Olive’s nanny is in the hospital this week and Charlie hasn’t been sleeping that well, so Mrs. Bee and I have had our hands full! So rather than write about parenting, we thought it might be fun to give a little behind the scenes look at how we came to name this site, “Hellobee.”

The story starts four or five years, back when Bee was running a wedding site. As people got married and started families, they started emailing Bee and asking if she was going to start a “Babybee” site. Of course that was the plan, but first we had to make a baby. Talk about a lot of pressure to TTC!

We knew we couldn’t start a baby site until we actually had a baby, or were well along in a pregnancy. Alas, we suffered two miscarriages and a baby seemed impossibly far away. Besides, who wants to blog about babies every day when you’re recovering from a miscarriage? Despite all this, we would regularly get impatient emails and posts from users demanding a Babybee site… it was a difficult time. 

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Eventually though, we were able to conceive our first child and Charlie was born in December of 2009. We were both completely overwhelmed by how difficult parenting seemed to be! It took a year or so for us to even begin to get a grasp on things, and around that time we both agreed: when we got pregnant with our next baby, we would start a baby site.

But what would we call it? Babybee.com was taken, and even if we wanted to buy it, there are so many trademarks with that phrase in it that we weren’t sure it would work. What if we bought babybee.com, and then someone else sued us claiming a trademark violation? That froze us up for a while and we weren’t sure how to proceed.

Then one day, we were brainstorming names for a possible personal site for Mrs. Bee and we came up with hellobee.com. Makes sense for a personal site, right? It was easy to see a tagline along the lines of, “Hello, it’s Bee!” We were both pretty excited, and even more so when we discovered that while someone else did own the URL… the hellobee.com domain was due to expire that very week and that we might be able to own it. It felt like destiny!  I registered with a domain sniping service, and we crossed our fingers… and then later that week, we got the email. Hellobee.com was ours! We were so excited.

So now we had a domain name for Bee’s personal site… but what would we call the baby site? Coming up with names is just so hard… we were both stymied. But then one day, it hit us: what if we shelved a personal site, and just used the Hellobee.com domain for a baby site? To help people understand what the site was all about, we could add a tagline to the header that said something like, “Say Hello To Baby.” Maybe that would help people make the connection between “hellobee” and parenting? We were both pretty nervous that people would be confused.

In the end though, there’s something about the name “hellobee” that just felt friendly and catchy.  (I guess we like friendly names, since we named our kids Charlie and Olive.)  So we threw caution to the wind and went with hellobee! The site launched in private beta on September 20th, 2011, about a month or so ahead of Olive’s due date. We figured we had a little time to get the site going before Olive arrived, but she had her own ideas! She came 5 weeks early, on October 5th. Somehow it all worked out, although looking back I don’t recommend launching a website the same month that you have a baby.

So in the end, were people confused by the name? We’ve actually never got a single email from anyone confused over the name, Hellobee! It’s funny: in the beginning, I was so worried about our website’s name. But over time, the name has grown on me quite a bit and now I can’t imagine it named anything else. It fits as much as the names Charlie and Olive fit our other children.

In any case, that’s the story behind the name, Hellobee. It’s been about 8 months since we launched the site, and it really does feel like things are coming together. We’re closing in on a million pageviews a month. It’s funny because we were right on track to hit 1m pageviews when Charlie got two ear infections and a respiratory virus and was knocked out of daycare for over a week. Just when he recovered from that, he caught a throat infection and missed out on another week. Meanwhile, Olive got a fever, Charlie stopped sleeping through the night, our nanny’s daughter got really sick and she had to miss work, and now our nanny is sick and out all week.

As a result, Bee has had to skip a lot of work to take care of the kids and I haven’t been able to work on the site nearly as much either. So our little Hellobee baby has stopped growing, while we’ve focused on our other babies.  So it will take a longer for us to get to 1 million pageviews…  we’ll get there eventually though!

Much thanks and love go to all of our Blogger and Hostess bees, who have been providing much needed childcare for baby Hellobee over the past few months! She (yes, Hellobee is a girl) appreciates all of the TLC!

Anyway, we thought it might be fun to take a little trip down memory lane together. How did you find out about Hellobee… and do you remember what you thought when you first heard her name?