Before naming your startup, read this. | Hacker News Reader

Before naming your startup, read this.

thenextweb.com

127 pointsjsomethings65 comments

The article author of course has an interest in convincing startups that naming is important. That doesn't make him wrong, but I think it's easy to see that a name does not a successful business make, and that naming is one of the tarpits that any business owner can get stuck in.

Pop quiz: rate the expected success of each of the following businesses based only on their name:

    Ford
    Reebok
    Nike
    Apple
    Chevy
    Applebee's
    Jack In The Box
    Google
    MicroSoft
    WalMart
    Lowe's (which, by the way, competes successfully with The Home Depot...)

and finally, my personal favorite:

    Pets.com

A "good" name only does one thing: it gives you a very brief head start. It might make it easier for people who aren't really interested in your business to talk about you. How far do you think that will carry you? How far can you get if you avoid the name tarpit entirely, and just concentrate on your brand, your product, or your service?

For another pop quiz, figure out by using only the name and the logo (extra information!) whether these companies are in the hair care business or the digital audio business: http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/logos.html (Submitted it http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3876253 )

It really isn't that important.

That was really easy.

"Computer scientist Alan Kay also plays Stan's father on South Park."

Chart.io, Like.fm (Extreme obviousness meets extreme brandability): I know exactly what these companies do before I even visit their sites.

Really? Cause I have no idea what Like.fm does. Chart.io? It's a place to input/output charts or something?

This post is pure pseudoscience.

I can't be the only one that was confused by the name Last.fm when I discovered it. I thought it was about FM radio.

It used to be separate from audioscrobbler.com (the charting and recommendations service) and only did streaming 'radio' based on your AudioScrobbler account. I'm guessing that, they realised that while AudioScrobbler is an okay name, Last.fm is a better one (it's short, easy to remember and implies something to do with music/radio) and merged the websites.

I felt a little conned when, a few thousand words on how I should not settle on a name and pay up for a good domain, I discovered that the author runs a domain portfolio website. If that would have been mentioned up front, I would have taken the above-mentioned advice with more of a grain of salt.

First line of the article: "I’ve learned a lot from the development of NameLayer, and I’m ready to divulge every trick in my arsenal." Pretty upfront.

Ah, I am just stupid for not recognising that as a full disclosure (I did not know NameLayer before).

And ironically, the name "NameLayer" doesn't give much insight into what kind of business it is...

That's some pretty sweet irony right there. The author should have dipped into some humility.

This is all stuff to consider, but without actual numbers, this amounts to his sincere advice that you should use his services.

Does anyone have a story of a project or business that was greatly helped or greatly hurt by their name, in quantifiable terms? Let's exclude obviously terrible names like "wyslja.com", or businesses where the whole point is SEO, like "sex.com".

I want to hear stories we can use as experimental data, like, "we used to be called GetHobbyHorse.com, and our sales went up by 30% once we bought HobbyHorse.com." Or, a name change that had zero effect, or even made things worse.

EDIT: I made a Google Docs Poll: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGF2bkV...

(self-plug: I run a naming company)

- Mint's name definitely helped them, and Wesabe's name definitely hurt them. In short, Mint's name is simple and straightforward, which helped users trust them with financial information. Wesabe's was neither. http://nomvilla.com/blog/how-mint-beat-wesabe/

- Under Armour's founder thinks that the name helped win over athletes (getting big tough guys to wear leotard-lookalikes) http://nomvilla.com/blog/how-under-armours-name-won-over-ear...

- FeeFighters' business increased 25x after they changed their name from Transparent Financial Services http://nomvilla.com/blog/feefighters-new-name/

The Mint case describes ease-of-use, and you simply imagine that wesabe was very hard to communicate. You also make up this new criterion that Mint.com is better because it strongly implies a color, and wesabe.com lacks this.

UnderArmour is product naming, not domain naming.

I will grant you that this FeeFighters thing seems like a clear case of a domain name helping the product, although you are committing the post-hoc fallacy. The quote is saying "during this calendar year, we changed our name, and we grew our business 25x" not "we changed our name and as a direct result our business grew 25x".

EDIT: I know that effects are hard to disentangle, but that doesn't mean you are allowed to make anything up about causation.

1. Mint's relation to a color that has good associations is a good thing. Mint = green, clean, fresh. I also think it's pretty obvious that Wesabe is difficult to communicate, especially compared to Mint.

2. UnderArmour: ok, but we're talking about naming in general here. The brand positioning of your company matters no matter what market you're in. A social network targeting seniors isn't going anywhere if it's named "L33tHacke.rs".

3. Correlation doesn't equal causation, etc. etc. but you're probably never going to get an isolated experiment involving a name. The market is too complex and the early stages of a company are too hectic to isolate any one cause for success. If it were that easy we'd have discovered the secret to success by now.

In short: they had issues with their name; they changed their name; a lot of good things happened. Take that as you will.

EDIT: the article is actually titled: "How a new name HELPED grow FeeFighers' business 25x". So my comment is the only thing in error. From the article:

Problems with the name:

We kept talking to customers on the phone, or in email, and they would say things like “How do you spell your name again? What’s your domain name?” Or, “I mentioned you to one of my friends.” We’re like, “Well, why didn’t they ever come back? We never actually heard from your friend.” It turned out that they had forgotten our name, because it wasn’t memorable enough.

After the name change:

Since we’ve changed the name [from TransFS to FeeFighters], we’ve raised a million and a half of additional capital. We have added five people to the team. We’ve grown our customer base 25X. And we’re growing like 30 percent over month to month. So it’s been a really, really good year.

"Mint" is also a place where money is made (minted) and, as an adjective, can mean something is in good condition.

You're missing the obvious: Green = MONEY.

solid real example - though not strictly quantifiable.. but in this piece Max Haot makes absolutely no bones that changing their name from Mogulus to LiveStream had a massive effect on their success (he says it over and over again)

http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/08/founder-stories-livestreams...

Certainly passes the smell test for me. Mogulus = huh? Livestream = Oh, I get what they do and remember enough to come back.

The writer's company resells domain names (I think, the site is down at the moment. It's that or a domain portfolio listing site). This taints everything he says. Of course he will say get[productname].com is bad because he is in the business of selling you [productname].com.

I didn't see anything here backed up with any hard data.

When I tried to tell my browser to scroll slightly to the right by pressing my right arrow key, the site hijacked the keypress and took me to an unrelated page. Wtf? FAIL.

Edit: AND it keeps reloading itself every couple minutes. Who designs this?

This is why I use NoScript.

There's a meta refresh= for that.

TNW, and a few other blogs, support navigation by keypress. (left/right = new article)

I didn't find several of the "strong examples" to be much stronger than the bad examples.

I absolutely believe in passing the telephone test: a receptionist (not expert in your field) should be able to transcribe your name accurately over a low quality cellphone call. Using technical terms (e.g. git) complicates this, especially if they're longer, and rules out homonyms, frequently confused sounds, etc.

I'd rather have a mid-length two word name, or a long single word, than an ambiguous short single word.

And, obviously, the .com/.net/.org for that domain, and ideally for all related spellings, hyphenations (between words), etc. I hate the abuse of country code ccTLDs for company names.

"getXXXXX.com" is acceptable for a mobile-only app's domain.

I didn't find several of the "strong examples" to be much stronger than the bad examples.

I concur.

For example, if I see a site named "somethingly.com", I immediately associate it with a whole bunch of negative connotations, including unoriginality, lack of substance in the product/service that would lead to a more meaningful name, and a high probability of being run by 21-year-olds who are more interested in landing a good funding round or two and then getting bought out by Google before anyone notices their service isn't very good than they are in providing any real value to their customers. Needless to say, such a name is not going to win me over as a customer...

I think 18-22yo who do startups are more likely to have something they're passionate about and build something awesome for the long haul.

The 22+ yo who have graduated college and need to find something to do, or those who have worked for one startup and now want to do something (but don't now what), seem a lot more likely to do a "fund me!" perfunctory startup.

I don't think it's really that related to age, though.

Love how he contradicts himself all over the place. Such as IOBits sucks because no one knows what "IO" means, but Chart.io is great because IO tells you what it does, or something.

Some contradictions:

MarketHear.com: bad because it fails the "bar exam"

CardPool.com: how does this pass the "bar exam" again?

Xort.com: bad - you settled on some domain because it's short and easy to pronounce

Etsy.com: good because it's short

Every startup name will have pros and cons to varying degrees. None will individually be perfect. The Strong & Weak examples are to spell out the extremes of many positive and negative criteria so that you have a base level to compare against.

How do you pronounce "xort"?

This is a serious question, I'm not an native English speaker and there are many pronunciations of X in English (Like "h" as in "LaTeX", like "ks" as in "extreme", like "z" as in "Xavier", maybe there are more...)

I think it's either "Zort" like Xavier, or "Exort", where you pronounce the X as a letter.

I've heard Xavier pronounced like Zavier and X-avier with about equal frequency. Also Havier somewhat less often.

The X in "LaTeX" is not an English X but a Greek X (chi). I can't think of any actual English word where the X is pronounced like that.

(But yeah, it's not obvious to me whether "xort" should be pronounced "zort" or "ksort".)

So in that case LaTeX is supposed to be pronounced like the spanish word for milk, "Lachee"? (Or I guess 'latechee', technically but if that were the case everyone would drop the 't' sound)

Well, it's actually TeX that's pronounced with a chi. Lamport doesn't care either way.

I'd imagine it sounds like the english word exhort.

Xort.com is a bad name.

If I heard "Xort.com" without seeing it, I would try to type it as "Zort.com" and probably wouldn't be able to come up with Xort.com on my own. That's also why I hate the Web2.0 trend of dropping vowels. It incurs too much work on my side to reach the website, which is a bad thing.

Same for envolve.com. Wouldn't someone assume you just said involve.com?

Interesting article, although I don't fully agree - naming a startup is like naming a baby - it has to "feel" right. Which is usually not the case with various generators out there.

Whenever I was involved in naming libraries/websites/products it was usually the "A-HA!" moment one of the involved people had at any random point in process of coming up with a name.

I totally agree. I've named quite a few small projects over the last couple of years and every name I've been happy with has come to my in an "A-HA" moment. Everything just clicked about the name, and it was available.

Any time I've settled for a name that I didn't really like (usually out of lazyness), I end up feeling like something is missing from the project. A little bit of the love I had for it is lost.

That's why I'm building http://domiy.com , a tool which helps teams of people brainstorm name ideas. I believe that the best names arise when a number of people are trying to come up with a name over an extended period of time. You have to give the "A-HA" moments time to occur.

Seems more self promotional than anything. After visiting the author's site I was quite depressed. Claiming to be selling names for 25% of their market price. Stupid claims such as that one is just insulting. If there were a market price it would be selling for that. The names really weren't that good either.

This reminded me of an anecdote from Bill Cosby during an interview he did on my college radio station. I'm not entirely sure if he was just patronizing the educators, but he said that he attributed a lot of his success in comedy to education and his thirst for knowledge. Something along the lines of "the more I read and learned, the funnier I could be." Perhaps this applies in some form to naming companies and products. It seems like a lot of people limit their resources for discovering good names (e.g. Thesaurus, dictionary, domain randomizer, etc." It should come from your surroundings and what you learn. In fact, I believe Zynga is named after one of Pincus' pets.

Just to state the obvious: the author runs a site to buy good names.

It comes down to money. If you can afford $10K right at th start, awesome. If you have $10, there are only better options among bad.

Tipjoy.com was less than $10 :)

I've come across "wysija.com" while looking at wordpress plugins recently. I immediately thought that was the worse name anyone could pick.

It literally looks like random letters. It's unpronounceable and hard to memorize.

They have a pseudo-explanation of the name at the bottom of their landing page. But I don't buy it. It reads more like an excuse.

But I ended up trying their product because I liked their video.

So I think the lesson is: If you put enough work into your product, you can overcome a poor name.

If you didn't know, "wiz-ee-wig" is a very well-known term to a particular subset of the population.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG

I sort of guessed that it meant "what you see is... ja?" when I saw the name, but yeah, it looks random even to me.

A compelling product will make a mediocre name memorable, but not vice versa.

My go to example for this is Google, the largest site in the world. It's a) a joke name b) that almost no-one knows c) and if you know it, it's misspelled! But because it's was head and shoulders above its competitors that garbage name is now part of the vernacular ( http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/google ).

Other pretty bad names (that we all accept as "good" now): Wikipedia (the hell's a wiki in 2001?), Twitter (what part of that conveys online SMS, or micro-blogging?), Flickr (no e, at least it's not .ly).

I think it's worth looking around for good names, but it's cut-throat out there in .com land, and if you're ever spending more time thinking up names than improving your product you're doing it wrong.

This is all completely ignoring the "search to find" user behavior that is (by my measurements anyway) really really common, even in pretty technical audiences.

Twitter evokes short bursts of speech, Flickr evokes light and movies, Google evokes size.

Exactly. The notion that a name should be transparent -- that its linguistic meaning should make the product obvious -- is a myth. Google, Apple, Nike, Lexus and McDonald's are all brands where the name bears no resemblance to the product or even industry they represent. The product gives meaning to the name, not the other way around.

My startup is called Top Hat Monocle. We do education software (mainly for universities, for now.)

I can tell you that our weird name has had exactly zero impact on our success to date. If anything the weirdness has had the side benefit of making our name more memorable than the myriad of startups with generic but more literal names.

I read an article[1] that, I think, was on HN a little while ago about naming apps. I find it a really good way to come up with good names.

[1] http://blog.zachwaugh.com/post/9666969587/how-i-name-my-apps

One thing I didn't see mentioned was searchability - it's so much easier to gauge sentiment and help folks out if you can pick your name out of the crowd. Useful for Twitter/Facebook/G+ searches, Web searches, and not getting overwhelmed with irrelevant Google News Alerts.

I strongly believe that the rules or maxims presented here have too many exceptions. There's a lot of weak arguments to support a weak thesis.

I remember Amazon.com being condemned for having a weird and confusing name. Ultimately, those detractors were wrong or the name didn't matter that much. The truth is that a company's name, like nearly every factor, demonstrates a weak correlation with success.

But tech bloggers love to draw lines between the dots and claim they've painted a pretty picture.

And yet amazon.com has, at least now, an awesome logo. It's got an arrow from a to z which makes a smile. Three elements related to what it does, or at least aims to do.

And this is coming from "_the_nextweb", why not just "nextweb".

A great example is Nyoombl. Guess how to pronounce it. Go on, guess.

Read the comments of this TC article to gather how impactful the name is: http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/11/nyoombl-debuts-social-video...

..."nimble"? That's pronounced... nimble? What?

Names that exactly describe your product can be a problem if you pivot. If you pivot a bit, then International Business Machines is not too bad, but Wire and Plastic Products was less useful for a media empire. Polaroid was ok for a pivot as it is both specific about polarization, but also just a nice word.

International Business Machines was named out of spite. Watson was a former employee of National Cash Register.

Forgot www.domaintyper.com. The best way to look up a domain and also gives suggestions for shorter versions as well as random domain generator.

Talking about negative connotation: one can buy TrueHorror.com on NameLayer for a mind blowing bargain of $5000,- ;)

There's a difference between an excuse and a reason. The author does not seem to understand that.

I can't help it but... 'namelayer' doesn't sound like a 'great' domain name to me either. Hmm.

"We price our domains at 25% of their market value."

Don't we all sell liquid commodities at 25% of market value? You know, because we like our customers and we don't like money? Can you feel the credibility chasm expand with that statement?

Much of this article is a reasonable point of view, but statements like this are a sure way to put my purchase clicker on the defensive.

I actually fully agree. I originally chose that copy to reflect how good our prices are relative to the "old guard" domain markets, but it's too unsubstantiated of a claim. I've replaced this copy with something better. Thanks for the constructive criticism.

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