Mint founder on branding: Keep it simple

We do a lot of branding and brand-shepherding and it always amazes me how little people care about things like names and logos. They'll budget <$500 for something that's going to be the first thing every single one of their customers associates with their business.

Obviously, if a company has a monopoly (Craigslist) or some other truly unreproducible competitive advantage, than these sort of blunders can be nullified. But I've never worked with one in the 5 years I've been doing this; I've worked with plenty who thought they did.

Absent any indication of how to acquire a domain like mint.com, this is irritating advice. Moreover, there are tons of counterexamples. I'd guess that most brand gurus would counsel against such nonsensical domain names as weebly.com or wufoo.com, but both of those companies are kicking ass. I also find it telling that 37signals has been able to build several highly successful (and essentially non-viral) web apps with such unlikely domain names as backpackit.com, basecamphq.com, and campfirenow.com. Come to think of it, 37signals.com is also an unlikely domain name for a runaway success.