Before naming your startup, read this. • Hacker News Board

Re: Before naming your startup, read this.

#21

Post by keiferski » Sun, Apr 22, 2012, 4:40 PM UTC

neilk wrote: post #20

keiferski wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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-…

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.

Re: Before naming your startup, read this.

#22

Post by ohashi » Sun, Apr 22, 2012, 4:41 PM UTC

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.

Re: Before naming your startup, read this.

#23

Post by Silhouette » Sun, Apr 22, 2012, 4:42 PM UTC

rdl wrote: post #15

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 ha…

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...

Re: Before naming your startup, read this.

#24

Post by joejohnson » Sun, Apr 22, 2012, 4:43 PM UTC

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.

Re: Before naming your startup, read this.

#25

Post by mooism2 » Sun, Apr 22, 2012, 4:44 PM UTC

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...)

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".)

Re: Before naming your startup, read this.

#26

Post by blahedo » Sun, Apr 22, 2012, 4:52 PM UTC

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?

Re: Before naming your startup, read this.

#27

Post by micheljansen » Sun, Apr 22, 2012, 5:04 PM UTC

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.

Re: Before naming your startup, read this.

#28

Post by jsomethings » Sun, Apr 22, 2012, 5:05 PM UTC

micheljansen wrote: post #27

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.

Re: Before naming your startup, read this.

#29

Post by heyitsnick » Sun, Apr 22, 2012, 5:12 PM UTC

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.

Re: Before naming your startup, read this.

#30

Post by nextstep » Sun, Apr 22, 2012, 5:18 PM UTC

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.