The name of your business is not as important as you might think. Whatever you choose it will grow on you. So pick one. This is what I learned from my experience when picking my business name. Overthink was my nemesis, again.
How did the name The Fuzzy Sofa Design Studio pop into existence? Several years ago I attempted to set up a logo design business which did not work out. This was due to still working in my other job and not having the skills to juggle more than one ball at a time. The other reason was I hit a wall when it came to marketing myself. The question of “How do I get my first clients?” haunted my nightmares. I am myself an introvert and selling myself was an absurd joke from the minds of madmen. Confidence was low. I have learnt a lot from my failed logo business which I will draw on for this endeavour. Back to the name. I came up with the name Fuzzy Sofa for the now-defunct logo businesses. I went through a lot of names before settling on Fuzzy Sofa. At first, I was not sold on it. I felt a better offering was always around the corner. Which I swear is a hex that some wizard cast out of sheer spite. After spending several weeks which became months I needed to commit to a name. I wanted the name to be adaptable, and a little quirky. The quirkiness of the name is a little subjective. The adaptability, not so much. Here is an example of what I mean by adaptable:
Fuzzy Sofa
The Fuzzy Sofa Design Studio
The Fuzzy Sofa Podcasts
The Fuzzy Shop
The Fuzzies
This would allow me to expand into other areas if I was so inclined or partly insane. I also did not want the name to be bound to a single business area. This would also allow for branding opportunities in the future. I achieved this aim. The name. It grew on me. So I resurrected it for my new business.
In the process of picking a name, I needed to check whether the domain was available. This can lead to lots of disappointment. On several occasions, I had a name I liked only for the domain not to be available. I will admit that I made my life harder by wanting a ‘.com’ domain. I don’t know why, because I’m old and back in the day ‘.coms’ were all the rage. ‘.studio’ would have worked well. The lesson learnt is the business name is more important than the ending of your web address. There is now a stupid number of web address endings these days. I am sure you could find an appropriate ending to your business name.
I am going to dive off on a tangent for a bit, it may make sense, or not. I have mentioned before my brain being an arse, and how I need to lean into its arse-ness. This is about being logical and linear. I sometimes can’t do more than one thing at a time. But my brain being my brain will also jump around because I hit muddy resistance. When I find difficulty I tend to move my attention elsewhere, procrastination is after all an art form. I also feel the need to complete one thing at a time before moving on to something else. Yes, I see, this is a complete contradiction, I did say it may not make sense. In this case, I need to do all the business setup stuff, before doing anything else. This can be an advantage, or sometimes it is not. It can come down to where your energy needs to go. At the end of the day, you need content to share, whether that be blog posts, portfolio work or side projects. As important as it will become, getting bogged down in business stuff can also become a distraction from the more important things such as content. So to play to my arsey brain strengths I need to compartmentalise things and assign a weight of importance to time. The hope would be to be able to focus on the right things for the right amount of time. Also, this would minimise brain jumping and spending way too much time on one thing. This is by no means revolutionary, I am not some business guru selling courses on how to make six-figure being a business guru. So here is my simple little list of areas of focus:
Business - once set up you want this to take as little time as possible. This should be as automated as possible. I will cover this in more detail in a future blog post.
Marketing - This also will have its blog post. Marketing is going to be a variable of time. Sometimes you will devote a lot of time. But once you have got things going it will take less time. But it will need attention and will change. Patients will be key as well as feedback. This is the area I will likely struggle with the most. I look forward to sharing my experience with you.
Creativity - This is what we do, the service we sell. The work that interests us. The work that brings us joy. This is the area where we should be up to our eyeballs in creating. Whether we are creating a cool-looking website or learning how to better our workflow in Figma. This is where our energy and time need to be going.
This may seem obvious to a lot of people. But for me, by having these areas of attention. To be able to focus more and achieve more of the important stuff. It also allowed me to create a schedule, and devote the appropriate amount of time to the areas of most importance.
In picking a business name I learned that I spend way too much time on thinking. Thinking, more thinking, in my hole of overthinking and analysing everything. Every time I buy something it comes with weeks of research. Unable to decide. Kudos to my beautiful wife who will say "That one will do." So we buy and I’m scratching my head, wondering why the F*&k I spend countless hours deciding which toothbrush to buy. The world did not implode. This one is good enough. This is a slight exaggeration. Yes slight.
Based on this experience, I decided to take a start-up approach to the things I create. Minimum Viable Product and then rapid iteration. I started to find that what I was initially producing was sh*t. Yet, at some point along the process, I would have a breakthrough. The project I was creating began to look less sh*t. Then as I tweaked and refined, things started looking up. The work became something I could be a little bit proud to have created. The real magic is to say “That will do.” I am not advocating quantity over quality. But getting stuck on one project of work and looking for perfection inhibits forward momentum. I don't feel that perfection is what we are after, it's more about a lack of confidence in our abilities. In the end, it comes down to sharing your work and moving on to the next project. Look for ways to learn and improve. Rapid iteration is key to not only creating a body of work but also to improving, and with that will come confidence. This, I believe will get you out of the overthinking hole. Sometimes you have to say F%$k it, that will do and move on.
Thanks for your ears.