15 years ago my brother and I decided to start PosterBurner.
But it wasn’t called PosterBurner.
It didn’t have a name yet.
So we needed to think of one.
And that is a lot harder than it seems.
The Process
A name would come to me.
I'd think about it for a second, then my eyes would light up and I’d think “This is it! It’s brilliant.”
I’d run down the hall and tell my brother.
He’d wince.
What in the world was wrong with him? Why couldn’t he see the greatness of the name I just came up with?
Then a few hours later, I'd realize that he was right.
It was a terrible name.
We did this back and forth for months.
Sometimes I got really excited for a name, and I'd go buy the domain.
I had to make sure no one would snatch it up.
But the truth was - no one was going to be doing any snatching of those names.
I was just funding GoDaddy commercials.
And then one night, in the laundry room of our apartment in Cedar Rapids Iowa, we landed on PosterBurner.
Here’s why.
If you were driving around in the mid 90's, you had a booklet of CDs in your car that looked like this:
And then a few years later it would look like this:
The difference between the first and second picture is that the CDs in the second picture were blank discs, and you "burned" your songs from your computer onto the blank CDs.
Everyone was downloading music and burning it to CDs.
When we started PosterBurner, the idea of taking a picture from your computer and turning it into a poster was new.
But people understood burning CDs.
It made sense. So we ran with it.
And it worked.
But now nobody burns CDs.
And over the years we started doing more than posters.
Some days we do more canvas prints, decals, and frames than we do posters.
So there’s a good argument for changing our name.
And we have considered it.
But we started this journey as PosterBurner.
And we took it from a small room in my house to real business as PosterBurner.
So we will be PosterBurner forever.
And if you missed the earlier parts of the story of how PosterBurner was started, here are the links:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
Part 7
Part 8