The Story of Cribio

Picking a new website name is hard.

Really hard.

Everyone has an opinion. Everyone has a reaction. Everyone knows immediately whether they like it, hate it, or need “some time with it.”

But the truth is, the naming process is not just about finding a word people like. It is about finding something you can actually own.

The domain.

The trademark.

The social handles.

The ecosystem around it.

The story behind it.

When you look at some of the top websites and technology companies today, many of their names are not even real words. Some have been around since the earliest days of the internet. Others became valuable simply because they were short, memorable, and available at the right moment in time.

Those moments are harder to find now.

Short domain names have become their own asset class. They are bought, held, traded, and invested in. There is private equity in the space. There are brokers, marketplaces, parked domains, and people who understood early that the internet was eventually going to run out of good names.

So when we started searching for a name for what would become Cribio, we knew we had to follow a few simple rules.

First, it had to be short.

No question. The best domains are short. Easy to type. Easy to remember. Easy to say out loud.

Second, it had to be easy to spell and say.

We think Cribio does well here. It has “crib” right inside it, a familiar and spellable word that connects naturally to home. Crib has long been slang for where you live, where you belong, where your life happens.

That mattered to us.

Third, we had to be able to own the ecosystem around it.

Buying the domain is priority number one, but that is only the beginning. Can you get the social handles? YouTube? X? TikTok? Facebook? LinkedIn?

Good luck getting them all.

Anything short has usually already been taken somewhere, by someone, for something.

Fourth, we had to be able to trademark it.

That is its own journey.

And fifth, it needed to feel unassociated.

This one was important.

Finding a name in real estate that is not already connected to someone else in the space is incredibly difficult. Words like homes, properties, real estate, listings, search, and agents have all been picked over more thoroughly than the snack table after a youth soccer game.

But unassociated also matters for a deeper reason.

Many consumers spend years thinking about a move before they ever connect with a real estate professional. They browse. They dream. They compare. They keep tabs open. They send links. They imagine different versions of their life.

We wanted Cribio to feel like a place that belongs to the consumer first.

A place that feels unattached until the time is right.

A place where you can explore without pressure.

Enter ChatGPT.

In the early days, ChatGPT was both helpful and wildly unhelpful in the naming process. It could produce plenty of names. Some were interesting. Some were terrible. Some sounded great for about five seconds.

But almost all of the good ones had the same problem.

They were not available.

That is the heartbreak of naming. You come up with something you like, you say it out loud a few times, you imagine the logo, you start picturing the brand, and then you check the domain.

Already taken.

The air leaves the room.

Even worse is when you search the name and discover an actual company already using it. Website, logo, customers, the whole thing. That is when you close the tab and pretend you never liked the name in the first place.

Names are polarizing in a way that is hard to explain.

I compare it to baby names.

When my wife and I were picking the name of our soon-to-be-born son, she made one thing very clear: under no circumstance was I allowed to tell anyone the names we were considering.

I thought that was interesting.

Why not share?

Then I learned the rule.

If you tell someone a baby name before the baby is born, they will be very judgmental. They will tell you about someone they knew with that name. They will make a face. They will say, “Oh, that’s interesting,” which is never a good sign.

But if you tell someone the name after the baby is born?

They are usually much more accepting.

The name becomes real because the baby is real.

Company names work the same way.

Before the company exists, the name is just a word. Everyone can debate it. Everyone can project onto it. Everyone can poke holes in it.

But once the company exists, once the product has meaning, once people start using it, the name becomes attached to the experience.

That is one of the advantages of a made-up word.

A made-up word gives you room. It gives you the opportunity to define what the company does instead of inheriting someone else’s definition. It lets you build the brand around the name.

Before I was in real estate, I worked in telecom, and I have always been a fan of Twilio. Cribio is, in some ways, my hat tip to them.

Twilio took a very old business and gave it new life through APIs. They made something complex feel programmable, accessible, and useful to builders. They created a platform around infrastructure that most people did not want to think about, but everyone needed to work.

That idea has always stuck with me.

Real estate has its own version of that problem. It is full of old systems, messy data, complicated workflows, and deeply important consumer decisions. We believe there is a better way to bring that experience to life.

Cribio felt like the right name for that mission.

Then came the next problem.

The domain was already purchased.

No website. No obvious company. No clear use. Google searches did not turn up much.

But the domain was locked up.

That moment is painful. You finally have something that feels right, and then you realize someone else got there first.

The process of purchasing a domain can be nerve-racking. You are trying to find the owner, make contact, negotiate a fair price, and not appear too excited about the thing you are absolutely too excited about.

Thankfully, we found the owner.

Even more thankfully, we were able to reasonably purchase both Cribio.com and Crib.io.

That was the moment we could finally breathe.

For about five minutes.

Because once the domain is secured, the next gauntlet begins.

Trademark.

Maybe that is a story for another post.

But for now, Cribio was born.

The name was ours. The idea had a home. The brand had a place to begin.

Now it was time to execute.