Choosing a business name
We asked customers for two years before we picked ours. Almost nothing they told us was what we expected to hear.
We spent about two years on this. Not two years of brainstorming in a room — two years of asking actual customers, at the counter and on the phone, a question that sounded stupid every time we asked it: three years from now, when your blinds are filthy again, what are you going to do?
Almost nobody said they would look up the name of the company that cleaned them last time. They said they would search for what was wrong. They would type in some version of "dirty blinds."
Bob's Blind Cleaning is a fine name for Bob
Most people in the trades name the business after themselves. It feels right. It is your name on the truck, your reputation, your family. We understand the instinct completely and it is the single most common mistake we watch new operators make.
Mrs. Jones does not remember Bob. She met Bob once, for forty minutes, three years ago, and she was mostly thinking about whether the dog was going to get out. What she remembers is the problem she had, because the problem is hers and Bob is not.
Throw away your ego when you name a business. The name is not for you. It is for the person trying to remember you at eleven o'clock at night.
Why the .com is part of the name
DirtyBlinds.com is not a website address we happened to own. The dot com is part of how people say it out loud, and that was deliberate. Somebody hears it once at a party, and six months later they have everything they need to find us again without having written anything down.
That mattered enormously before search engines got good, and it turns out it matters again now for a different reason. When somebody asks an assistant on their phone who cleans blinds, the answer comes out of what is written down about this industry — and a name that describes the problem plainly is a name that survives that translation.
What to actually do
Ask ten people who are not in your industry what they would search for if their blinds were disgusting. Write down their exact words, not your interpretation of their words. The name is somewhere in that list.
Then check whether you can get it, whether it is spellable over the phone, and whether it survives being said by somebody who is not paying attention. If it clears all three, you have got something worth putting on a trailer.
And if you would rather skip the exercise entirely, licensing our name is one of the choices we offer, for exactly this reason. It took us two years and a lot of awkward questions to arrive at it.
Thinking through the licensing option? See how operators use it, or call and talk it through.