As a consulting company, BigBinary needed to do time tracking and invoicing. In the early stages, we were using time tracking and invoicing tools by other vendors. After a while, we had a pretty good idea of what we needed in a time tracking and invoicing software.

In Sep 2013 we started the development of a similar service. It was on a slow track because we worked on it whenever we had downtime from the client work.

In March 2017 we bought the domain aceinvoice.com. The other domain in consideration was timenano.com. After a few months, we started using AceInvoice for all BigBinary activities.

We didn’t want to keep adding features to AceInvoice that we wouldn’t use. So now we needed a new project to work on during our downtime.

From time to time we will get support questions on AceInvoice and we decided to build a customer help software. First, we needed a FAQ-type questions management service. Since the name of the invoicing software was aceinvoice we looked for acehelp and it was available.

In May 2018 we bought the domain acehelp.com.

At that time Elm was a new emerging programming language that captured our fascination. Working with Elm didn’t go very well. It had a very high learning curve. After six months of development, we had made very little progress. So we ditched Elm and started development with React.js from the scratch.

Around the same time, BigBinary hired some engineers from various colleges as part of campus recruitment. Now we needed a project for them to work on to learn Ruby on Rails and React. acehelp was primarily a knowledge base software. Since a chat software is most likely to use a knowledge base software we thought the next product should be a chat product. However, the domain acechat.com was taken.

In Jan 2020 we bought the domain nitrochat.com. We also bought the domain nitrohelp.com so that we could move acehelp to nitrohelp.

A few months later pandemic started and many clients released our engineers. So now we had a lot of engineers available to do internal work. We had been using calendly for a while so we know what needs to be in a scheduling software.

In April 2020 we bought the domain nitrocal.com.

Because of the pandemic all the schools and teachers had to go online. From what we gathered we thought quizzing software is needed by the education community. In July we noticed that nitroquiz.com was already taken. We thought all the other products are moving to nitro so we should move aceinvoice.com to nitroinvoice.com. But nitroinvoice.com was also taken. At the same time, we decided that we would split nitrohelp into nitrochat, nitrodesk, and nitrokb. However, nitrodesk.com was taken.

In August 2020 we bought the domains nitrodesk.io, nitroform.io, nitroquiz.io, and nitrocal.io.

In September 2020 we bought the domain nitroindex.io so that all the products could be under one single brand of “nitro”.

However, we had a problem. nitroindex.io is a terrible domain name. Secondly, for each new product, we would have to buy a new domain and it was increasingly difficult to ensure that the domain is available. For example, nitrochangelog.com was already taken.

It was almost impossible to find a larger number of domains where both domain names are dictionary words. So we decided to look at non-dictionary names.

In Oct 2020 we bought the domain neeto.com for $4895.

Two years later in Oct 2022, we are writing our first blog. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll talk about how we are building neeto, our technology decisions, our process, our design decisions, mobile development, the challenges we face, hiring, project management, consistency issues, and much more.