to other businesses in my area, and–most importantly–did not seem to be related to any computer viruses. So I grabbed it an ran.
Well now that I’ve posted about where the business name came from, I hope you’ll check out future posts as I share a little about my other experiences in building Right Stuff Web Development.
Allen,
Thanks for mentioning me in this neat story. I really enjoy reading it. I might try to write one like it. Most of all thanks for the confidence and support the last seven years while building the business. From the original spell corrections to this day you’ve been there for us and Thank You.