How Neeto got the name Neeto

As a consulting company, BigBinary needed to track and invoice time. In the early stages, we used tools from other vendors. After a while, we had a pretty good idea of what we needed in time tracking and invoicing software.

In Sep 2013, we started the development of a similar service. It was on a slow track because we worked on it whenever we had downtime from the client work.

In March 2017, we bought the domain aceinvoice.com. The other domain in consideration was timenano.com. After a few months, we started using AceInvoice for all BigBinary activities.

We didn’t want to keep adding features to AceInvoice that we wouldn’t use. So now we needed a new project to work on during our downtime.

From time to time, we will get support questions on AceInvoice, and we decided to build a customer help software. First, we needed a FAQ-type questions management service. Since the name of the invoicing software was aceinvoice we looked for acehelp and it was available.

In May 2018, we bought the domain acehelp.com.

At that time, Elm was a new emerging programming language that captured our fascination. Working with Elm didn’t go very well. It had a very high learning curve. After six months of development, we had made very little progress. So we ditched Elm and started development with React.js from scratch.

Around the same time, BigBinary hired engineers from various colleges for campus recruitment. Now we needed a project for them to work on to learn Ruby on Rails and React. acehelp was primarily a knowledge base software. Since chat software is most likely to use a knowledge base software, we thought the next product should be a chat product. However, the domain acechat.com was taken.

In Jan 2020, we bought the domain nitrochat.com. We also bought the domain nitrohelp.com so that we could move acehelp to nitrohelp.

A few months later pandemic started, and many clients released our engineers. So now we had a lot of engineers available to do internal work. We have been using Calendly for a while, so we know what needs to be in scheduling software.

In April 2020, we bought the domain nitrocal.com.

Because of the pandemic, all the schools and teachers had to go online. From what we gathered, we thought the education community needed quizzing software. In July, we noticed that nitroquiz.com was already taken. We thought all the other products were moving to nitro so we should move aceinvoice.com to nitroinvoice.com. But nitroinvoice.com was also taken. At the same time, we decided to split nitrohelp into nitrochat, nitrodesk, and nitroKB. However, nitrodesk.com was taken.

In August 2020, we bought the domains nitrodesk.io, nitroform.io, nitroquiz.io, and nitrocal.io.

In September 2020, we bought the domain nitroindex.io so that all the products could be under one brand of “nitro”.

However, we had a problem. nitroindex.io is a terrible domain name. Secondly, we would have to buy a new domain for each new product, and it was increasingly difficult to ensure that the domain was available. For example, nitrochangelog.com was already taken.

It was almost impossible to find a larger number of domains where both domain names are dictionary words. So, we decided to look at non-dictionary names.

In Oct 2020, we bought the domain neeto.com for $4895.

Two years later, in Oct 2022, we are writing our first blog. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll talk about how we are building neeto, our technology decisions, our process, our design decisions, mobile development, the challenges we face, hiring, project management, consistency issues, and much more.