When the Search Result Is Just You: Notes on Building a Business Under My Own Name
Photo: woman working alone at desk home office laptop natural light, via images.stockcake.com
There is a specific kind of vertigo that comes from typing your own name into a search bar and realizing the results are not about a person. They are about a business. My business. Every portfolio link, every byline, every conference panel transcription — all of it points back to me, because when I registered as a freelancer a decade ago, I made the decision to skip the studio name entirely and just be Alexsandra Pontonio.
It seemed like the obvious choice at the time. It still does, most days. But this article is about the other days.
The Spellcheck Tax
Let's start small, with the thing that eats the most time: my last name has an S and a Z in it, and people cannot let that go. I have seen "Pontonio" rendered as "Pontonioe," "Pontoneo," and once, memorably, "Poutineo" — which at least made me hungry. For years I assumed this was a novelty problem, a mild tax on having parents with a sense of heritage.
It is not a novelty problem. It is a deliverability problem. When a recruiter in Chicago types what they think my name is into LinkedIn, they find someone else, or nobody. I have lost count of the opportunities that presumably evaporated in a misspelled search query. My solution was unglamorous: I bought the domain for the most common misspelling, and I spell my name out loud in every introduction like I'm dictating a prescription. "P as in penguin."
You Cannot Rebrand a Person
Here is the structural issue with a personal-name business that nobody warns you about: companies can pivot. A studio called Bright Ledger can start doing brand strategy after five years of web design, and nobody blinks. The name is a container; the contents can change.
When a human name is the brand, the brand is whatever you did last. I spent two years early on doing a kind of work I no longer want in my search results, and I cannot delete it the way a company can quietly sunset a service page. My name is a permanent URL for everything I have ever shipped. The career pivot I made three years ago required me to actively outrank my own history rather than escape it — publishing new work, new case studies, new positioning, all layered on top of the old sediment.
The anonymity question follows the same logic. There is no off-switch. When I post an opinion about pricing, it is not a company stance; it is mine, attached to my face, searchable by every future client. I have watched peers hide behind tasteful studio names while testing controversial ideas, then walk them back without a trace. I have never had that luxury.
Where It Pays Me Back
And yet. The referral economy in the United States runs on names, not LLCs. When someone recommends me, they say my name out loud in a room, and the person hearing it remembers a person — not a vague agency they'll confuse with three others. I have gotten work from a woman in Portland who heard my name at a wedding in 2019 and held onto it for two years. Try doing that with "Northline Creative Group." There are, conservatively, four hundred of those.
The trust transfer is real, too. Clients hiring a studio hire a process. Clients hiring me hire a person, which means they know exactly who is accountable. I have closed projects against larger agencies precisely because there was no account manager between the client and the person doing the work. My face was the guarantee.
What I Would Tell Someone Starting Out
If you are at the beginning of this decision, here is my honest ledger. Choose your own name if your work is personal, if your referrals will be word-of-mouth, and if you can tolerate being the product. Choose a studio name if you plan to pivot, if you want to hire and scale, or if you want a firewall between your opinions and your income.
I chose correctly for who I was ten years ago. I would choose the same today, mostly because the equity I have built — the search results, the recognition, the shorthand of being findable — cannot be bought back once you've spent a decade under your own flag. But I no longer pretend it was a free choice. Every business structure is a set of trade-offs, and mine just happens to have my face on the invoice.
The brand is exhausted sometimes. It is also, on its best days, unmistakably mine.
