Why did we name the company “buuteeq”?

Since you’re curious, here’s the story: the name “buuteeq” was coined in a hotel room in Beijing by the founders who were urgently in search of a better name for the company which had been loosely known as “Hanbao Software” (which means “hamburger software” in Chinese), itself coined over a big bowl of hummus at the Bite a Pita restaurant’s original location in Beijing’s Laitai Huahui Shichang (the restaurant has since moved to Sanlitun, check them out—best middle eastern food in Beijing!) .  As an online SaaS software service company our primary concern was of course to have .com URL, and the naming strategies available to us and other entrepreneurs in Feb of 2010 were (a) misspell a word using the wrong consonants or vowels, or (b) combine two nouns that don’t normally go together into a new word amalgam.  We played with lots of options but in the end settled on the spirit of “boutiquedness”, as it best captures the aspirational qualities of both our customers (independent hotels) and their guests (travellers looking for the “boutique hotel” experience).  As we set off to misspell the French word “boutique”, we were amazed at how many permutations were already taken (some middle eastern names are similarly spelled, so several were taken for personal blogs).  Among those considered: butik, buutik, butek, buutek, buuteek, bootiq, bootek, booteek, etc.  When we saw “buuteeq” written out, we were drawn to the symmetry of the “b” and “q” (inverted shapes), of the balance of double vowel “uu” and “ee”, and when we did some impromptu focus group testing (we asked some friends) we were pleasantly surprised to find that there was a near 100% accurate pickup of the “boutique” pronunciation.  We bought the domain on GoDaddy and we were off to the races.  Our customers have been very complimentary and both they and we love being able to say “I love working with buuteeq (pronounced “boutique”)!”  Sarah Lacy and Paul Carr over at TechCrunch were the first to tell us that they *hate* the name (thankfully, they expressed love for our business plan and product offering!)—and that’s a tradeoff we can accept for the time being.   Maybe someday we will have the money to dislodge the guys that are domain squatting on the proper French spelling “boutique”, and for the time being we’ve also set up a redirect for www.boutiquedms.com” so that we have an easier to spell variation for via voice transcribing.  Alas, for now we’ll settle for being the awesome company that our customers love that delights hotel guests with the cool name that is really hard to spell—buuteeq!