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| Credit Fish-Marketing.com |
In 2003 I started a company with two industry associates. An
afternoon was spent in my office, over several bottles of wine, specifically to
discuss company names.
Oldfield, Selby, &
Thomas (yes, with the Oxford comma).
We loved it.
It was the three of us, professional sounding, sophisticated (in its
own way at that time), and not hard to pronounce.
But one small issue: It sounded like a Law Firm – and that, we
certainly were not!
We were a consultancy, an education consultancy at that –
specialising in guiding investors and educational managers through the myriad
of government regulations and requirements in order to operate ethically and
successfully in the tertiary education field.
Oldfield, Selby, & Thomas said nothing to indicate that!
A few more days, several more bottles of wine, and a carton of
ciggies later – we were Pathways.
Pathways told our story – we established the pathway for our clients to succeed
in their investment, and in the broader education industry, Pathways
represented the journey that students took to graduation, that educators took
to developing their career, and that we as entrepreneurs took to contributing
to the industry that we were so passionate about.
So as the title broadly suggests, “Do Start-up Names Matter”?
Hell YES, they do!
You wouldn’t rename your child after six months, why would you want
to put yourself in the same position with your entrepreneurial baby?
Names matter as they contribute not only to identity, but they tell
some (if not all) of your story before further engagement. They set up apart
from your competitors, and they (can) stick in the minds of potential clients
and stakeholders. They shape your corporate future (whether tech start-up, SME,
or any other organisational form) through time and space; they are an essential
element of your business fingerprint.
Don’t overlook the power of a great name.
____________________
And from the net on this very topic, a pretty solid
interview-article by Max Garrone looking deeper into “Do Startup Names Matter”?
Startup
names may be a dime a dozen, but most founders still agonize over what to call
their dream. Are they right to invest so much energy and time — or would any
random string of letters be fine?
If
anyone knows the answer, it’s Jonathan Nelson, who created the startup
incubator Hackers/Founders
(aka H/F). Based in Silicon Valley but busy around the globe (in 75 cities
in 32 countries), H/F throws events where entrepreneurs can network, hone
pitches and gather advice. We asked Nelson for his thoughts.
Is
naming a startup a big deal?
Founders
spend a lot of time on it. It’s kind of like that question, “What do you name
your band?” What if you name your band Mudhoney … or Nickelback? It’s hard to
change that name once you get a bit more popular, because the brand is so
tightly tied to your name. You don’t hear of startups changing their name after
they’re bigger, so it tends to be something that people obsess about.
I
think there’s a corollary between the names of hedge funds, startups and bands.
I’ve been reading about hedge fund history, and they tend to have aggressive
funding names like Tiger Global, Alpha Heavy, Aggressive Growth. You could put
whatever turd of an investment in a fund named Aggressive Growth, but you’d
think “oh yeah I
want to put my money in,” just because the name tells you what you want it to
tell you. Hedge funds obsess about their entity names because that’s on the
check that you write to them.
How
much involvement do VCs have in choosing a name?
I’ve
asked a lot of investors how they make their decisions. It’s all about pattern
match. They tend to invest a lot in gut and emotion. Generally, many investors
will make up their minds in 2.5 minutes whether they’ll write a check or not.
The company name and one-line pitch is about all you can fit into that time, so
I think it’s actually fairly important. It’s part of the first impression
people get. If you have a really bad name, chances are you’re not going to get
funded. Or the lead investor will change the name real quick before they tell
all their friends about it, because they don’t want to tell their friends that
they invested in something with a lame name.
What
sort of factors go into choosing a name?
Naming
companies is an interesting problem, primarily because so many companies are
web-based, which limits you to current available domain names or a domain-name
extension. For a while there, the .ly extension was really popular, which is Libya’s,
but then the civil war happened in Libya and a lot of entrepreneurs thought
“Maybe it isn’t such a good idea to be giving Gaddafi $75 a year for my domain
name.” That’s changed people’s perceptions.
Do
you try to keep names to a certain length?
Y
Combinator tries to keep startup names down to two syllables, names like eBay,
Yahoo!, Google, Reddit, and so on. They really try to have short memorable
names, even if you have to turn that name into something else and build a brand
around it.
But
another startup I know about is Can I Stay
With You While I Rent My Place on Airbnb. They
got a ton of press coverage just because of the name. It’s just a signup page,
but they got 1,500 signups as a social network to find a place while you rent
out your place on Airbnb. The name stuck and was memorable.
When I
think about names, I know memories are formed from data plus emotion.
Emotion makes the data sticky. We really try to think about that when we think
about names; you want it to be memorable. When you come up with a one-line
pitch for your company, you try to make it more memorable. Ours is “Making life
suck 34% less for founders.” It causes some cognitive dissonance, but because
of that it’s more memorable.
What
if your company was Fuck You We Do Data.com? I’m waiting for a company to take
that name because it’s self-explanatory, and memorable because it’s shocking.
Sure, it’s not businessy, but the definition of business is changing.
Why
are domain names so important in a world where people don’t type them into
their browsers any more? Is there any move to abandoning the obsession with a
name that works as a great domain name?
Startups
getting off the ground obsess about domain names for a while. I hoard cool
domain names just because I may use them someday. But they still matter outside
of just being cool names.
I’m
working with a company right now founded by a divorce lawyer who wants to
transform the divorce process, because divorce lawyers get paid by the hour and
no one should get paid by the hour to settle a divorce. That’s evil. The
founder, Sandro, wants to charge a flat fee for divorce. He started with the
name Legal Passage, but
when we looked at his logs he got zero hits to that page in six months with
zero promotion.
We
were actively thinking about it. Legal Passage doesn’t communicate to you what
they do, so we Googled around and looked at terms like diydivorce. Sandro
mentioned that a huge part of the U.S. population will soon be Hispanic, so why
don’t we go for divorce.io, which is divorcio
or divorce in Spanish. Divorce.com is for sale for $100,000, and we’re thinking
that if people are typing in divorce
into their search bars they’ll go directly to divorce.com and we’d get lots of
incidental traffic. So, SEO still makes domain names important. We actually
spend quite a bit of time of time working on these names.
Here’s
another example. We were working with a company called Flights With
Friends that lets a group of people split travel
bills. Like if you’re going to a bachelor party, usually one person bites the
bullet and buys everything, then does all the work to bill everyone else. We
liked the service. We all hated the name.
Flights
With Friends got sued by Zynga because they said it impinged on Words With
Friends, and Flights With Friends’ founder said, “That’s awesome, we’re getting
sued by a big company, we’ll get tons of press!” Eventually the company became
more of “if you’re going to do something with friends, do something really
cool” — like an event, not just a flight. So we got the mobile-only exclusive
rights to 200 high-roller penthouse suites in Vegas. You can’t book them any
other way. And we changed the name to Suiteness.io, where you can
get things like a five-bedroom suite, a bowling alley, a butler, for $5,000 a
weekend. Now with no advertising for Suiteness, it’s just in the App Store,
we’re getting $40,000–$50,000/month just because people were looking for the
word “Suite.”
Do
you have any hard-and-fast rules about brainstorming for names? Do you follow
any formal process?
We
spitball. There’s really no formal process that we follow.
What
about putting someone’s name into a company name?
Founders’
names are interesting. One of the things we do when we select companies for our
incubator is that we have a blind application so that founder name, age, gender
isn’t present. We don’t post it on our app. Why? There’s a documented study
about how, historically, a hiring manager who was handed two resumes that were
identical except for name was likely to make a callback decision based on the perceived
race of the applicant. That’s a documented study, so we thought about that a
lot, and the rest of the numbers. There are a huge number of women in Silicon
Valley, but only 4% of female-led startups get funded. We have name-blind
applications because of this. I suspect founders’ names also have a definite
effect on the 2.5-minute VC pattern match for an investment decision.
Are
you seeing any naming trends?
Things
are getting shorter. Our first domain name was hackersandfounders.com, but our
meetings are in bars where I have to tell people what our name is over all the
noise. Eventually, I had to get a short name. The Christmas Island domain
suffix is .cx, so we went with hf.cx
and made my email address j@hf.cx.
Now when I give someone my email address at a bar, they say “omg that’s the
shortest name ever” and they just type it into their phone.
H/F
is an international network. Since startups are truly globalized, do you see
any patterns in naming that differ by language or nationality?
I was
working with a company named Export Abroad and someone said, “Dude, that’s a
mail-order bride company: Export-A-Broad.” I thought about it and concluded
that, OK, that’s weird, but he kind of has a point. The company does big data
to provide global business intelligence. It’s from the Midwest, where Export
Abroad has a different vibe. It’s not Silicon Valley where someone would
probably want Export.io.
How
did your name come about?
It’s
weird that Hackers and Founders ended up being a really good name, because in
so many different parts of the country “hacker” is a scary word, but in Silicon
Valley it’s colloquial for “good programmer.” Across the country, or even here
occasionally, we’ll have a meeting in a bar and the bartender will ask if we’re
going to steal their personal information. The fact that it has the word
“hacker” in the name has helped us in our tech-heavy community. About
two-thirds of our membership is engineers, so that’s really important.
What
are some bad startup names you’ve come across?
Our
parent company is called NP-Hard, which is computer science speak for a group
of hard computer problems. When I came up with that, my wife said, “That’s a
terrible name.” If you’re not a computer science geek it doesn’t make sense,
but I’m perfectly fine telling you that name, even if it only ever shows up on
our checks.
At
H/F, what good advice is most frequently ignored when it comes to naming?
Ultimately
it’s not my company, it’s their company. My job is to be their sherpa. So I’ll
ask, “What problems do you have?” and I’ll give my pointed, direct advice. But
ultimately the CEO and founders have to learn to make decisions themselves.
Ultimately it’s their company; I only own a small part of it. They face the
consequences. I love being proven wrong by the founders.
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