LifeMojo’s World

Finding a good .com domain name is not easy. Lucky for us we didn’t spend too much time on it initially. When we started, we had a domain name flab.in and we used that for our initial product prototypes with a few B2B clients. We all thought it is a great name for us because the root cause of almost all the lifestyle diseases is the flab that we accumulate and our initial target was India, until we realized that it sort of has a negative connotation and using .in instead of .com is not going to be popular anytime soon.

We started to checkout all the available domains at instantdomainsearch.com and as expected all the good ones were taken, and most of these were parked. Being a startup, investing in a good name at this early stage of the venture didn’t make sense, so we decided to be as wild as we can and think of one word names that we all could spell with the same spelling. And the acid test used to be a phone call to a random friend to see if he can spell that name with the same spelling as well. We couldn’t find any such name and ended up spoiling one Sunday over it. This reminds me of a nice quote that I heard in one of the TED videos, “Real Innovation happens when you cut 0s from your budget”.

The next Sunday, we thought of finding a name that is relevant to us, even if it is two-word domain. The best we could find was healthboon.com and carecross.com. We picked healthboon.com over carecross.com and started using it. During our B2B sales calls, people asked us if HealthBoon is a hospital. For some reason we got the same reaction from more than one potential client. We started thinking about a really good name for our B2C offering.

This time instead of thinking about what we do, we started thinking about what affect our venture brings to our customers’ life. The answer was clear “Enhance Quality of life” – that is why people want to be fit right? And we want our customers to get there as fast as possible. The transformation has to be magical. We played around with “Life”, “Health”, “Quality” and “Magic” and got to LifeMojo.com

LifeMojo Story LifeMojo Story

Need of a Mobile application to track daily activities that effect fitness is obvious for us. We realized that it is not just about having a nice application out there, but it is about majority of the people accessing the right information and in the most convenient way. So we started listing down all the things required to make that happen, and got to a list of things that we need to do apart from having a mobile application that works on most of the mobile phones in India. The value that the application has for fitness seekers is obvious, but the most crucial thing is to get this application to work on our customers’ mobile phone. We lacked the expertise in making a J2ME application work on GPRS on all type of phones in India. Now one way to look at it is that it’s not our problem, people would get this done from their respective mobile operators. Instead of living with this dream, we woke up to the reality that this is an expertise that we lack. The action item for us was clear: get an expert onboard!

We interviewed a few people within our network of friends and tried to find someone who was an expert at it and more importantly, who understands what we are trying to do as a company and believes in “The Dream”. Thanks to Guy Kawasaki for the nice gyan in different talks and books on building the company the right way. I and Himanshu have been recruiters at Trilogy, FlightRaja and ngpay but the importance of “Hire the Infected” became clear to us after his post here.

Lucky for us, we found the right guy for us pretty soon. Suhas Yadav joined us on 4th July, and has been living the dream with us since then.

LifeMojo Story Guy Kawasaki, LifeMojo Story