Why I Left Microsoft
paulmestemaker.com
paulmestemaker.com
The HN community has been influential in the ~1 year I have been lurking. I hope to give back by distilling my learnings leaving a big company I enjoyed being a part of and compare/contrast my lifestyle as a founder of a new startup as we go through a lot of experimentation to find a sustainable business model.
We spent quite a long time trying to come up with an original name. We had a few principles: * The name should be two syllables or at most three syllables.
* Something unique enough that we could easily win the top spot on search engines.
* Be able to register the .com
* Something to do with our mission/team/future brand (e.g. "myth" is about story telling)
Unfortunately, a lot of names we wanted were already taken, or the domain names were taken. We had another name, but it was morphed from a previous venture that had some issues with the other people involved so we didn't want to get into a legal dispute over it. We had been showing around some prototypes for quite some time and potential clients/partners really wanted a name they could refer to us by so we sat down for hours and finally pulled the trigger with Mythly.
Our software currently has a crappy name (wrpme) and as it's being successful we're simply in the process of rebranding it.
The crappy name didn't prevent us from making a couple of successful sales...
Focus on value.
"Focus on value" is great advice and very much inline with YC's mantra of "build something people want". Thankfully, our prototypes have had some consistently positive reactions. Now we just need to build something that is strong enough to be released on the app store or showcase our talent in a more scalable fashion.