Hopefully, search results.
My name is Jeff King. But good luck searching Google and finding me. Jeff King gets more search results than Bill Gates.
When I decided to make a business out of my art I realized I was going to need to do something about this. I was going to have to find a new name.
An engineer by training I decided to be methodical about it. I went online and found a random name generator. I sat down with that for a couple hours looking for names that I liked. I also made sure that a website with that name didn't exist and that it had less than one million search results on Google.
I came up with a list of about ten. But that is clearly nine too many.
I enlisted the aid of my friends to help me narrow it down. I created a simple online survey and asked people to select all the names they liked. There weren't any real winners. But, there were a clearly a couple of loosers.
That survey me down to four.
From there it was just spending a couple days saying them in my head till I finally decided that Michael Banister was going to be the one for me.
The rest was all mechanical. I filed for a fictitious name with the state of Pennsylvainia (where I live). It is the same type of form you would need to fill out if you wanted to have any type of business that doesn't have the same name as you. Say you wanted to open a store called Jim Bob's Pots and Things. Then in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, unless you are forming a corporation, you would need to get a fictitious name.
So, now, I am legally both Jeff King and Michael Banister.
And if you found this website though a Google search—then it was all worth it.
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