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The agonies of picking a product name and how we chose Trello

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Re: The agonies of picking a product name and how we chose Trello

#31

Post by Mz »

buzzcut wrote: post #22
ubi wrote: post #19

Another interesting part of the project name / url debate: Is having [product].com that important? In their book and blog 37Signals has generally played down the importance of urls. Pointing to the use of basecamphq.com for their project management offering. I must say I am on the fence. Clearly appending something to your product's name opens more options for un-squatted domains but at what cost to the end user?

I'd love to hear what people think about this. I think a .com name is important, but I can't back that up with any real evidence. And basecamp is a great example of it not mattering. We considered trelloapp.com (and use trelloapp on Twitter), and my guess is that it all would have turned out fine either way. But I still have a possibly irrational attachment to the [name].com

I think a .com name is important, but I can't back that up with any real evidence.

I know of a little anecdotal evidence: A .org I know of used to routinely have to remind people it was .org, not .com. The owner of another .org I know of once stated bluntly they "farked up" by not buying the .com version as well, which was bought at some point by a company (using the same name, if I recall correctly -- physically located elsewhere). And, of course, there is the infamous whitehouse .com to take advantage of the fact that even for .gov sites, people mentally default to the .com mode.

No formal studies or anything (that I know of), but there is some anecdotal evidence that it makes a difference of some sort.

Re: The agonies of picking a product name and how we chose Trello

#32

Post by dangrossman »

buzzcut wrote: post #9
Gring wrote: post #6

The post also mentioned "Idealist". Would have been a much greater name, lots of clever wordplays and explanations what it really is: Idea List Ideal Deal. I wonder why they decided against it.

I liked that name the best. However someone get there way before us: http://www.idealist.org/

> It looks like your browser might be out of date. Your experience on Idealist could be better if you update to the newest version.

I'm using Chrome 13. Amusing.

Re: The agonies of picking a product name and how we chose Trello

#33

Post by BrandonM »

polshaw wrote: post #29
rdl wrote: post #23

Is it trello like hello, or trello like llello (yeyo)? I dislike names which 1) can't be said and transcribed unambiguously over a 4kbps bad cellphone call by a non-native speaker to a non-native speaker and 2) don't have an unambiguous pronunciation...people might not mention your product if they're afraid of sounding stupid mispronouncing "ver-say-che", etc.

I'm going to assume trello, like trellis! I agree with your points but think trello is fairly unambiguous, considering it was an available (? or cheap) 6 letter .com domain.

It's unambiguous if your native language is not a romance language.

Re: The agonies of picking a product name and how we chose Trello

#34

Post by CPlatypus »

Yes, naming is a huge time-suck. Not only do you have to worry about the domain and the github project name, but you have to worry about trademarks as well. Even if you hate trademarks and have no intention of registering yourself, some other Johnny-come-lately could register a name you've worked hard to give meaning to and then deny you its use. Prior use is an even less effective defense with trademarks than with patents, and international trademark issues are too nightmarish to talk about.

Take it from someone who has actually had to change a project name after two years. You want a name that's pronouncable, barely memorable, but nothing to do with any real words that others might contend for. There's a reason for all those crappy nonsense-word names. They put an end to the pain so that developers can go back to developing actual functionality.

Re: The agonies of picking a product name and how we chose Trello

#35

Post by antrix »

This reminds me of something that happened here in Singapore not too long ago. The government had big plans of reviving the downtown area with lots of new developments, including the new casinos. As part of this makeover, they thought the then name of the area - Marina Bay - needed to be retired too.

So they hired a consulting firm and paid them about half a million dollars (IIRC) to come up with a new name.

In the end, the name they picked was.. Marina Bay. Yes, half a million to just continue with the old name! The spin was that the name was good and already part of the national culture/image. Which, to the layman, was obvious from the start :-)

Re: The agonies of picking a product name and how we chose Trello

#36

Post by patio11 »

mootothemax wrote: post #25

One aspect I'm interested in is the SEO angle. For instance, if I make cow food and call myself Cow Food Online, register a domain of cowfoodonline.com, would I stand to benefit from having lots of links with "Cow Food Online" pointing at my domain, since that'd be the name of my service?

You will benefit from both that factor and the exact match domain (EMD) bonus. Basically, example.org requires less links and less aligned anchor text to rank for the query [example] than any domain other than example.{com,net,org}

Now hypothetically assuming I was doing cow food online, I might make my domain cowfood .com and brand it as "Cow Food Online." That way you get a bonus when people search for [cow food], which is likely to be orders of magnitude more than [cow food online].

Re: The agonies of picking a product name and how we chose Trello

#37

Post by terrellm »

mootothemax wrote: post #25

One aspect I'm interested in is the SEO angle. For instance, if I make cow food and call myself Cow Food Online, register a domain of cowfoodonline.com, would I stand to benefit from having lots of links with "Cow Food Online" pointing at my domain, since that'd be the name of my service?

If you make "cow food", you probably want CattleFeed.com instead of CowFood.com or CowFoodOnline.com. A cow is a female bovine while cattle is one or more bovines of any gender. Not being picky... I'm a HN'er who makes his living writing software and running e-commerce stores for the cattle industry :D

As patio mentioned, there is the exact match bonus where your domain (com/net/org) matches the query exactly. Also, an exact match domain tends to lead to anchor text (inbound links) with the keyword. So the one-two punch of an EMD (exact match domain + keyword-rich anchor text) is extremely helpful.

One word of caution with EMDs... I bought an EMD CattleTags.com for an e-commerce store and have had to work on my branding to encourage people to link to me as "Cattle Tags Online" or "Cattle Tags Store" rather than "CattleTags.com" which isn't as desirable.

Re: The agonies of picking a product name and how we chose Trello

#40

Post by bostonvaulter2 »

metachris wrote: post #17

It sounds like a good amount of time was wasted because the domains were already taken, which was only discovered after discussing and voting on them. It might have been better to forfeit all names without domain in first place. It's still possible to find good, free names. http://impossibility.org is a pretty good domain name generator, for instance.

http://domai.nr/ is pretty neat as well
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