It would be interesting to know what influenced the choice of name of your company ? What other names were amongst the candidates and why they weren't chosen ? Is there a story behind your company's name ?
What's the story behind the name of your startup/company ?
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Re: What's the story behind the name of your startup/company ?
#2From my post here: http://www.greaterscope.com/blog/2008/11/11/intentional-soft...
Back in 2002 I thought of "Intentional Software" as a company name. It was supposed to imply that we wouldn’t be creating haphazardly designed products. But then again, I'd only been coding for a year or two at the time, which doesn't seem like enough time to be doing anything other than haphazard development.
All of that is beside the point, because Charles Simonyi came along a few years later and started a company of the same name. He was born well before me so he had a killer head-start. Plus, as the originator of "hungarian notation", he knew how to not program all willy-nilly.
My ideas for a company name progressed, especially once I stopped using the space bar. Out came "Greaterscope" as a possibility. The encapsulation of optimistic, forward-looking, expansive ... a chord was struck. Or rather, a saw was wobbled to make a sound. But don’t worry, the saw’s teeth are clean. (Yeah, that was a stretch, but I had to reference Scope mouthwash somewhere, since you probably thought of it upon seeing our company name)
Re: What's the story behind the name of your startup/company ?
#3Ours is a tale of the sunk cost fallacy. Back in 2006, we started working on a social network aggregator called BlueSwarm that was very similar to FriendFeed or SocialThing. We originally called it BlueSwarm.org, because the .com was taken, but just before we launched in Summer 2007, we bought the .com, paying way way more than we should have. Stupid. Anyway, the launch went OK, but after awhile, we realized that the space was crowding fast and it was a difficult idea to monetize, so we put it on the back-burner.
Meanwhile, we launched a little side blog called MightyBrand that covered personal branding through social media. We posted there occasionally, but not much. It was one of those spur-of-the-moment ideas you do on a weekend that gradually lose steam over the next few months.
In early 2008, we decided to take the codebase from BlueSwarm and re-purpose it to be a social media monitoring platform for brands. This is where the sunk cost fallacy comes in: because we paid so much for the BlueSwarm.com domain, we really wanted to use it, so our social media monitoring platform for brands and companies was also called BlueSwarm. We went through these mental marketing gymnastics trying to relate it to what we were doing: "Who's swarming around your brand?" We launched an alpha prototype under BlueSwarm and applied to YC as BlueSwarm.
Finally, about six months later, we realized that it probably wasn't the best fit, and it suddenly dawned on us that MightyBrand was actually a pretty good name for what we were attempting to do, and would grow with us as we expand because just monitoring. So when we launched our public beta in Jan 2009, we had completely re-branded as MightyBrand.
PS - If anyone wants to buy BlueSwarm.com, .net, and .org, email me. :)
Re: What's the story behind the name of your startup/company ?
#4names are mostly irrelevant. domains however, are not.
Make sure you get the .com, make sure you get all the typos (if you haven't bought ~10 domains you're doing it wrong).
Avoid stuff like "getx" (getdropbox) no one remembers the get and that'll piss users off, you'll also have to deal with dropbox.com being a competitor/spammer/something bad down the line.
If you can get a name that vaguely tells what you do, awesome. If its clever, awesome. Be wary of long names - we love Broadersheet, but it is rather long. We'll see.
Don't do the d.o.t thing, its lame, annoying, hinders your audience, maybe even hurts your SEO. Yahoo bought delicious.com, and note the techy audience initially.
I have this belief, you know you've found a great name (eg "how about z?") when you then type z into a domain checker and the .com is available -- I take that as a sign of yes!
Re: What's the story behind the name of your startup/company ?
#5I was finishing up my last project and looking for something new to work on. I wanted a good name for it so I hit up ajaxwhois.com, where I spent a good ten hours over the course of two or three weeks looking for a good domain name for one of the projects I was considering (How crazy is that: I was letting the domain name availability decide which project I would pursue).
Frustrated, I wrote some software to scan for available domain names. Surprise suprise: some of them were not half bad. "Hey, I thought, some people might find this useful." I dropped the other ideas and started working on a new project:
The name -- Domain Pigeon -- was discovered using the software I originally wrote to find available domain names. That same software found the 90,000+ domain and Twitter names that are currently listed on the site.
On an unrelated note, a decent percentage of people that search for Domain Pigeon on Google misspell it: 'Domain Pidgeon' (like fridge or ridge)--stupid French etymology. I also own and redirect people from domainpidgeon.com because of that hiccup. I admit its a little ironic that its a somewhat difficult domain name... :)
Re: What's the story behind the name of your startup/company ?
#6Ours is "Tjetter" (http://www.tjetter.com), which is "Chatter" spelled phonetically in Dutch.
We really wondered whether this would be a good idea, because I'm guessing it's practically impossible to pronounce 'tjetter' in English (is it not?).
Re: What's the story behind the name of your startup/company ?
#7I normally pick the names of my projects randomly. But the names in some sense describe the essence of the project. If its an outstanding name it will definitely stick.
Re: What's the story behind the name of your startup/company ?
#8Ours is a tale of the sunk cost fallacy. Back in 2006, we started working on a social network aggregator called BlueSwarm that was very similar to FriendFeed or SocialThing. We originally called it BlueSwarm.org, because the .com was taken, but just before we launched in Summer 2007, we bought the .com, paying way way more than we should have. Stupid. Anyway, the launch went OK, but after awhile, we realized that the…
You should try to sell BlueSwarm.com to the Columbus Blue Jackets :)
Re: What's the story behind the name of your startup/company ?
#9names are mostly irrelevant. domains however, are not. Make sure you get the .com, make sure you get all the typos (if you haven't bought ~10 domains you're doing it wrong). Avoid stuff like "getx" (getdropbox) no one remembers the get and that'll piss users off, you'll also have to deal with dropbox.com being a competitor/spammer/something bad down the line. If you can get a name that vaguely tells what you do, awes…
All agreed... I still have no clue why 37signals settled for basecamphq and campfirenow. Terrible domains. And agreed with dropbox. If I ever want to check out dropbox, I now need to google for it, or try to decide which sub-optimum domain they're using.
Surprise, basecamp.com has adsense at the top, which includes an ad for basecamphq.com. Same with dropbox.com. That's silly expense.
There's tons of great domains not taken out there. Don't believe any of the domain whores who tell you "Premium 4 letter domains like srxq.com usually go for 4 figures". There's a large range of even 4 letter .com names available for the reg. fee.
Just sit down for a day with a domain checker, and find something easy to say and spell, which isn't taken.
I did that a year and a half ago and decided on mibbit. I still like it enough :)
Re: What's the story behind the name of your startup/company ?
#10Some angel investor who wanted to cut a check couldn't spell the name of the company right, so we had to change the name of the company to the misspelled version and live with it forever. It was a disaster! Watch out for bad company names!