Best resource I could find on picking names for products/company name is "Hello, My Name Is Awesome" by Alexandra Watkins. I really recommend it to anyone struggling to find a good name.
In short it talkes about 5 qualities of a good name and 7 qualities of a bad name.
IMO name Qovery for sure touches on 1 bad quality:
* spelling challanged - que-overy, it should be pronounced Covery right?
After some time, it doesn't sound that bad, it's just that this Q and o look unnatural next to each other. BTW. Alexandra ripped apart people saying "Google" is a good name - no it isn't :) we just got used to it
The argument that Google is actually a bad name... Kind of cuts the argument heavily. I'd assume Kleenex hits the bad points, as well... Xerox?
Now, if the point is that the name can be bad, but that it likely won't impact success, I can agree with that. Reminds me of the penny arcade about the Wii.
One of the reasons why people go with a bad name, is because it at least stands out - that purple cow. This narrative is analyzed and dismissed in her book. People don't cringe on the name google anymore because they got used too it, but in the beginning for sure it raised some eyebrows right?
ps. google is not that bad actually as I look at it now, but what counts is the first impression. Of course if you have a breakthrough technology you can give it the name "underware" and it will adopt.
I'll take a look at that book. The naive counter in my mind is that I can cede there are bad names without necessarily needing good names.
That is, the name of something takes as much importance as you want to give it. Using a name that brings up bad context is obviously bad. But... no amount of "good context" is going to help a bad product/thing.
For google, I would just argue it isn't a bad name. Not really a good one, per se. Before google, it was virtually an unknown word that had no meaning to most folks. (Indeed, it is a misspelling, after all.)
It does not hit her good traits either because it does not mean anything. But that's not necessarily bad for branding because it lets you start with a blank slate and you are free to give it any meaning. It's like learning a new word, which is exactly what happened with Google.
In fact, many of the strongest brands have names similar to Google's: They don't really mean or evoke anything by themselves. It's branding that made them mean a lot to us.
Nike, Adidas, Mercedes, BMW, Apple, etc. If you never heard of them in your life you would have no idea and they would evoke nothing to you (or worse, evoke something completely different in the case of Apple and perhaps Mercedes).
All in all, I think the most important is to avoid hitting bad traits and negative interpretations. I think 'Qovery' may not be great because of spelling and pronunciation, indeed.
Google is an extremely large number, Google/Googol was often in those "fun facts books", very apt for a company that searches and index the unimaginably large amount of websites.
Nike is the greek goddess of victory, very good for a company that is about sportswear.
BMW is Bayerische Motoren Werke, so a location and motor works, they make cars. that makes a lot of sense.
Mercedes is a semi common Woman's name (and used to be more common) named after a guy's daughter. Apple is the fruit.
So I will give you Mercedes and Apple, but the other ones were really awful examples of names that don't mean anything.
Ah yes, Bayerische Motoren Werke, what everyone obviously understands when they hear 'BMW'... Silly me.
The reality is that BMW means exactly nothing to people apart from the meaning the branding assigned to it, which is "great German cars". Most car brands are like that, actually.
The same goes for the other brands I mentioned. As a word 'Google' is no more meaningful than 'Yahoo' for 99.9% of the population (no-one knows what a Googol is). It means what the branding and product have made it mean to the point that it became a verb.
Is this some kind of generational thing? Doc Brown talking about "jiga" watts and "1 in a googolplex" were memes before there were memes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVsWikJ09Dk
If you're going to tell me that "Yahoo" means Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle you misses the point in the same way as the previous poster.
The point is that if you take a random person off the street who has never heard of Google, Yahoo, Nike, BMW and ask them what these mean to them the answer will be 'Nothing'.
No-one knows that Nike is a greek goddess or that BMW is an acronym for some German words that mean nothing to 99% of the world population.
What these names have in common is that they are simple and easy to remember. Success is then to make them mean something, and better yet, own a category like Google owns 'search engine' to the point it's become a generic verb.
I would highly recommend reading the 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Ries and Trout.
I read it as Q ovary, which after a moments thought my brain turned into queer ovary (taking inspiration from the Q in LGBTQ). That still didn't make any sense.
> As of today, Qovery CLI (CLI used by devs to interact with Qovery) and Pleco (a tool allowing us to clean old cloud resources) are written in Go, and Qovery backend is mostly written with Kotlin.
This is great engineering. Sensible use of technology.
