How Bvckup got its name | Hacker News Reader

How Bvckup got its name

bvckup.tumblr.com

24 pointskmfrk22 comments

This post seems to miss three important considerations: trademarks, domains & "spellability". With respect to trademarks, it's worth taking a few minutes on uspto.gov to understand the trademark landscape of your potential name. Secondly, with respect to domains, it's worth assessing how much your desired name will cost you. It is very rare to find a half-way decent name that has not been registered, but many are either not being used or in the hands of squatters. For a few thousand you can get a decent name. When your desired name is in the hands of squatters, and you don't have the cash, I suggest using something like "getDESIREDNAME" or "DESIREDNAMEapp".....if the service succeeds you will have the cash to purchase the domain. Again, you want to ensure going in that your desired name is not already being used in the same manner that you intend to use it. On the final point, if someone can't spell your name after hearing it, it's a fail. Flickr is not the exception that disproves this rule.

Looking at Bvckup then w/ these considerations in mind, yes the trademark is available and so was the domain, but on the third count it fails. My 2 cents.

First two points - fully agreed. I should've mentioned the domain name availability, it is indeed the first coarse filter for rejecting name candidates.

> if someone can't spell your name after hearing it, it's a fail.

Practically speaking - why is it a fail? Who are the prospective users that I am going to loose over this?

Every single person who hears about it on TV or radio.

Or rather, every user who doesn't because the producer can't work out how to pronounce it, so it never goes on the teleprompter.

> Every single person who hears about it on TV or radio

That's not "practically speaking". If I ever to get a TV coverage, that'd be of TWiT or similar, and I'm sure Leo can manage to pronounce it and follow-up with the URL on the screen.

>> if someone can't spell your name after hearing it, it's a fail.

>Practically speaking - why is it a fail? Who are the prospective users that I am going to loose over this?

I'd modify this slightly - I can't say it after reading it. "B-vuck up"? Sounds ugly and is not consistent with other English word forms. It's not only that it's hard for people to communicate but also it may be hard for people to internalise. How do you read it's name - I simply skip over the name, it makes reading copy with the name in it disjointed.

Now, this could work for you if your product is strong enough - if the product has a global brand behind it then I can see people going "sheesh ACME Corp's new product, have you heard the name ..." and this actually gaining you some mindshare. You'd simply pronounce it "backup" and people would know that ACME Corp spell backup with a funny A.

Other than that I personally go with this as a name fail.

at the risk of sounding ignorant, how the heck are people supposed to pronounce your product name? in fact, how do you even talk about your product verbally with others?

Bee-vee-cup, but here's the thing - in two years of it being in beta this has never come up as a real issue. I guess this can impede a word of (physical) mouth to a degree, but the assumption here is that few people are going to need to actually pronouce the name.

Consider Dribbble, Forrst or even XKCD - having an immediately obvious phonetic form does not appear to be a firm requirement for the name as long as its predominant usage is online.

My first impulse is to say "backup but replace the a with a v". If you tell someone bee-vee-cup they still don't know how to spell the domain name.

> Consider Dribbble, Forrst or even XKCD - having an immediately obvious phonetic form does not appear to be a firm requirement for the name as long as its predominant usage is online.

I'm not sure how your examples there help you at all. Each of them have clear pronunciation: dribble, forest, XKCD each letter spelled out.

bee-vee-cup is not intuitive at all. If you show the logo to me I would have guessed "Backup" with an inverted capital A.

Examples don't mean to help, they were meant to illustrate the point that followed. The ease of pronunciation and the ability to spell the name from its audible form are not all that important in the online context. This is a conjecture, not a fact, but based on what I've seen so far it appears to be a valid one.

Moreover that stumble that your brain does when seeing it for the first time, it makes the name memorable. Compare to something like "Super Backup" - fine, easy flowing name, all clear. A week passes, and what do you remember? Was it a "super" or an "ultra backup"? Now imagine it was called "Duper Backup" - the same thing as with Bvckup, this quirk makes it more memorable and in the end that's what counts.

I have to put a disclaimer here though :) I have rather unconventional views of what makes or breaks the logos and names. I got flamed more than once for these views on Logopond and Typophile, but I still firmly believe that a small quirk in the name goes a long way. See, for example, http://dribbble.com/shots/92904-Puzzle

The name is alright, although personally I pronounce it bvvvkup in my head rather than bee-vee-ckup, but the point is that it's memorable. Explaining it over the phone to someone might be harder.

The logo is a miss though imho, I honestly thought it was an upside A as well. You could probably rectify it without losing the original concept though, for example: http://i.imgur.com/u0z2X.jpg

That is the exact change I was thinking of making. Thanks for the nudge.

I would've guessed that you were going for 'buckup' with a latin v (pronounced u). Akin to SVPPLY.

Yep, or akin to Bvlgari... which is what helped turning Backupus Vulgaris into Bvckup. But in the end I had to keep a safe distance from #uckup for obvious reasons.

800 uniques so far, about 50 downloads. I'll post updated counts in a bit for everyone's amusement.

1475 uniques from HN in 8 hours, about 80 downloads. Receeding now.

I was going to submit this myself, but you beat me to it.

In any case, while mostly in a reading mode, I am on HN. If anyone has any questions or comments, shoot, be happy to talk about my stuff :)

This method of creating the name is widely used by professional logo/identity designers. David Airey has a good illustration - http://www.davidairey.com/berthier-logo-design-process

The main problem with it that it is still unpredictable. It may lead to a good name or it may not.

Certainly, it's a well-known method. My main goal was to illustrate the actual flow from a set of words through associations to the name.

As for its unpredictability - at least it provides certain framework that generally speeds up the convergence, as opposed to just sitting there and brute-forcing the vocabulary:)

I wondering how long the process took.

And kudos on your site design ... it made me go look at the actual site ... and download the software and now I'm backing up my entire hard drive using bvckup:)

That product name is funny though, I wouldn't know how to direct someone to it verbally other than to say "I'll fb you the link"

That entire website is a <table> tag, and I'm OK with that.

And so is HN. Are you OK with that too?

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