Not Simple, not Available, yet Usable.
We have a quirky but interesting back story to how we got to the name Usable Balance.
Continued from this previous post.
We often get asked, how did you get the usablebalance.com domain?
As my first post alluded to, we started back in 2019 with Simple Balance. That was the concept, simple balance, all you need.
Simple, yet Available.
But then I got obsessed with the Simple Balance being incorporated into Internet Banking. There are two balances if you’ve ever paid attention - Available Balance and Current Balance.
For those who didn’t know the difference:
Current Balance was the current funds in your account at that point in time, including pending transactions like pending transactions on a debit card, cheques waiting to clear. So not actually what you have, but kind of an indicator.
Available Balance was the funds available to you right now, that had cleared and were absolutely yours. The kind that small business owners like, they can touch and feel.
Well, that was my dream, Simple Balance should be the Available Balance for small business bank accounts.
So the first pitch deck was made, with internet banking in mind, your own business’s Available Balance.
But, it was very apparent, very quickly, that this was not going to be possible to be positioned first with banks. Not because banks can’t be innovative, but because people needed to trust what this Available Balance was, how it worked, and what was behind it. It was a simple concept, but required a LOT of trust behind it to be adopted by banking users.
That’s when we focused on building a brand name of something that wasn’t necessarily related to banking terminology, but could be plugged in later on.
What’s Available?
We then did what any good founders do, we trawled through our trusted domain name registers to see what’s available. We wanted, no, needed a .com.
Conversations from back in 13th January 2023
Then Jason suggested usablebalance.com. And like any crappy co-founder does, I completely ignored his suggestion, and went on to suggest much higher quality names like kushy.com
But Jason took away my shiny things and was persistent, then re-quoted his suggestion again to me. Thank god he did, because we could have ended up landing with a gen-z level spelling of our product name (whatstheguap.com) just to get an available .com domain.
We slept on it, for almost two weeks. But then Jason did “the pitch”, and won me over. This ended up being one of our most fortuitous (I am using this big word to impress Jason) decisions as we thought it was a typo of the actual spelling - you know US english vs UK english or something. Why else would such a simple yet elegant domain be available when something like kushy.com wasn’t?
I’m a fan of literal, my last venture was commonledger.com and the literal nature of it helped people understand the product without much of a pitch.
Usable, not Useable?
So after triple checking we had the spelling correctly and registering 30 odd domains later (I am not kidding you) such as usableinvoice.com, usableaccounting.com… we have our, usable, brand. I am still impressed this day with Jason making this discovery and suggestion.
Three iterations and we had our new logo.
Well, I hope this one entertained you because I enjoyed going down memory lane for a moment there. While there’s still a lot of work to do, and we’re excited for this years’ launch - we also really have enjoyed the fun we’ve had so far.
Here’s to another 9 years. 🍻
