Why TDB? Choosing a business model and name

Welcome to The Digital Brew, a podcast about making your business more awesome online.
Your hosts are Angela (a copywriter) and Stew (a web designer). Pour yourself a cuppa and let’s get started with today’s episode…

In this episode, we talk about choosing a business name and model.

This one could be helpful for you if you’re in the early phases of a business idea or launch or if you’re thinking about a rebrand or changing up your business model.

Okay, to get started, let’s talk about choosing a business model.

By that, we mean how an organisation creates, delivers, and captures value.

For The Digital Brew, we realised that the best way we can create value for clients right now is by working together. That meant combining copywriting + web design into one package or service. As a package, our clients can save time and effort, and we can deliver a better result, much faster.
Also – we’re service providers, but we decided to choose a productised service model. That means we package up the things we do and limit the scope of what we can do. The reason we chose to do productised services is:

• We can do the same thing over and over again for different people
• We’ll get better all the time and do it more efficiently
• This means we can deliver more value for clients
• It helps us be clearer about our offer and who we target
• In some cases, it can position you so you can charge more
• It means we can transparently share our prices (or price point, since we do customise our packages)
• Based on our experience in our own freelancing businesses and previous business, productised services are easier to systemise and scale

So, if you’re a service-based business, we’d definitely suggest at least considering how you can package up what you do into a few offers. Even if you do some custom work and some packages. At the end of the day, your business should deliver value (to your customers/clients and you) so choose a business model that helps you deliver the most value!

Okay, so let’s get into names.

Here’s how we came up with the name “The Digital Brew”…

We wanted something personal so that it relates to us and has meaning for us (and makes sense for the people/client who know us personally). That’s where “brew” comes from. You could say that we’re obsessive tea and coffee drinkers.

That’s probably relative, though. Stew drinks a coffee every morning, plus numerous black teas throughout the day. Angela is all about the green tea. Breakfast, morning tea, late morning, afternoon tea, second afternoon tea, supper… all go perfectly with a cup of jasmine green tea.

Anyway, getting back to the brand name.

We also liked “The Digital Brew” because it had the right vibe. It felt a bit fun, quirky, and modern. We felt that this would attract the right sort of clients for us.

It’s got that agency feel, which is sort of what we’re going for.

It’s worth mentioning the availability of the name, as well. The first thing we looked at was the .com and .com.au to make sure they were both available. Actually, the .com was up for auction a few weeks after we checked, so we ended up bidding for it! Then we went through the process of getting the social media handles (with some variations, like @digitalbrewau), getting the business name on ASIC (The Digital Brew Co), and starting the trademark process.

Plus, it seems like it’s a future-proof name. We could potentially fit other types of services under this name (unlike Rodgers Web Copy and Design). It’s flexible. Hey, it even works as the title of our podcast 🙂

But also, it’s scalable. If we add team members or even one day sell… TDB will still continue to live on even if we’re not the ones representing it. Not that we ever plan to sell at this point, but you never know what we might do when we’re old fuddy duddies.

So, to wrap it up…

Choose a business model that fits your goals and how you work best. And think about how you can deliver the best value to clients, customers, and yourself.

Consider productising your services and promoting set packages if you’re a service-based business.

And think long term when it comes to naming your brand. Ask yourself:

• Is there room to grow?
• Does it still make sense with where you’re at now?
• Does it align with and attract your target market?
• Does it fit you and have personal significance/meaning?
• Is it available? (You can check availability with something like namecheckr.com.)

We’ll catch you in the next episode, which is all about mapping out brand launch tasks in Asana.

Thanks for tuning in to The Digital Brew with Ange and Stew. Make sure you head over to thedigitalbrew.com for more episodes, detailed show notes, resources, and our newsletter. And if you feel like this episode has helped make your business more awesome, pop us a review. We’ll catch you next time!