
Before naming your startup, read this. - jsomethings
http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2012/04/22/before-naming-your-startup-read-this
======
thaumaturgy
The article author of course has an interest in convincing startups that
naming is important. That doesn't make him wrong, but I think it's easy to see
that a name does not a successful business make, and that naming is one of the
tarpits that any business owner can get stuck in.

Pop quiz: rate the expected success of each of the following businesses based
only on their name:

    
    
        Ford
        Reebok
        Nike
        Apple
        Chevy
        Applebee's
        Jack In The Box
        Google
        MicroSoft
        WalMart
        Lowe's (which, by the way, competes successfully with The Home Depot...)
    

and finally, my personal favorite:

    
    
        Pets.com
    

A "good" name only does one thing: it gives you a very brief head start. It
_might_ make it easier for people who aren't really interested in your
business to talk about you. How far do you think that will carry you? How far
can you get if you avoid the name tarpit entirely, and just concentrate on
your brand, your product, or your service?

~~~
Jach
For another pop quiz, figure out by using only the name _and_ the logo (extra
information!) whether these companies are in the hair care business or the
digital audio business: <http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/logos.html>
(Submitted it <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3876253> )

It really isn't that important.

~~~
halefx
That was really easy.

"Computer scientist Alan Kay also plays Stan's father on South Park."

------
joejohnson
_Chart.io, Like.fm (Extreme obviousness meets extreme brandability): I know
exactly what these companies do before I even visit their sites._

Really? Cause I have no idea what Like.fm does. Chart.io? It's a place to
input/output charts or something?

This post is pure pseudoscience.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
I can't be the only one that was confused by the name Last.fm when I
discovered it. I thought it was about FM radio.

~~~
batiudrami
It used to be separate from audioscrobbler.com (the charting and
recommendations service) and only did streaming 'radio' based on your
AudioScrobbler account. I'm guessing that, they realised that while
AudioScrobbler is an okay name, Last.fm is a better one (it's short, easy to
remember and implies something to do with music/radio) and merged the
websites.

------
micheljansen
I felt a little conned when, a few thousand words on how I should not settle
on a name and pay up for a good domain, I discovered that the author runs a
domain portfolio website. If that would have been mentioned up front, I would
have taken the above-mentioned advice with more of a grain of salt.

~~~
jsomethings
First line of the article: "I’ve learned a lot from the development of
NameLayer, and I’m ready to divulge every trick in my arsenal." Pretty
upfront.

~~~
micheljansen
Ah, I am just stupid for not recognising that as a full disclosure (I did not
know NameLayer before).

~~~
gammarator
And ironically, the name "NameLayer" doesn't give much insight into what kind
of business it is...

~~~
skeletonjelly
That's some pretty sweet irony right there. The author should have dipped into
some humility.

------
neilk
This is all stuff to consider, but without actual numbers, this amounts to his
sincere advice that you should use his services.

Does anyone have a story of a project or business that was greatly helped or
greatly hurt by their name, in quantifiable terms? Let's exclude obviously
terrible names like "wyslja.com", or businesses where the whole point is SEO,
like "sex.com".

I want to hear stories we can use as experimental data, like, "we used to be
called GetHobbyHorse.com, and our sales went up by 30% once we bought
HobbyHorse.com." Or, a name change that had zero effect, or even made things
worse.

EDIT: I made a Google Docs Poll:
[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGF2bkV...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGF2bkV6UlRpNm1fQlh4QVdHVldLR3c6MQ)

~~~
keiferski
_(self-plug: I run a naming company)_

\- Mint's name definitely helped them, and Wesabe's name definitely hurt them.
In short, Mint's name is simple and straightforward, which helped users trust
them with financial information. Wesabe's was neither.
<http://nomvilla.com/blog/how-mint-beat-wesabe/>

\- Under Armour's founder thinks that the name helped win over athletes
(getting big tough guys to wear leotard-lookalikes)
[http://nomvilla.com/blog/how-under-armours-name-won-over-
ear...](http://nomvilla.com/blog/how-under-armours-name-won-over-early-
adopters/)

\- FeeFighters' business increased 25x after they changed their name from
Transparent Financial Services <http://nomvilla.com/blog/feefighters-new-
name/>

~~~
neilk
The Mint case describes ease-of-use, and you simply _imagine_ that wesabe was
very hard to communicate. You also make up this new criterion that Mint.com is
better because it strongly implies a color, and wesabe.com lacks this.

UnderArmour is product naming, not domain naming.

I will grant you that this FeeFighters thing seems like a clear case of a
domain name helping the product, although you are committing the post-hoc
fallacy. The quote is saying "during this calendar year, we changed our name,
and we grew our business 25x" not "we changed our name and as a direct result
our business grew 25x".

EDIT: I know that effects are hard to disentangle, but that doesn't mean you
are allowed to make anything up about causation.

~~~
keiferski
1\. Mint's relation to a color that has good associations _is_ a good thing.
Mint = green, clean, fresh. I also think it's pretty obvious that Wesabe is
difficult to communicate, especially compared to Mint.

2\. UnderArmour: ok, but we're talking about naming in general here. The brand
positioning of your company matters no matter what market you're in. A social
network targeting seniors isn't going anywhere if it's named "L33tHacke.rs".

3\. Correlation doesn't equal causation, etc. etc. but you're probably never
going to get an isolated experiment involving a name. The market is too
complex and the early stages of a company are too hectic to isolate any one
cause for success. If it were that easy we'd have discovered the secret to
success by now.

In short: they had issues with their name; they changed their name; a lot of
good things happened. Take that as you will.

\--

EDIT: the article is actually titled: "How a new name HELPED grow FeeFighers'
business 25x". So my comment is the only thing in error. From the article:

Problems with the name:

 _We kept talking to customers on the phone, or in email, and they would say
things like “How do you spell your name again? What’s your domain name?” Or,
“I mentioned you to one of my friends.” We’re like, “Well, why didn’t they
ever come back? We never actually heard from your friend.” It turned out that
they had forgotten our name, because it wasn’t memorable enough._

After the name change:

 _Since we’ve changed the name [from TransFS to FeeFighters], we’ve raised a
million and a half of additional capital. We have added five people to the
team. We’ve grown our customer base 25X. And we’re growing like 30 percent
over month to month. So it’s been a really, really good year._

~~~
cpeterso
"Mint" is also a place where money is made (minted) and, as an adjective, can
mean something is in good condition.

------
heyitsnick
The writer's company resells domain names (I think, the site is down at the
moment. It's that or a domain portfolio listing site). This taints everything
he says. Of course he will say get[productname].com is bad because he is in
the business of selling you [productname].com.

I didn't see anything here backed up with any hard data.

------
blahedo
When I tried to tell my browser to scroll slightly to the right by pressing my
right arrow key, the site hijacked the keypress and took me to an unrelated
page. Wtf? FAIL.

Edit: AND it keeps reloading itself every couple minutes. Who designs this?

~~~
oftenwrong
This is why I use NoScript.

~~~
huhtenberg
There's a _meta refresh=_ for that.

------
rdl
I didn't find several of the "strong examples" to be much stronger than the
bad examples.

I absolutely believe in passing the telephone test: a receptionist (not expert
in your field) should be able to transcribe your name accurately over a low
quality cellphone call. Using technical terms (e.g. git) complicates this,
especially if they're longer, and rules out homonyms, frequently confused
sounds, etc.

I'd rather have a mid-length two word name, or a long single word, than an
ambiguous short single word.

And, obviously, the .com/.net/.org for that domain, and ideally for all
related spellings, hyphenations (between words), etc. I hate the abuse of
country code ccTLDs for company names.

"getXXXXX.com" is acceptable for a mobile-only app's domain.

~~~
Silhouette
_I didn't find several of the "strong examples" to be much stronger than the
bad examples._

I concur.

For example, if I see a site named "somethingly.com", I immediately associate
it with a whole bunch of negative connotations, including unoriginality, lack
of substance in the product/service that would lead to a more meaningful name,
and a high probability of being run by 21-year-olds who are more interested in
landing a good funding round or two and then getting bought out by Google
before anyone notices their service isn't very good than they are in providing
any real value to their customers. Needless to say, such a name is not going
to win me over as a customer...

~~~
rdl
I think 18-22yo who do startups are more likely to have something they're
passionate about and build something awesome for the long haul.

The 22+ yo who have graduated college and need to find something to do, or
those who have worked for one startup and now want to do something (but don't
now what), seem a lot more likely to do a "fund me!" perfunctory startup.

I don't think it's really that related to age, though.

------
lubujackson
Love how he contradicts himself all over the place. Such as IOBits sucks
because no one knows what "IO" means, but Chart.io is great because IO tells
you what it does, or something.

------
kstenerud
Some contradictions:

MarketHear.com: bad because it fails the "bar exam"

CardPool.com: how does this pass the "bar exam" again?

Xort.com: bad - you settled on some domain because it's short and easy to
pronounce

Etsy.com: good because it's short

~~~
tomp
How do you pronounce "xort"?

This is a serious question, I'm not an native English speaker and there are
many pronunciations of X in English (Like "h" as in "LaTeX", like "ks" as in
"extreme", like "z" as in "Xavier", maybe there are more...)

~~~
mooism2
The X in "LaTeX" is not an English X but a Greek X (chi). I can't think of any
actual English word where the X is pronounced like that.

(But yeah, it's not obvious to me whether "xort" should be pronounced "zort"
or "ksort".)

~~~
VigUi7vv8G2
So in that case LaTeX is supposed to be pronounced like the spanish word for
milk, "Lachee"? (Or I guess 'latechee', technically but if that were the case
everyone would drop the 't' sound)

------
tzaman
Interesting article, although I don't fully agree - naming a startup is like
naming a baby - it has to "feel" right. Which is usually not the case with
various generators out there.

Whenever I was involved in naming libraries/websites/products it was usually
the "A-HA!" moment one of the involved people had at any random point in
process of coming up with a name.

~~~
pabloIMO
I totally agree. I've named quite a few small projects over the last couple of
years and every name I've been happy with has come to my in an "A-HA" moment.
Everything just clicked about the name, and it was available.

Any time I've settled for a name that I didn't really like (usually out of
lazyness), I end up feeling like something is missing from the project. A
little bit of the love I had for it is lost.

That's why I'm building <http://domiy.com> , a tool which helps teams of
people brainstorm name ideas. I believe that the best names arise when a
number of people are trying to come up with a name over an extended period of
time. You have to give the "A-HA" moments time to occur.

------
ohashi
Seems more self promotional than anything. After visiting the author's site I
was quite depressed. Claiming to be selling names for 25% of their market
price. Stupid claims such as that one is just insulting. If there were a
market price it would be selling for that. The names really weren't that good
either.

------
rglover
This reminded me of an anecdote from Bill Cosby during an interview he did on
my college radio station. I'm not entirely sure if he was just patronizing the
educators, but he said that he attributed a lot of his success in comedy to
education and his thirst for knowledge. Something along the lines of "the more
I read and learned, the funnier I could be." Perhaps this applies in some form
to naming companies and products. It seems like a lot of people limit their
resources for discovering good names (e.g. Thesaurus, dictionary, domain
randomizer, etc." It should come from your surroundings and what you learn. In
fact, I believe Zynga is named after one of Pincus' pets.

------
ivankirigin
Just to state the obvious: the author runs a site to buy good names.

It comes down to money. If you can afford $10K right at th start, awesome. If
you have $10, there are only better options among bad.

Tipjoy.com was less than $10 :)

------
rollypolly
I've come across "wysija.com" while looking at wordpress plugins recently. I
immediately thought that was the worse name anyone could pick.

It literally looks like random letters. It's unpronounceable and hard to
memorize.

They have a pseudo-explanation of the name at the bottom of their landing
page. But I don't buy it. It reads more like an excuse.

But I ended up trying their product because I liked their video.

So I think the lesson is: If you put enough work into your product, you can
overcome a poor name.

~~~
pkamb
If you didn't know, "wiz-ee-wig" is a very well-known term to a particular
subset of the population.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG>

~~~
StavrosK
I sort of guessed that it meant "what you see is... ja?" when I saw the name,
but yeah, it looks random even to me.

------
kmontrose
A compelling product will make a mediocre name memorable, but not vice versa.

My go to example for this is Google, the largest site in the world. It's a) a
joke name b) that almost no-one knows c) and if you know it, it's misspelled!
But because it's was head and shoulders above its competitors that garbage
name is now part of the vernacular ( <http://www.merriam-
webster.com/dictionary/google> ).

Other pretty bad names (that we all accept as "good" now): Wikipedia (the
hell's a wiki in 2001?), Twitter (what part of that conveys online SMS, or
micro-blogging?), Flickr (no e, at least it's not .ly).

I think it's worth looking around for good names, but it's cut-throat out
there in .com land, and if you're ever spending more time thinking up names
than improving your product you're doing it wrong.

This is all completely ignoring the "search to find" user behavior that is (by
my measurements anyway) really really common, even in pretty technical
audiences.

~~~
lobster_johnson
Exactly. The notion that a name should be transparent -- that its linguistic
meaning should make the product obvious -- is a myth. Google, Apple, Nike,
Lexus and McDonald's are all brands where the name bears no resemblance to the
product or even industry they represent. The product gives meaning to the
name, not the other way around.

------
axiom
My startup is called Top Hat Monocle. We do education software (mainly for
universities, for now.)

I can tell you that our weird name has had exactly zero impact on our success
to date. If anything the weirdness has had the side benefit of making our name
more memorable than the myriad of startups with generic but more literal
names.

------
Pheter
I read an article[1] that, I think, was on HN a little while ago about naming
apps. I find it a really good way to come up with good names.

[1] <http://blog.zachwaugh.com/post/9666969587/how-i-name-my-apps>

------
jen_h
One thing I didn't see mentioned was searchability - it's so much easier to
gauge sentiment and help folks out if you can pick your name out of the crowd.
Useful for Twitter/Facebook/G+ searches, Web searches, and not getting
overwhelmed with irrelevant Google News Alerts.

------
nextstep
I strongly believe that the rules or maxims presented here have too many
exceptions. There's a lot of weak arguments to support a weak thesis.

I remember Amazon.com being condemned for having a weird and confusing name.
Ultimately, those detractors were wrong or the name didn't matter that much.
The truth is that a company's name, like nearly every factor, demonstrates a
weak correlation with success.

But tech bloggers love to draw lines between the dots and claim they've
painted a pretty picture.

~~~
jaredmck
And yet amazon.com has, at least now, an awesome logo. It's got an arrow from
a to z which makes a smile. Three elements related to what it does, or at
least aims to do.

------
LiquidSummer
And this is coming from "_the_nextweb", why not just "nextweb".

------
minimaxir
A great example is Nyoombl. Guess how to pronounce it. Go on, guess.

Read the comments of this TC article to gather how impactful the name is:
[http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/11/nyoombl-debuts-social-
video...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/11/nyoombl-debuts-social-video-
broadcasting-platform-for-conversations/)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
..."nimble"? That's pronounced... nimble? What?

------
justincormack
Names that exactly describe your product can be a problem if you pivot. If you
pivot a bit, then International Business Machines is not too bad, but Wire and
Plastic Products was less useful for a media empire. Polaroid was ok for a
pivot as it is both specific about polarization, but also just a nice word.

~~~
philwelch
International Business Machines was named out of spite. Watson was a former
employee of National Cash Register.

------
bizodo
Forgot www.domaintyper.com. The best way to look up a domain and also gives
suggestions for shorter versions as well as random domain generator.

------
jorgenhorstink
Talking about negative connotation: one can buy TrueHorror.com on NameLayer
for a mind blowing bargain of $5000,- ;)

------
16s
There's a difference between an excuse and a reason. The author does not seem
to understand that.

------
moonlighter
I can't help it but... 'namelayer' doesn't sound like a 'great' domain name to
me either. Hmm.

------
aneth
"We price our domains at 25% of their market value."

Don't we all sell liquid commodities at 25% of market value? You know, because
we like our customers and we don't like money? Can you feel the credibility
chasm expand with that statement?

Much of this article is a reasonable point of view, but statements like this
are a sure way to put my purchase clicker on the defensive.

~~~
jsomethings
I actually fully agree. I originally chose that copy to reflect how good our
prices are relative to the "old guard" domain markets, but it's too
unsubstantiated of a claim. I've replaced this copy with something better.
Thanks for the constructive criticism.

