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Before naming your startup, read this.

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Re: Before naming your startup, read this.

#11

Post by tomp »

kstenerud wrote: post #9

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

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...)

Re: Before naming your startup, read this.

#12

Post by rglover »

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.

Re: Before naming your startup, read this.

#13

Post by keiferski »

tomp wrote: post #11
kstenerud wrote: post #9

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

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.

Re: Before naming your startup, read this.

#15

Post by rdl »

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.

Re: Before naming your startup, read this.

#17

Post by abuzzooz »

kstenerud wrote: post #9

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

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.

Re: Before naming your startup, read this.

#18

Post by bluesnowmonkey »

kstenerud wrote: post #9

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

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

Re: Before naming your startup, read this.

#20

Post by neilk »

keiferski wrote: post #6
neilk wrote: post #5

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 experimen…

(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) htt…

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.

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