Ask HN: Name your company after your first product? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Name your company after your first product?

2 pointsbabyshake3 comments

Most YC companies have eponymous names. You make a product called Airbnb, so you call your company Airbnb Inc. There are some counter-examples (like 280 North), but they seem to be the exceptions.

But then there are the various "Labs" startups and 37 signals type shops that use umbrella names, which seems to work better if you release multiple products.

I'd appreciate any advice about which approach to take, assuming you're starting a fairly normal company that is going to start with one product but is likely to eventually build more.

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If you are building a single product and have no plans for further products it is just as easy to name your company after your product, assuming that your product has a "user-friendly" name and is simple to remember. For example, AirBnB is catchy and easy to remember, and the company is built around the single product.

If you know ahead of time that you will be marketing several products down the road I think it is better to go with a name that encompasses those products (i.e. Adobe, Microsoft, 37 Signals, Zynga, etc...).

Microsoft wasn't named Disk Operating System for a reason, it was named Microsoft and DOS was a product so you combined the two to have Microsoft DOS.

Having a name that is different from the product if you plan to develop multiple products makes it easier to spin off or sell that individual product down the road. For example, it would be easy for Zynga to sell off the Farmville asset without having to change their entire corporate marketing scheme and deal with rebranding the company.

It depends if you're going to have multiple products or not.

If one product is the goal then go with company name=product name.

If multi product is the goal then go with a company name different than product name. This way you'll be able to market several products under one brand...

Defining things in a way that is both adequately specific and adequately broad is pretty challenging. Several really large companies have changed their names after achieving a certain level of success. I kind of think this is a little like those discussions about worrying about how to produce will scale: If you get that successful, that's a good problem to have. Right now, not necessarily so important. I mean, yeah, put some thought into it. But don't get too hung up on it.

My .015 cents worth.

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