Trello means crazy in greek.
I think you mean "τρελός" :) From the look of it, there's only one L.
There's an older spelling with double lambda. Also, trello is the neuter gender.
The agonies of picking a product name and how we chose Trello
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Re: The agonies of picking a product name and how we chose Trello
#12Trello means crazy in greek.
And 'trell' means slave in norwegian.
I don't think you can avoid this kind of thing if you want a short and pronounceable name.
Re: The agonies of picking a product name and how we chose Trello
#13That's all good if you are an notable evangelist like Spolsky, but i think it's best to use something at least vaguely descriptive. Sure, people can remember the 7 most popular sites on the net, but for the rest it's best to choose something that can come up easily when you struggle to remember the freaking name of that service. For example, Picplz=obvious, groupon=sort of obvious, Quora=might come up when thinking "questions". I prefer to pick the site subject and add a funny/fuzzy or non-english suffix for my projects, e.g. projectilo.com, noteplz.com, mapifier.com etc.
Re: The agonies of picking a product name and how we chose Trello
#14That's all good if you are an notable evangelist like Spolsky, but i think it's best to use something at least vaguely descriptive. Sure, people can remember the 7 most popular sites on the net, but for the rest it's best to choose something that can come up easily when you struggle to remember the freaking name of that service. For example, Picplz=obvious, groupon=sort of obvious, Quora=might come up when thinking "…
Although a less descriptive name allows you to adapt your service more easily. If amazon started as onlinebooks.com it would have made the migration to online everything + AWS + kindle + everything else more difficult.
Re: The agonies of picking a product name and how we chose Trello
#15Just my opinion, and you're right that it pretty much doesn't matter, but I don't like "Trello" because we already have "trulia" and "twilio". They just are too similar to me.
Re: The agonies of picking a product name and how we chose Trello
#16That's all good if you are an notable evangelist like Spolsky, but i think it's best to use something at least vaguely descriptive. Sure, people can remember the 7 most popular sites on the net, but for the rest it's best to choose something that can come up easily when you struggle to remember the freaking name of that service. For example, Picplz=obvious, groupon=sort of obvious, Quora=might come up when thinking "…
Although a less descriptive name allows you to adapt your service more easily. If amazon started as onlinebooks.com it would have made the migration to online everything + AWS + kindle + everything else more difficult.
Optimizing for the wrong problem.
Re: The agonies of picking a product name and how we chose Trello
#17It sounds like a good amount of time was wasted because the domains were already taken, which was only discovered after discussing and voting on them. It might have been better to forfeit all names without domain in first place. It's still possible to find good, free names. http://impossibility.org is a pretty good domain name generator, for instance.
Re: The agonies of picking a product name and how we chose Trello
#18Consumers can get over a weird name (Wii?!) but what hurts is when they can never remember it.
It's easier to remember names that are concrete (even though monkeys have nothing to do with surveys) or have a memorable connection to the product's usage, like Reddit.
When someone hears the name, understands the product's use or sees the site, try to give them a thread that they can pull on later to remember the name. That's all.
I feel bad about calling out Ninite as a counterexample but several HNers say they can never remember their name. If your name isn't relevant, at least let it be memorable.
Re: The agonies of picking a product name and how we chose Trello
#19Another interesting part of the project name / url debate:
Is having [product].com that important?
In their book and blog 37Signals has generally played down the importance of urls. Pointing to the use of basecamphq.com for their project management offering.
I must say I am on the fence. Clearly appending something to your product's name opens more options for un-squatted domains but at what cost to the end user?
Re: The agonies of picking a product name and how we chose Trello
#20That's all good if you are an notable evangelist like Spolsky, but i think it's best to use something at least vaguely descriptive. Sure, people can remember the 7 most popular sites on the net, but for the rest it's best to choose something that can come up easily when you struggle to remember the freaking name of that service. For example, Picplz=obvious, groupon=sort of obvious, Quora=might come up when thinking "…
Although a less descriptive name allows you to adapt your service more easily. If amazon started as onlinebooks.com it would have made the migration to online everything + AWS + kindle + everything else more difficult.
on the other hand if evernote had a captcha-looking name i 'd never have stumbled upon it.