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> I think if the names are flipped - if your company was named mint.com, theirs wesabe.com, then quite possibly you win.

Whoa there, you're jumping to extreme, unsupported conclusions. No one disagrees that Mint's branding is great. But to count that as the main reason why they won? Even top 3-5 reasons? That flies in the face of the wisdom given by every successful startup veteran: it's all about execution. If Mint.com hadn't provided the instant gratification that got people talking, if they hadn't won TC50, if they hadn't spent heaps of money on marketing, they would have been dead in the water.

Don't get me wrong: branding is important. But if your product+marketing is inferior, you'll probably lose, and if it's superior, you'll overcome all but the most disastrous names. (Nobody knew what a googol was, most people still don't, and look who's running the show.) You're focusing on the name to such an extent that you're ignoring most of the factors that lead a business to success or death... it's like MBA guys who've never built a product in their lives, yet say things like, "Oh I'll just outsource it, it's not important." Yeah right.

While I agree execution is important, it actually doesn't matter if no one can remember your products name or website. I could see how a name could break a company regardless of how good the product is. Why did I choose mint? Because it was the site that I actually remembered months after discovering it.

You're also discounting the notion that competitors don't "execute". Even if you're not "executing" everything as well as your competitors, people will come back to an easy to remember name (easy to remember, spell, say, repeat, etc).

The name, imo, was/is a huge factor (as one of the OPs wrote) that I think helped snowball the other aspects of execution - being able to build on customer feedback - precisely because it was such an easy pass along name. Having loads of people come to your site gives you a lot of valuable info that a 'better executing' but poorly visited site doesn't get.

Supporting evidence:

Two years back I tried Mint, Wesabe and the new Quicken online.

From those three sites, only Mint could retrieve data for my WellsFargo visa. So I stayed.

Quicken was the worse - they actually made changes to my account (for which WF notified me by email) and their support was basically useless when I asked them about it.

So, the name had almost nothing to do with my decision - if Wesabe had the same scrapper as Mint, things would have been different.

(I misspelled Wesabe twice while writing this post - so maybe the name does matter... but I still maintain that a working product matters more)

Until this post, I thought we were talking about the Mint linux distro.

Today I learned that people use a program called Mint for handling their finances. I would have expected, at least, a program called "Money".

That name would just get them sued by Microsoft.

> > I think if the names are flipped - if your company was named mint.com, theirs wesabe.com, then quite possibly you win.

> Whoa there, you're jumping to extreme, unsupported conclusions.

I never used wesabe, but assuming that the products were anything close in quality, the difference in naming/branding could've made the difference between winning and losing.

Yes, everything else matters too, but if you get even a small short term edge in press articles, signup, and customer retention due to naming, then it has a snowball effect on everything. Press begets more press, signup and happy customers begets positive word of mouth, and so on. It might've made the difference - it might not have, but it's not so crazy a thought.

Replying to a (very good) counter argument with your original argument does not make your argument better nor does it bring the discussion forward. For my part, I'm very grateful to Marc for sharing his experience and thereby providing us with knowledge.

If the most important thing is getting people to start using a site, a weird name (sorry) is a definite barrier.

Imagine a website is behind a locked door, like a 1920s speakeasy. You have to hear, remember, then say (maybe even spell) a secret codeword to a grumpy doorman to enter. This is pretty much the user reality.

A startup could easily test domain name memorability using Mechanical Turk, I think, which would make this a far more objective exercise. Briefly show panel members a short list of websites and descriptions, then quiz them.

If you get your numbers from 30% to 60%, maybe paying a few thousand dollars for a domain name isn't so bad. I know many (myself included) still have a 1990s level of spite about paying for resold domains, but maybe we can get over that if it's quantified.

Finally, I'm not saying mint.com is necessarily worth two million dollars, but I quickly add that if it's worth two million dollars to anyone, it's to a financial-services startup.

mint.com was 2 million for the domain? Do you have a source for that? Is there a source for general cost of domain names owned by companies as of today?