

15,000 more monthly signups just by changing the name of my webapp. - pixelllated
http://www.startupproject.org/2011/06/name/

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ericflo
It's a little hard to judge this article when the most important information
(the before and after of the name) has been changed in the pursuit of
anonymity.

~~~
philipDS
Maybe it's about scvngr? <http://www.scvngr.com/> Just a guess. :)

~~~
ericflo
I thought that at first too, but they have press going back to 2009 under the
name scvngr: [http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/13/scvngr-lets-you-build-
aweso...](http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/13/scvngr-lets-you-build-awesome-
scavenger-hunts-for-any-mobile-phone/)

~~~
philipDS
Hmmm, got a point there. Can't think of another related location based service
though.

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PanosJee
We had a similar experience about a month ago. We rebranded (with help from HN
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2560805>) from Sfalma (greek word for
error) to BugSense and our sigups increased by x4.

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josephcooney
Could the change in numbers be attributable to going from a generic English
word to something more unique and discoverable (if you'll pardon my pun)

~~~
ArcticCelt
I'll go one step further about what you said and guess that a search with a
generic English name in a search engine will return 1000s of results with your
application at the bottom of page 100.

With a unique name you are now on page one at the top of the results. Probably
also valid for search in app stores.

However for this to work you need first to hear the name somewhere and it
needs to be easy to remember.

~~~
thomaslangston
This would be a great theory, except there wasn't a jump in web traffic from
the name change, only conversions/purchases.

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intellection
From article: "Following our recent article titled -’how i doubled the price
of my software product – and sold ten times as many copies‘ we received emails
from numerous developers with similar stories to share regarding their own
startups, and today we are sharing one of those tales. The developer who’s
application we are covering wishes to remain anonymous: please understand that
this anonymity is what allows us to share specific user signup, traffic and
revenue statistics in these articles that the developers wouldn’t otherwise be
comfortable sharing – the anonymity is a worthwhile sacrifice in our opinion-
but let us know your thoughts in the comments below. For the purposes of this
story, the developer will be known as ‘Steve’ and the product name, ‘Discover’
(at least originally!)."

Is there real value in unknown data?

Is it anonymity or intellectual property, safety or paranoia?

There could be more reasons: probably, or possibly?

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nl
I wonder if the new name listed better in the AppStore/Market for some reason?

Maybe it was closer to some other popular app and picked up traffic from that?

Without the real names it's kind of difficult to imagine trying to replicate
this.

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eitland
Am I the only one who thinks someone around here should know about a site with
15k monthly signups and a iPhone and Android app?

(On the other hand I never really got twitter, -a cheap version of teambox
that for most people is just a more convenient way of receiving spam : )

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tanay46
Hmm this is quite weird. Maybe the new name made it feel more like a 'cool web
app' which made more people sign up. Can't make much of this without the
actual name etc though.

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lucian1900
Perhaps the act of rebranding itself resulted in more users? One might be
reminded of a service or reassured that a service is active by a rebranding.

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gcb
did they already have those users on the web app and just the mobile app
download increased after the name change?

article is confusing.

