What’s in a Name?
The following entry is just sharing how I stumbled my way through productization. If you copy my steps and it blows up in your face (legally, financially, or otherwise), that’s on you, not me. For real advice, ask someone whose job it is to give it.
At this point, it is a good idea to think about the future for this project. Based on just how well the community responded to it, I have decided to give productization a go. The road is long and winding, but with a good design to start off with, I’m optimistic about my prospects.
I want to start by delving into the process of registering a company. To me, the new primary objective of this project is to gain practical experience and gain a firsthand understanding of the challenges and responsibilities involved in starting a business and developing a marketable product.
It is important to have a plan for anything, so here is mine: during the following months, I will parallel R&D and production with registration and promotion. This approach speeds up the process since they are not dependent on each other. In addition, I want to approach production through B2B, and a lot of headaches would be saved if I have all the legal stuff sorted out before I approach a supplier with my final design.
To create what will become the “home of the ZeroPivot Protractor”, we need to get a domain name, it is the URL that users will type in to get to your website. It is what your website and brand will be known as, so it is important to pick a short but memorable one. To get one of these, you need to pay a registrar a continued fee to essentially “rent” the URL. Searching up “domain name registration”, you will quickly find that almost all of the good domain names have already been taken.
Caption: Searching up “zeropivot” on domain name registrars.
My first choice is “zeropivot.com”, but that has already been taken. Thus, the responsibility is on me for picking a name that both fits my brand and product and has not already been taken. After all, What’s in a Name? The whole of your brand identity, apparently.
Eventually, I stumbled upon the domain “zeropivot.pro.” What sets it apart is its rather unusual Top-Level Domain, which is the part after the period. This can be read as “zero pivot .pro(tractor),” fitting for the actual name of the product. To confirm the decision, I then registered my domain using Cloudflare.
Just like that, I am now the proud owner of zeropivot.pro!
Update: 2025-5-21
Dear reader, if you are reading this, it might be slightly confusing. You will notice that this site is “bonae-artis.com.” During later stages of the registration process, I needed an actual business name, and one of my mentors suggested that I should set up the business in a flexible way such that it can become the home of my possible future projects as well.
As you will read about in some of the later entries, a huge part of this is figuring out what I want—the audience, the brand identity, the company structure, etc. Taking a closer look at the protractor, it is designed for a high-end audience, and thus I set the brand identity as a luxury stationary company. This calls for a nice, Latin name, and “Bonae Artis” means “good design” or “good art”. The hyphen replacing the space is a tip from Google’s documentation on SEO, and “.com” seems the most natural for people to type in. Just like that, “bonae-artis.com” was born.
As advice to anyone doing this in the future, changing this name was a lot of hassle, as I had to reconnect the website and email, as well as setup a redirect from “zeropivot.pro” to “bonae-artis.com”. It was a lot more work, but there will always be issues and challenges along the way, just accept it as part of the learning experience!