If you can't remember the name, then it's not clever.
PS: I believe only "lifestyle" products can get away with that kind of fantasy name. Things that impact and change significantly the way you do something that you do often.
Clever Names Aren’t Always a Good Thing
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Re: Clever Names Aren’t Always a Good Thing
#42I feel the same way about Web 2.0 names with trendy dropped vowels. Bnter, for example - is it bantr? bntr? banter? These brands provide great fodder for typosquatters, I'm sure.
Re: Clever Names Aren’t Always a Good Thing
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is almost like Oracle support telling me "There is no problem" after I call them about my database corruption. The author, who obviously loves your software, couldn't find you enough times that he wrote a blog post about it. There are several reddit thread about this issue. Several replies to this thread express the same frustration - they can't find your software when they know it exists and want to use it. You…
Oops, I didn't mean to come off as saying that the author's problem isn't real. I understand where he's coming from and we hear similar things from a lot of users. But, there's not a good solution available so I don't really worry about it day to day. We're not going to change the name at this point, and I think people have started to see us enough that its becoming less and less of a problem. Actually, lots of peopl…
For some reason Ninite sounds very familiar to me, so it's easy to remember...
Re: Clever Names Aren’t Always a Good Thing
#44I've had they same issue with Ninite, actually. I'm agnostic on whether it needs a different name. For a use-once-in-a-blue-moon product which fixes an immediate need, it probably needs better SEO. The simplest baby step is to write ten or twenty pages about pain points and how Ninite fixes them.
We could probably use more SEO, but we're actively fighting that once in a blue moon use reputation.
We're working to position Ninite as a great general download site and our new Ninite updater should help repeat use. Even with a single app, clicking next next next through an installer is silly. Our paid users end up using Ninite daily at their work already.
A big issue with SEO for us is that normal users don't even imagine that what Ninite does is possible. I think some mix of education and oblique SEO could help, but I think the newness of what we do complicates things a lot.
We aren't hurting for traffic, but it's primarily word of mouth and press so far.
Re: Clever Names Aren’t Always a Good Thing
#45[deleted]
Re: Clever Names Aren’t Always a Good Thing
#46VLC is another tool I had trouble memorizing the name of. "VideoLAN? That must be something different..."
Re: Clever Names Aren’t Always a Good Thing
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is almost like Oracle support telling me "There is no problem" after I call them about my database corruption. The author, who obviously loves your software, couldn't find you enough times that he wrote a blog post about it. There are several reddit thread about this issue. Several replies to this thread express the same frustration - they can't find your software when they know it exists and want to use it. You…
Oops, I didn't mean to come off as saying that the author's problem isn't real. I understand where he's coming from and we hear similar things from a lot of users. But, there's not a good solution available so I don't really worry about it day to day. We're not going to change the name at this point, and I think people have started to see us enough that its becoming less and less of a problem. Actually, lots of peopl…
You might be right - but you can't logically draw the conclusion that 'lots of people remember the name' based on the evidence presented.
The is no correlation between words people end up reaching your site by, and words that they are trying to find your site by.
Consider the world where 10M people are trying to find Ninite, but forget the name and unsuccessfully google "keep multiple programs up to date". Similarly, 1M people google for some variation of Ninite, and all find your site. Your referrer logs would show that all users reaching your site remembered your name, even though you're throwing away 90% of your potential user base.
That's like trying to disprove the hypothesis: "You don't network enough, so not enough people know you" with the evidence "99% of the calls I get are from people that know me, so clearly a lot of people know me".
Re: Clever Names Aren’t Always a Good Thing
#48At first, I agree. But then I look at my running programs: emacs, Steam, Safari, Python, Clojure, along with the more descriptive Finder, iChat, iTerm2, Mail. Somehow, I think the problem has more to do with how obtrusive or how much interaction you have with a program rather than the name. What would you call Ninite?
Onestall.
Re: Clever Names Aren’t Always a Good Thing
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Are there examples of products where an awesome name made them into successes? Or even had a significant impact? YouTube. What differentiated YouTube from all the other video sharing sites? A good name and logo.
I've got a hunch that there was a little more to it than just "a good name and logo."
For one, they tried hard to support every possible video format for upload (as opposed to, e.g., Google Video, which was much pickier about what it would accept). In general, they nailed the "just make it work" factor.
(Subjectively, I remember YouTube being the first site that made me think, "wow! video on the internet! it works!". Ironically enough, this is no longer really true -- half the time YT starts buffering part way through the video (sometimes never to go finish w/o a full page refresh), & the other half the time you get a disruptive pop-up covering 20% of the screen. Bah.)
Re: Clever Names Aren’t Always a Good Thing
#50I'm a co-founder of Ninite. We hear this a lot, but I don't think it's a big deal. Traffic has been growing well since we launched and we install 1,000,000 apps every week now. The real problem is that there's not really a term for what we do. The key part in all these stories is that even searching for us is hard. We're doing something totally new so we might as well call it something totally new. I'm also just aest…
> I'm also just aesthetically opposed to descriptive names.
In your case, I think a coined name is OK because any alternative that I can think of--like "Multi Product Installer"--sounds horribly generic. Multi Product Installer is no easier to remember than Automated Setup Utility, or Quick Choice and Download, or whatever.
By I do think that for a fast-moving market, a descriptive name (or at least a memorable one) is pretty important. Movies are great example of this. I'm convinced that some really good movies that have done badly at the box office failed because of the their names.
Two examples that come to mind are "Waking Ned Devine" and "ffolkes". You get no clue what the movies are about from these titles. Are they comedies or action movies? Who knows. It would be so much better for these films to have been called, say, "Get the Dead Guy's Fortune" and "North Sea Hijack", respectively.
I've personally chosen movies to watch based solely on the title (when the film I came to actually see was sold out, for example), so there's no denying that it can have a big effect when you need to make choices quickly. In this respect, "Facebook" makes sense, especially in a super-fast arena like social media software.
"Google", by the way, is not a counter-example to my point because the name is memorable (by association with googol) to techie people who would have been the early users.