When Kevin and I were originally talking about starting our own company, naturally one of the major first decisions is what to actually name it. Today I was rummaging through our Google Docs, and I stumbled upon a list of possible choices that we contemplated, before finally settling in on BrightMix. Note, however, that this is far from an exhaustive list, but rather one of many “digital napkins” that we scribbled ideas on. It is, however, mostly unedited from when we originally wrote it many moons ago.

Name	Notes
BrightMix	plus homonymic britemix
TrueAnomaly	enigmatic!
RollingAhead	i actually think this could be a sweet product site … cars or something?? new age convertible car seats searching meets web 2.0
SuperiorSimplicity	implies simplicity = good
Simplinity	???
Probably Not
TidyCoder	This would be a sweet coding resource site
RenovatingSoftware	Needs “Software” to work
EvangelizingSoftware	Needs “Software” to work
YeOldeSoftware	Ye Oldest name of all
ConvergingSoftware	Needs “Software” to work
Rhyzz	hard to spell and/or pronounce?
Definitely Not
RoflCode	Joke.. .haha. rofl
GhettoBlasterSoftware	joke… long live the ghetto blaster
BarelyLegalCode	The red light district of coding
InfusingCode	mmmm, delicious infused vodka
Anomical	i can’t pronounce this
CodeRehab	drug connotations
RollAhead	“roller head”, rolllingAhead seems better

Some funny ones in there, and the comments are priceless. My personal favorite? YeOldeSoftware of course. What a great name. As you can see, many of the choices that we made were cutting-edge names – some even enigmatic. Nothing generic like “blah blah solutions”, (which actually isn’t a terrible name, if you actually use “blah blah”). We’re not huge fans of completely generic technology company names. Rather, most things are “web 2.0” style—combinations of two unrelated words. You see that a lot these days, from many of the companies that we aspire to be like: 37 Signals, Jackson Fish, Fog Creek, Clear Function, Adaptive Path, Blue Flavor, Simple Bits, Logical Awesome… The list goes on and on. Two-word names are all the rage..

If anyone wants to actually use any of these names, let us know… We actually own quite a few of the domains .. haha.

For about a year leading up to starting the bay area company, Kevin and I spent a lot of time in Campfire, and on Google Docs, brainstorming a ton of stuff. I’ll try to dig up some of the other docs that we put together, or chat sessions we had, which give great insight into the thought process that went into us forming the company.