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.
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?
hostess / eggplant / 11068 posts
I love this! And HB is a girl, too! Love it! I found out about Hellobee through Mrs. Bee’s blog and totally loved it…Didn’t think anything of it! It was called Hellobee and that was that! Oh my…September 2011…LO was just one month old and I remember sitting in my glider with her tucked in my left arm while I used my right hand to type…Memories…
hostess / papaya / 10540 posts
I’ve always wondered, this was great to read!
blogger / pineapple / 12381 posts
I would say that I knew about this beautiful baby since early inception (sort of like conception, right?) But I didn’t really become active until after I stepped down at WB and had more time to devote to a new venture!
GOLD / squash / 13464 posts
I found out about hellobee though weddingbee. And from the second I entered hellobee I never went back to weddingbee again. I LOVE IT HERE. I actually was a little confused by the name for a second but as soon as I saw the tag line “say hello to baby” I thought it was a perfect name!
blogger / wonderful cherry / 21628 posts
Interesting post. I think Hellobee is a great name!
GOLD / eggplant / 11517 posts
Yay! Always wondered about this too.
guest
I was a WeddingBee addict back in the day. But haven’t been there in a long time. I was lucky enough to find Hellobee when I came across one of Mrs. Bee’s pins on Pinterest by chance. Have been hooked ever since! Perfect timing as I’m expecting my second in October.
hostess / wonderful watermelon / 39513 posts
Love the story. I saw a tweet about a site named Hellobee around November. I read this guide and I was in LOVE!
http://www.hellobee.com/2011/11/18/the-ultimate-baby-registry-toiletries/
I was 9 months pregnant and feeling pretty overwhelmed about EVERYTHING involving a baby. Thanks for running and creating such a great site!
cantaloupe / 6730 posts
Oh too funny. I was totally hoping for a baby site because I only found Weddingbee a month before my wedding. So I was super-pumped when I heard about Hellobee and didn’t give even a first thought as to why it was called that.
pomegranate / 3658 posts
I think I found out through Penguin or Avocado tweeting about it. I think I was momentarily confused about the name, but not really. My husband in particular loves it. He imagines himself waving at our future new baby saying “HELLO!!”
grapefruit / 4400 posts
I found it through Bee’s personal blog, like @Rubies did! I was never confused by the name, but I knew that babybee.com was taken already, so I figured you guys would name it something else. I think it’s super cute and think, “HELLO, baby!” when I saw what you were naming it. And of course, it had to have “bee” in the name!
GOLD / pear / 1845 posts
I found you on pinterest. Which is pretty odd, actually.
persimmon / 1099 posts
From weddingbee! Which I used through my wedding. I got here and never looked back!
coconut / 8681 posts
LOVE this, how interesting! I found about HB through a few of the girls on WB (which I still am really active on) and I remember being SO excited to check it out. DH and I were on a car trip and I read HB on my phone for almost the whole drive
hostess / wonderful persimmon / 25556 posts
I found out through a Weddingbee blogger’s tweet. I loved the name from the beginning. Here’s what I thought when I heard it was called hellobee: “hello, little bee. Nice to meet you.”
kiwi / 623 posts
I was reading up on baby stuff at 4 months pregnant and somehow found bee’s personal site and from there found hellobee! Signed up and waited eagerly for my invite and was so grateful once I got one
guest
I can’t remember where i saw that Hellobee was coming, but i was excited about it because I was 9 months pregnant at the time and I loved wedding bee. It went beta the day my baby was born! By the time I was able to get back to he Internet, there was a lot of helpful stuff to catch up on. It was great, as I expected! Thanks for creating such friendly communities! I shy away from many focused forum type sites but I always feel good about coming here (and formerly to wedding bee).
clementine / 750 posts
I found it though a mention on Wedding Bee where I’m still active since the TTC/If stuff is more active, although now I’m pregnant I’ll be over here more. I love both sites.
cantaloupe / 6669 posts
I found HB through WB, too! I love it here even though I have not said hello to our own little bee, yet.
And I love the name! Always made sense to me.
honeydew / 7968 posts
found out bout the site via mrs. bee’s personal site as well. perfect timing because i was in my 1st trimester when it went beta.
didn’t think about the origination of the name. just assumed the “bee” had something to do with mrs. bee’s name….
apricot / 275 posts
So happy for you guys & the success of Hellobee! Close to 1M page views already…amazing!
GOLD / pomelo / 5167 posts
Love posts like these!!!
GOLD / wonderful coffee bean / 18478 posts
I found out about HB through Mrs. Bee’s personal blog as well and always thought the name really suited the site. Maybe I am just used to Mrs. Bee’s “style” since I have been reading her blog for so long? It is interesting to know how much you stressed about the name….well, it is perfect!
blogger / pear / 1964 posts
Forget how I finally got here, but I do remember wondering when the heck someone was going to get around to creating a baby version of WB. So glad your plan was finally able to come to fruition.
blogger / pear / 1964 posts
@Mr. Bee What’s involved in “growing” a blog? Other than keeping it updated, adding new features and posts, how do you increase your page views? Totally not baby related, but just curious.
guest
I found the website through another blog I follow. It’s so fun to hear how it all started. I just started following maybe a month or 2 ago and I thought it had been running a long time before me! So excited to see/read what’s coming up next!
blogger / pomelo / 5361 posts
I discovered Hellobee through Weddingbee. After my first perusal, I still preferred Weddingbee because it had more boards focused on being newlyweds, your home, and babyfever. As we got closer to TTC, then I became more devoted to Hellobee! I never questioned the name. I guess it just seemed to fit!
Hellobee is such a great site! I’m learning so much about parenting that it would take me years to glean otherwise, and the community could not be more supportive of each other. I talk about Hellobee as though it were a real person, “Well, Hellobee said . . . “. Good to know Hellobee’s gender so I can use the right pronoun.
GOLD / wonderful apricot / 22646 posts
Read this on my phone yesterday! LOVED this post!
I totally love the name HB! I think the “Say Hello to Baby” is the perf moniker to explain the site name too.
I actually found out about HB from a WB friend who sent me an invite. I didn’t realize what it was for, so I ignored it for a few weeks. I logged on to WB randomly and saw some posts about HB and made the link. I signed up back in October 2011 and haven’t looked back since!
I love being a part of this community and love my hostess duties!
GOLD / wonderful grape / 20289 posts
Fun story! I’ve always wondered, I think it’s such a cute name! I learned about it from Weddingbee.
wonderful olive / 19353 posts
I’ve always been curious of it’s creation. Thanks for sharing!! I found out about it via Mrs. Bee’s personal blog.