
How to name your startup - joshuacc
http://joel.is/post/29186927028/how-to-name-your-startup
======
tptacek
A recent article made the case _against_ disregarding domain names: while
Square used to be SQUAREUP.COM, and Facebook used to be GETDROPBOX.COM,
neither is today; both have acquired the bare domain name corresponding to
their name and use them exclusively.

The issue here is then, once you make the decision to be "getFOO.COM", the
better you do, the more expensive FOO.COM becomes. There is no guarantee the
price for the "real" domain name will ever be reasonable. It may instead
become intractably expensive.

If you're committed to "getFOO.COM" forever, the strategy works just fine. But
when I see people talk about how Facebook used to be "thefacebook.com", I get
itchy. How much would you have charged for "facebook.com" 4 years ago?

~~~
panabee
> Facebook used to be GETDROPBOX.COM

Perhaps you mean "thefacebook.com?"

~~~
slurgfest
Not long ago I read on HN that tptacek is always right about everything. I
think we can safely say that Facebook used to be GETDROPBOX

------
paulsutter
I would add:

\- Distinctive

\- Easy to spell

\- Easy to pronounce

\- Fairly unique on Google

\- Abstract is better than meaningful

I love the suggestion that the domain name doesn't matter. A big mental shift
for me, but the examples are compelling. Most people find sites with a Google
search and not by direct navigation anyway. Easy to spell and pronounce are
really important. If people aren't comfortable talking about your company,
they wont talk about it. We named my first company Voila! Software, and that
was a really dumb name. People were afraid to say or even type it.

Quantcast is the best company name I've used, and that was actually suggested
by Godaddy. Imagine that.

~~~
kabdib
Easy to pronounce is pretty important. One startup I was at, I had to spell
the name every time I mentioned it to someone new.

"I work for Wayfarer Communications."

"Wafer?"

"No, /Way Fare Er/"

"Wayfarfar?"

"Double-ewe Aye Why Eff Aye Are Eee Are."

"Oh . . . what does it mean?"

Not a /bad/ name, but not optimal, either.

~~~
mikestew
At least "wayfarer" is a word. I worked at "Adapx". Don't feel bad, _everyone_
except the employees pronounced it wrong. The fact that the marketing company
that charged them for it wasn't laughed out of the room amuses me. The
decision makers _had_ to have asked, "how do you pronounce it?" And they wrote
a check anyway.

("Adapts" or maybe "adaps" is the intended pronunciation, I'm still not
exactly sure and I worked there.)

------
larrys
"My current startup is named Buffer, but the domain name is bufferapp.com. My
previous startup was named OnePage, but the domain name was myonepage.com."

Best of luck to the OP with their strategy and advice. But I wouldn't say
"myonepage.com" was a big success by any stretch.

<http://siteanalytics.compete.com/myonepage.com/>

I'd also like to know specifically why the OP feels they have the long term
experience to offer advice in this area? I'm seeing someone who is a few years
out of college and doesn't really have the depth of experience in this area to
write an article titled "How to name your domain name". Maybe "my experience
with how I named my startup" would be more appropriate.

Add: Some of the things he says I agree with somewhat (stick to two syllables)
and some I don't (see reply to tptacek below which hmm, by the way I can never
remember how to spell lest you think naming doesn't matter) The problem with
advice like this is that if you know nothing you won't know what is correct
and what isn't.

~~~
joelg87
I don't claim OnePage was a success by any means, in fact in many of my other
articles I use OnePage as a reference to countless mistakes and learning which
helped me with Buffer. One thing I would say, however, is that the reason
OnePage didn't succeed was not because the domain wasn't onepage.com ;)

We have a long way to go with Buffer but I'm very happy with the growth so
far: we're a top 4000 website (alexa) and with almost 300,000 users we see
130,000 shares per day via the platform and are fast approaching a $1M annual
revenue run rate through our freemium model. We also have some top investors
on board in our seed round we closed at the end of last year. We've done all
this with the domain bufferapp.com.

I'm not an expert of anything, this is just how I would approach naming a new
startup if I were to start something today. I agree your suggested title is
perhaps more appropriate. That said, I did draw attention to a few other
successful startups, and some of them have been running for a while now.

~~~
abcd_f
You are clearly attention whoring by choosing titles that are more likely to
generate foot traffic than to accurately reflect the contents. This is
disingenuous. You are, as GP said, in no position to offer authoritative
advice, so you might try and respect your target audience and puff your cheeks
less.

------
panabee
The most crucial point is to not obsess over names.

Obsess over product, not name. Companies prosper or fail because of their
product, not their name. Consider Amazon. It outshines competitors in
e-commerce, even though one rival -- Buy.com -- owns the perfect name for
online shopping. Would you care if Google renamed itself to Moogle? Probably
not. Google's search engine is the best, independent of name. To paraphrase
billionaire investor Vinod Khosla, brands are nothing more than proxies.
Meaning, great names cannot hide poor products -- especially in the
information age.

There are many examples of ordinary names representing extraordinary
businesses. Apple. Four Seasons. Amazon. These names evoke excellence because
the underlying services are excellent. Strong brands today will fade tomorrow
once quality suffers. Think GM, Dell, and Sears. In short, search for a cool
domain, but remember a name is nothing more than a proxy. Build something
people value, and value will flow to the name.

~~~
larrys
"Consider Amazon."

Using Amazon, Yahoo, Google, ebay etc., backed by years of free traditional
media publicity (90's style) to validate a strategy I certainly take issue
with that. I'm not saying it's not possible to develop a made up name but
using those legacy companies and the advantages that they had at the time is
not in itself justification for thinking any startup can do the same.

Similarly news.ycombinator.com is very successful in spite of the fact that
the domain is highly unusual. It's an outlier.

And obviously you have to build something of value. But naming does matter and
certainly deserves a great deal of attention.

"Four Seasons" - This contradicts your point. Do you really think any old name
could be used by a luxury hotel brand? What if it was called "Roomsville
Hotel"?

~~~
panabee
i'm not sure we're in disagreement. names matter and warrant attention. the
less direct your name (e.g., amazon), the more you need to invest in marketing
and educating consumers about your company/product. the macro point, which i
suspect you agree with, is that ultimately the product mattes more than the
name, and that is where people should obsess. good names will not lift
companies into prosperity, though terrible names can sink companies per your
point and my edit.

------
adastra
Have to disagree with this article. There are three qualities that override
everything else for a good name:

1) Being memorable

2) Easy to spell when you hear it said out loud (and conversely: easy to
pronounce when you see it written)

3) Not being cheesy or otherwise embarrassing to say when you introduce
yourself to people

I just can't believe it every time I hear a company name that, if I remember
it a few days later and want to go look them up, is impossible to spell.
Missing a letter is fine. But having silent letters, with k's instead of c's
and other non-phonetic spelling? That's just crazy.

~~~
TillE
Yeah, I think those factors are a bit more important than counting syllables.
Shorter is better, but clarity and memorability trumps that.

As a random example based on the tabs I have open, RockPaperShotgun is
probably the most popular blog that focuses specifically on PC games. That's a
lot of letters and five whole syllables, but it's also easy to remember. It's
a good name.

------
danneu
Interesting tidbit about my ebook products, piracy, and naming:

I sell a few ebooks. Let's say they're all about growing plums in your
personal garden.

Two of them are brandable, unique-on-Google names. Like "Plum Thumb" or
"Plumateer". The other is a generic name. Like "The Plum Guide".
plumthumb.com, plumateer.com, and theplumguide.com. All my ebooks are $12.99.
I imagine the piracy rate increases substantially once you Photoshopize the
price.

My plumthumb and plumateer products are super-easy to pirate. Googling "plum
thumb rar" or "plumateer ebook" brings back a whole page of ebook warez links.
On the other hand, Googling "plum guide [rar|ebook]" brings back pages of
unrelated plum links that aren't my product. The name is just too generic.
(Note: theplumguide.com is the first google result for "plum guide").

My "plum guide" ebook serves a broader niche than the other two ebooks thus is
more heavily trafficked and has more sales volume. Most of my sales volume
comes from PPC->sales-letter funnels. Using free link-back tools, plum guide
has a proportional word-of-mouth backlinks to sales ratio.

I don't know how useful this information is. Does forcing someone to use
google-fu or fish through Google results to pirate an ebook increases sales?
Does a little obscurity-through-genericness provide any benefit when your
sales are driven through Adwords anyways? Who knows.

If general behavior is "can't pirate it? then forget it" instead of the
wishful-thinking "can't pirate it? fine, here's my credit card", then isn't it
better to get pirated? Audience begets more audience and there will always be
shrink.

It's fun to think about.

I hope I didn't obscure what I was trying to say with the arbitrary plum
examples.

------
b00m
The policy used to arbitrate domain name disputes (UDRP or Uniform Domain Name
Dispute Resolution Policy) dictates that building a company on a site like
bufferapp.com doesn't give that company the right to the corresponding .com.
(buffer.com) Attempting to sue to get the name is called "reverse domain name
hijacking" and the arbitration committee is very very skeptical of those types
of request.

Case in point: [http://www.thedomains.com/2012/06/16/rick-schwartz-wins-
the-...](http://www.thedomains.com/2012/06/16/rick-schwartz-wins-the-udrp-on-
saveme-com-get-a-finding-of-reverse-domain-name-hijacking/)

That being said, the price of the .com will track the perceived value of your
company. It would be an awful waste to have to use a significant percentage of
some round of funding to buy a domain name. Also, it seems like a significant
percentage of your type-in traffic would be lost to the buffer.com. Even 10%
of your type in traffic is probably worth the $xx,xxx you will pay for a
decent .com name.

The arguments against paying for a decent .com seem weak.

~~~
dictum
Good luck finding a good name that is still available as a .com domain, or
that can be bought for less than $2000.

(Actually, I hate the idea of paying _any_ amount to a domain squatter.)

------
arkitaip
I prefer guidelines for choosing bad names because they are much fewer than
guidelines for good names.

* Make the name offensive in some language.

* Make the name difficult to pronounce.

* Make the name difficult to spell.

* Make the name non unique or confusingly similar to another name.

As long as you DON'T FOLLOW these guidelines you'll be ok.

------
FuzzyDunlop
Speaking of names, can anyone identify the current trend of $arbitrary_number
+ $arbitrary_noun? I saw '80Legs' in a different thread, then there's stuff
like 20Cans, 32Tractors, 99RedBalloons, and god knows what else.

~~~
huhtenberg
The pool of unique names pretty much had ran dry after 37signals. It's the
concept that is memorable, and it is quite shallow here.

------
timedoctor
I think this forgets the MOST important point of the name. Easy to remember
and easy for people to spread it virally. For example, facebook.com or even
"thefacebook.com" is not too hard to remember.

I have a systematic way to evaluate this by actually telling over 100-200
people via an audio or video the domain name and then asking them later to
remember and write down the name. You will be shocked at how difficult it is
for people to remember most names and also at how easily they misspell.

I also totally disagree that the .com name does not matter. It matters a huge
amount for referral dynamics, for the brand. The companies listed in the
article were mostly forced to buy the .com name at great expense. If it didn't
matter they wouldn't have bothered.

In these cases listed in the article the companies succeeded DESPITE the
handicap of not having a great .com domain.

It's better to start with a cheap domain to save costs if you don't have the
money, but if you can get a memorable .com domain then great.

Whatever you do don't get a .co domain. These are proven by overstock to be
total duds (they tried to launch o.co and after a huge and expensive launch
they realised that a large percentage of people will remember it as .com and
they lost all that type in traffic). A .net .me .biz is much better than a .co

~~~
sopooneo
I agree. I ran a company with a name similar to ChicagoSpanishTutor and
literally four out of five people remembered it incorrectly. No use fighting,
just find a better name or make some change on _your part_ that makes it
easier to remember.

------
austenallred
You only the mistake of having a bad name once. I had a copywriting side gig I
tried to name and got caught up with the idea of a red pen. So we ended up
with RedWrit - not only impossible to say and spell (if you know how to say
it), but the red pen allusion was completely lost.

This time I don't think we made the same mistake. GrassWire. It comes from
grassroots newswire, but you don't need to know that - everyone knows how to
read it, when someone says it you know how to spell it, it's unique and the
domain was available. That's all that matters.

------
Schadeaux1
How do you like Schadeaux Technologies (pronounced shadow) for a business that
creates censorship evasion hardware? I always thought it would be cool because
"schad" was a German prefix and -eaux was a French suffix, but I then I
learned that "schad" means harmful in German and -eaux forms plural diminutive
male nouns, usually an animal, so it would really mean "a little harmful," but
that can't be right because -eaux is only for nouns. Perhaps it would mean "a
little harmful animal." :D

~~~
andrewflnr
Your logo should be just the shadow of some small, invasive, but endearing or
sympathetic animal, to get the oppressed-and-underground-but-not-defeated
overtone. I want to say a mouse or rat, or a mole, but none of those are quite
right. You might get some kind of insect to work, like a wasp, depending on
what kind of vibe you're looking for.

------
nekojima
Facebook used thefacebook.com to begin with, because its original name when
founded was Thefacebook. This was changed a year later to Facebook when it
purchased facebook.com.

------
michaelpinto
5\. hire a copywriter

------
vlad
All of these companies paid for a better domain name.

GetDropbox.com

TheFacebook.com

Twittr.com

