Wakoopa, Frengo, Squidoo: Are Stupid Startup Names Hurting Silicon Valley?

The search for a unique corporate name and identity may be backfiring in the Silicon Valley, according to an amusing article in last week's Los Angeles Times. Wakoopa, Frengo, Squidoo or Meebo all might be acceptable on an individual basis. But when every startup in the Valley begins opting for whimsy (and a non-stop barrage of vowels) over, well, making sense, the results can be less than desirable.

Wakoopa, Frengo, Squidoo: Are Stupid Startup Names Hurting Silicon Valley?
blog.wired.com

"Stupid" is such a subjective opinion. Individual brand-carving matters much more. . . immediate association is more relevant. These abstract names (wakoopa, frengo, squidoo) aren't really built upon any particular app of substance . . . it's a kind of reverse-branding that hurts in the long-run. Selling names works, but only a bit. Sooner or later, you have to sell substance.

The problem is that the demand for desirable names is vastly higher than ever before, while the supply is limited [1]. Moreover, since there are now so many named things competing for attention, finding a name that stands out and is desirable is pretty hard.

1. Interestingly, the market adaptation has been a slow erosion of the constraints on desirable names - 'Yahoo' and 'Google' sounded silly once upon a time, as did 'Flickr'. As the number of web apps increases, chances are the wackyness of the names, and people's tolerance for them will continue to expand.

This probably bothers those in the biz far more than most people, since they see dozens of these things a day while normal users only see those few apps they use or stumble upon. Though a lot of the names of the also-rans and almost-rans are truely terrible.

I don't like to quote Bob Parsons, but his essay describing the problem is second to none http://www.bobparsons.com/DomainKiting.html

It's called domain kiting/parking/squatting, and could be easily stopped if the ICANN introduced a non refundable deposit on a domain name.

The key point from the article is this,

- As it stands, domain names are fully refundable within 4 days. This causes million dollar corporations to buy domains in bulk, renew them every four days, and eventually buy domains that they think are profitable. In the mean time the average web-preneur sees no domains available.

This is exactly what I was thinking when I read the article about naming phones with cryptic numbers earlier. Random strings of vowels in non-words are just as memorable as KR344-a I'd say.

Hmm, maybe I should register kr344-a.com just to be safe though.