How to Name your Company • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Name your Company

#71

Post by tptacek » Tue, Oct 23, 2012, 12:58 PM UTC

kami8845 wrote: post #67

tptacek wrote: post #9

Or, just name your company quickly and move on. We lost a couple weeks early on to naming Matasano, and after some false starts, eventually gave up and thumbed through a list of exotic plants. By the time the book of plants had been opened, the naming premise had been accepted: we were done trying to find a semantically "fitting" name for the company. We just picked a plant with a cool name. We ran into two "problems…

I don't mean to offend you but Matasano is probably one of the worse names I've encountered in the past few years. My thought process: 1) Sounds like Monsanto, do they do agriculture? Sounds boring. 2) Sounds Latin American, is that their origin / market they're focusing on? Sounds boring. So I think there are a lot of names where you guys could've avoided those 2 problems. I still don't think of Matasano as a high-t…

I'll definitely look into dealing with those problems. Thanks.

Re: How to Name your Company

#72

Post by tptacek » Tue, Oct 23, 2012, 12:58 PM UTC

amorphid wrote: post #69

tptacek wrote: post #9

Or, just name your company quickly and move on. We lost a couple weeks early on to naming Matasano, and after some false starts, eventually gave up and thumbed through a list of exotic plants. By the time the book of plants had been opened, the naming premise had been accepted: we were done trying to find a semantically "fitting" name for the company. We just picked a plant with a cool name. We ran into two "problems…

Matasano sounds good to me. I want to start a business ay some point called something like Jorge's Taco Truck. The business will not be owned by Jorge, there will be no sale of tacos, and we won't have a truck. I bet the name would be just fine, perhaps even memorable.

I would totally buy word processing software from Jorge's Taco Truck.

Re: How to Name your Company

#73

Post by rmc » Tue, Oct 23, 2012, 1:44 PM UTC

alexkus wrote: post #64

martey wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Braintree is named after the town in Massachusetts, because the founder liked John Adams: https://www.braintreepayments.com/blog/whats-in-a-name-custo...

Many of the towns in MA were named after towns/cities/counties in the UK (Essex in particular); Braintree, Chelmsford, Billerica[y], etc. Indeed the counties of MA are mainly UK town/city names in the UK. It's only 3 out of the 14 that aren't (Dukes, Franklin, Nantucket). It always made me chuckle to see so many place names I recognised from home (UK) when I visited our office in Lowell, MA.

Same happens in other former UK colonies, e.g. Australia.

Re: How to Name your Company

#74

Post by sneak » Tue, Oct 23, 2012, 3:00 PM UTC

jtheory wrote: post #8

Samuel_Michon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't find 'xkcd' particularly easy to pronounce or remember. Given its target audience, it works for xkcd. Geeks like geeky sounding, hard to pronounce names (like gnustep, xmlhttprequest and PostgreSQL). If a name like 'xkcd' were chosen for a consumer service, it probably wouldn't work very well.

The name was chosen explicitly to be difficult to pronounce and remember.

No, it wasn't.

I named my company in the same way Mr. Munroe named his webcomic: a four-letter domain available in .com, .net, and .org.

Re: How to Name your Company

#75

Post by jtheory » Tue, Oct 23, 2012, 6:07 PM UTC

sneak wrote: post #74

jtheory wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The name was chosen explicitly to be difficult to pronounce and remember.

No, it wasn't. I named my company in the same way Mr. Munroe named his webcomic: a four-letter domain available in .com, .net, and .org.

http://www.redhat.com/magazine/025nov06/features/xkcd/

"Actually the domain name came after the instant messaging screen name, which I picked late one night. Five, six, maybe seven years ago, I was tired of having names that meant something. Skywalker4, Animorph7... I wanted to pick a name that I wouldn’t get tired of. That would just always mean me. So I just went down combinations of letters that weren’t taken, until I could find one that didn’t have any meaning, didn’t have any pronunciation, and didn’t seem like an obvious acronym for anything."