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Comment by ora600 | Hacker News Reader

This is almost like Oracle support telling me "There is no problem" after I call them about my database corruption.

The author, who obviously loves your software, couldn't find you enough times that he wrote a blog post about it. There are several reddit thread about this issue. Several replies to this thread express the same frustration - they can't find your software when they know it exists and want to use it. You hear it a lot yourself too.

But still you don't think its a big deal. I'm wondering what kind of evidence will convince you its a big deal.

It sounds like awesome software. I'm glad I've heard of it. I just hope I'll remember the name when I'll need it.

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Oops, I didn't mean to come off as saying that the author's problem isn't real. I understand where he's coming from and we hear similar things from a lot of users.

But, there's not a good solution available so I don't really worry about it day to day.

We're not going to change the name at this point, and I think people have started to see us enough that its becoming less and less of a problem.

Actually, lots of people do remember the name. Our top 26 searches to find the site are variations or misspellings on the name. 27 is "install multiple programs" and then we're back to the name until "multi installer" at 40. We got a quarter million visits last month from people typing ninite or ninite.com into google.

I also don't think founders of new startups should fret too much over naming. Just make something great, release it, and improve it. The catchiest name in the world won't save a bad product. Product is the high bit here, naming is lower than you'd think.

For some reason Ninite sounds very familiar to me, so it's easy to remember...

You might be right - but you can't logically draw the conclusion that 'lots of people remember the name' based on the evidence presented.

The is no correlation between words people end up reaching your site by, and words that they are trying to find your site by.

Consider the world where 10M people are trying to find Ninite, but forget the name and unsuccessfully google "keep multiple programs up to date". Similarly, 1M people google for some variation of Ninite, and all find your site. Your referrer logs would show that all users reaching your site remembered your name, even though you're throwing away 90% of your potential user base.

That's like trying to disprove the hypothesis: "You don't network enough, so not enough people know you" with the evidence "99% of the calls I get are from people that know me, so clearly a lot of people know me".

No good solution available? You state that you are not going to use the best available good solution - a memorable name. That's very different. Consider branding the product with two names? Coming up with a version name that is memorable? Doing some SOE that works? Throwing away customers because you have enough - nice to be in that boat.

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