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Are you sure you've drawn the right conclusion?

Why picking a name for a startup does matter

vs

Did it hurt us in the end? I don’t think so.

Seems that the correct conclusion is: even if you pick a disastrous name, you can always change it later.

See my other comment below. Think about the costs involved, both in terms of cash (startups want to manage cash!), design and development time spent to fix this. At some point you find that your brand is in MANY places.

For example. We can fix our site, but we also need to fix EVERY framework that we release to developers. etc. etc.

Then you're arguing that it did hurt you in the end.

It is hard to measure the potential damage. Did we lose users/customers? We don't know. We certainly didn't gain German devs on board. Did we lose investors? We got ourselves a great investment ( $500K), but it may hurt future rounds. This is a "better be safe then sorry" decision in the end I think.

Rebranding is expensive. Just a redesign is expensive, rethinking the concept, etc. Hopefully it will give us some extra publicity and people will have another good laugh :)

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