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Comment by gnufrra | Hacker News Reader

I am the first employee of a startup with less than 10 employees. We are a direct competitor of Fab latest incarnation Hem (One Nordic).

We have been around for more than 2 year now. Our revenues are in multi-million and most importantly we are profitable.

Lucky to be working with founders who believe in reaching profitability first. We are a data driven company from the get go. Which allowed us to make smart decision while been super lean.

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Can you name your company? (I'm asking because I'm interested in furniture, not for the startup gossip.)

http://www.bryght.com

Change the url and you could grow revenue really quickly man.

I think the name's fine. Google? Facebook? Whatsapp? Blergh.

They're all pretty phonetically obvious. Bryght, on the other hand...

"Oh yeah, bought some great stuff from Bryght the other day"

"Hey man, tried that Bright web site you mentioned. It didn't work"

"Where did you go?"

"Bright dot com"

"Bryght dot com?"

"Yeah, bright dot com"

and so on and so forth, for all eternity.

"Bright with a Y, dot com."

Some names are a lot harder to explain than that.

Brighty.com?

No it's brightwithay.com

You could say the same about IKEA too. I'm still not sure I pronounce it properly...

IKEA was a huge brand before the internet was there to make it important for people to type its name correctly..

Just think of it as Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd and you'll know.

Agreed. Misspelled brand identity is the equivalent of a shaky foundation.

Yet Flickr did ok for itself. As did Twittr, and del.icio.us (sp?). I agree that names matter but the scenario you've painted isn't fatal by any means. In the modern connected age, 'word-of-mouth' is just as much about text as it is about talking (ie FB posts, tweets, msgs, etc).

Indeed, Bryght's revenues are in the multi-millions so they're clearly doing something right.

If they're selling non-obvious quirky stuff, maybe having a non-obvious quirky name will help with branding.

Or not. But I don't think assuming it's a net negative is necessarily justified here.

Hey, congrats. I filled my dining room with the knockoff CH33 chair you guys sell. I was very pleased with the overall experience.

so how do companies like you make money? where's the innovation? where's the unique value proposition when something like Amazon, ebay exists?

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