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In my opinion 'free publicity' really doesn't exist. It always comes at a cost. In this case, we got loads of traffic, but only from German people that had a good laugh. There wasn't a way (we could think of) that would help us turn that traffic into new customers

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I can see that - now you have a HN frontpage link, AND you can have a great rebranding campaign for the Germans in the future.

True. I am very happy with this discussion on HN, but I do hope others will learn from this and not be tempted to make the same mistake. I'd rather would have had an excellent review on TechCrunch and then lots of people signing up from all over the world, including Germany. This attention now is great, but obviously doesn't fix the false start. In the end it is so much better if people talk about the value you may or may not deliver, then discuss the name

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