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Ask HN: Stuck with an unpronounceable product name

61 points by throwaway190620 ↗ HN
Hi everyone,

Throwaway account. Been on HN since 2008, but first time asking anything.

Here's the situation - we have a mature desktop product, IT-oriented, with a very good reputation and strong loyal following of people who know about it. Started as a side project, so didn't spend much thought on naming it and just picked something. It finally grew to a point of being worthy of proper marketing and promotion and... that name choice is now a problem. It is hard to pronounce and it doesn't sound nice if you manage to do that.

This complicates things when trying to sponsor video channels and podcasts for obvious reasons, but these are one of our best options for reaching people we are interested in.

Obviously, we can rename it, but this translates into a massive amount of work, in part because of several years worth of accumulated support/kb/forum material, all of which refers to the existing name.

Another option is to adopt the "Called Hahaha, but written HxHxHx" approach. This feels needlessly complicated if not forced.

Third option is to launch a clone of the product with a different name, use it for capturing the ad traffic and then direct it towards the original product. This seems workable, but also a bit too experimental for comfort.

---

Anyone's been in a similar situation before?

Do you have any experience with renaming a _mature_ product?

Thanks!

121 comments

[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 186 ms ] thread
indeed30
This instantly made me think of Qbserve.
Operyl
Off topic, but:

That looks insanely cool, thanks for mentioning it. I'm going to give it a try :).

ivm
Haha, it got this name because we were super tired after preparing for the release and couldn't find anything related to time tracking that wasn't already taken. I thought about renaming the app a year later but, again, nothing amazing was found after a couple of days of research, so I decided it wasn't worth the hassle of rebranding.
throwaway190620
This is perfectly pronounceable though - Cue-Bee-Serve.
mishac
Hmmm, I instinctively pronounced as "Cube-zerve"
docdeek
Always thought it was pronounced cob-serve.
dsincl12
I was thinking Bvckup https://bvckup2.com/ :)
Splognosticus
Heh, I think this is a great counter-example. Great product, who cares if it's got a weird name? :)
neuroticfish
It sticks in your brain in more ways than one. When someone tells you about Bvckup, they have to clarify "Backup with a V" and that forces you to think about it longer because there's no letter in "backup" that could be confused with a V.
naniwaduni
"Backup with a V" would be backvp to me.
whatshisface
Maybe you don't have to rename. It might be awkward to pronounce the current name, but unless you have any data indicating that people's purchasing decisions are being affected...
throwaway190620
We have no way to measure this, but common logic would suggest that there _is_ a negative effect there too. Imagine a junior sysadmin coming over the manager's desk and suggesting to use a tool that sounds like someone profusely swearing in Parseltongue.

But that's a secondary concern compared to not being promote product through any channels with an audio track.

whatshisface
Would people be less likely to buy it if the podcaster had to spell out the name? It depends on how rational the decision to purchase it is.
throwaway190620
I suspect that yes, they would be actually.

It's one thing to say "Sponsored by Apple" and another "Sponsored, erm, by Q-Z-W-C-K-I, which is actually much better than what its name might imply". The less friction there is, the better. Especially for placements that last mere seconds.

legitster
Lots of companies spell out their names on podcasts. I think it's unfair to compare your brand to the most recognized brand in the world. You should really do some testing to see how random people perceive it.
legitster
Look into usability testing or panels. You can create tests where people are asked to read or listen to sets of company names, do a minute of tasks, and be asked to recall company names based on their services. Relatively cheap to do in Amazon Turk.
kangnkodos
Can you add an additional name? HxHxHx - DesktopThing

Over time, you could transition to using the additional name more and more, and finally, rename the product.

throwaway190620
Might've worked if the thing wasn't sitting on its own site.
notahacker
That transition can happen gradually too: NewAppName becomes the leadgen site all the video ad watchers get sent to, then gradually support and FAQ and company emails get migrated over to it, and the actual app url migrates later, if at all.
cddotdotslash
It might not be as bad as you think. First, you've gotten the following you have based on reputation and your following so far. Second, most IT applications are written about more than they are talked about. I think consumer apps need a pronounceable name because people talking about them provides marketing value. But the discovery of most IT apps comes from written communication - blog posts, Google searches, etc.

Finally, if you're really concerned about it, maybe incorporate a pronunciation guide (phonetic symbols) into your branding somehow.

throwaway190620
> But the discovery of most IT apps comes from written communication - blog posts, Google searches, etc.

Well, yeah, precisely the original reasoning behind the name. The problem is that we can't promote through any channels that require pronouncing the name and there are quite a few really good ones.

jessaustin
So the name is vulgar when pronounced? That's awesome! You must work in a really chill organization.

Also, you definitely want to change the name. Lots of organizations aren't that chill, and you haven't sold anything to them yet.

cddotdotslash
Well then it sounds like the option is pretty binary - change it.
perennate
If your concern over a rename is more about the work in updating material than the potential loss in revenue due to confusion about the name, then I think you should rename, since it'll be worth the effort in the long run.
Starwatcher2001
If the spelling of the product name is uncommon, that might be a plus on search engines.
leot
"Spark" the IoT company renamed itself to "Particle" and it seems to have gone ok.
friedman23
if it's something like HxHxHx you could call it Hx3?
notahacker
Actually persuaded my dad to do more or less exactly that for his consulting business by pointing out he'd be better off creating a brand based on the number of Ts in our surname than have clients calling all the time to ask him to spell it out so their emails stopped bouncing...
linuxasheviller
Say hi to the other folks on the Azure team from us.
hn_throwaway_99
I have literally never heard anyone mispronounce Azure.
cddotdotslash
I have (albeit not terribly). I've heard the "A" pronounced like in "appetite" and also like the "A" in "America" with the "zure" sounding like the "sure" in "closure".
vollmond
Is the accent on the first or second syllable? Is the A pronounced "uh" or like in "apple"? I honestly don't know, having never experienced that word in verbal conversation, only books.

Though I don't think it's bad enough to be an example of OP's problem by any means.

aqme28
Because you can pronounce it a dozen different ways and thankfully people still know what you're talking about.
xeromal
Go to a microsoft conference and behold. I went to the LEAP conference this year and all the danes seemed to pronounce it as Az-your and I was the hillbilly pronouncing it Az-er
legitster
I have taken to giving it extra flair everytime I pronounce it to a Microsoft person.

"ah-ZOOR-ay"

itcmcgrath
I've been around a company that was 180+ years old (so rebranding was non-trivial ;)). They switched to an acronym based on the original name, so there was was 1) a direct link between old and new, 2) old branded tgat was mussed wasnt a big deal for bew customers, and 3) everyone called it by the acronym going forward.

A similar approach might work for you and allow an incremential phase out of the old brand over time. Instead of HxHxHx, it's now HITD (HxHxHx IT Desktop)

nullspace
> I've been around a company that was 180+ years old (so rebranding was non-trivial ;))

It's not fair to mention this and NOT tell which company and link to the story about this! :)

DoreenMichele
There may not be a story to link to.

I once did a write up about Aflac's rebranding because I worked there for over five years and couldn't find a write up of it anywhere. I think that blog is no longer available to the public, so we may be back to "It doesn't exist anywhere online that I can tell."

nullwasamistake
Renaming is easy. The corporate types spend months on a new logo. All you need to do is find replace the old name in the codebase, maybe a day of work max. The marketing materials can be updated to reflect that over time
kowdermeister
Just do the rebranding, it's better to do it on the long run. Yes, it's a huge amount of work, but it could be done in a finite amount of time. The two names can co-exist, like

    New name (formerly HxHxHx)
Furthermore not all name updates are equally important, some can be done with a DB find and replace some is shit manual work, but you can hire for this job someone.

Read about stories how companies did this before. Currently I can think of one case that's ongoing: Taxify -> Bolt. They still have the Taxify logo on their cabs in Hungary but the app updated to Bolt (taxify).

throwaway190620
> The two names can co-exist

That's what I'm wondering the most actually.

I think the least intrusive way to do it is to introduce a literal clone of the product under a different name. Make it clear that it is the exact same things as the original.

What I can't find is any examples of anyone doing this. Also, not sure how would the mighty Google react to these shenanigans and if their automata won't decided to delist both products just because it looks fishy.

legitster
Yeah, I wouldn't recommend doing so without consulting with an SEO person.

I don't think you will necessarily get dinged by Google, but a slow trickle towards a new page may kneecap both.

dheera
SEO is overrated in most cases these days. Nobody searches for stuff anymore. They find you mostly through social media, non-social media, and word of mouth.
legitster
Search is still hugely important. If you have a podcast ad or a tradeshow booth people don't remember you by your company name. They remember you as "that one company that does x". You need to make sure you show up as that company that does x, otherwise your competitors will eat up your marketing budget.
Veen
This is far from true. It depends on the business, but search is a massive source of traffic for all sorts of businesses.
afarrell
I definitely search for stuff. Not only that, but I search for things that I’d first heard through word-of-mouth.
pessimizer
> They still have the Taxify logo on their cabs in Hungary but the app updated to Bolt (taxify).

This might be a solution: wait for a fairly large UI overhaul or reskinning, announce that reskinning with the name that you want the product to have, then slap the new branding on the reskin while maintaining the company with the old application name (this is assuming the the company is named after the product.) That way, whether people use tho old name or the new name, they're talking about the application or the company that has a single application.

You might even be able to gaslight many old customers into thinking that the product never had a name change, and that the split always existed.

afarrell
> gaslight

How do you gaslight someone you have only passing contact with? Its certainly possible to deceive them into believing a particular thing, but I think it would be impossible to make them feel that they are losing touch with their core ability to perceive reality unless they were already going through some difficult mental health struggles.

tompark
It feels awkward while it's happening, and you keep referring to it by the old name, but later you get used to the new name.

Like iPython notebook to Jupyter notebook.

And Hudson to Jenkins. I remember at the time having a hard time remembering the new name, still referring to it as Hudson, but when writing this I actually had to search for the old name because I forgot it.

jballanc
Everyone's missing the more obvious (recent) massive rebranding: Comcast to Xfinity.
mataniko
Not really a rebrand or recent. Comcast is the company, Xfinity is a product line.
adrianmonk
Not only can they co-exist, personally I think it's most effective and natural (at reaching people) if, as an intermediate step, you establish a "real" brand that includes both names.

If you're renaming from "Foo" to "Bar", rather than jumping straight to "Bar (formerly Foo)", you establish a brand "FooBar", leave it that way a long time (years?), and really cement that in people's minds. Once everyone recognizes it as "FooBar", you can later drop half and people will still recognize "Bar".

Also, if don't include both old and new monikers as first-class parts of the brand, then in communication people will sometimes drop "formerly Foo". For example, if it's a mobile app, is your app icon label going to be "Bar (formerly Foo)"? No, it's going to be "Bar". (But "FooBar" could be an app icon label.) So there will be contexts where people choose not to mention the old name, weakening the reinforcement of the connection to the old name.

crucialfelix
I pronounced a certain webserver "en-jinx" for years until I finally realized it was "engine x". Which is a really daft name. Should be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QGQXRICAEAE

The Beatles is also a really bad name for a band but they managed it.

coldpie
I still mentally pronounce it "en-gee-eye-en-ecks".
tinus_hn
Not to mention Apple, their record label.
homonculus1
Wow... "engine x" makes a lot more sense than "en-ginks".
sundarurfriend
I used to stare at the name every time and try to pronounce it like a word in an African language (like Ngoba). Felt like such an idiot when I figured out what it's supposed to be.
crucialfelix
That's exactly how I still pronounce it. I still can't pronounce the Asian Ng
boca
I did the same until I read your comment! Thank you. Learning never stops.
maxxxxx
I am not a marketer but it seems to me that people are too concerned about things like naming, icons and others. There are successful products with bad names (it took years to find consensus on pronouncing “azure”). Craigslist is successful without constant redesigns. At a minimum make only name change and then keep it. I have seen products go through several changes and they pretty much always were in decline and it seemed renaming or redesigning was the only idea management had left.

In short I don’t think it’s that important.

cheschire
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. -Phil Karlton
maxxxxx
Developing an API and giving things names is definitely a very hard problem.
Scarblac
There's really only one hard problem in computer science: people.
throwaway190620
I can assure you that you are fundamentally wrong. First impression is exceptionally important and the name/icon is the first thing anyone sees.
maxxxxx
I don't know that particular name and the target market. Maybe it's really bad. But if you have a good product in my view the name doesn't matter that much. A lot of people struggle with "sqlite" for example or "Azure" or "OSX".
marapuru
There is a gray area there. First impression is important AND the first impression is not just the name or icon. It is the combination of many things. The value the specific product gives you as the most important one.

I'm not dismissing the importance of a visual or aesthetic. Just realize that there is more than that.

lacampbell
it took years to find consensus on pronouncing “azure”

I don't think there's a consensus. I certainly don't call it "ah zherr" like microsoft do.

SAI_Peregrinus
I just pronounce it like the color azure. ˈæʒər. ˈeɪʒər would be ok too if that's how you pronounce the color.
lacampbell
In my variety of English it's something like æ-ʒu-ə, which is exactly how I pronounce the colour. I was a bit shocked when I heard the american pronounciation.
notacoward
I used to work for a company called Revivio. It was quite funny hearing sales/marketing folks try to spell it out over the phone without sounding like they were singing Old McDonald. Thanks, self-styled genius marketing VP!
SAI_Peregrinus
"Romeo Echo Victo India Victor India Oscar" (or similar) is probably the only way to not sing that spelling.
tomahunt
"Hacker school" rebranded to "The Recurse Center"

www.recurse.com

ergothus
I dont have a suggestion, but as a datapoints you could look at testacular => karma. It definitely took a while to complete, but was definitely done for similar-sounding reasons. You can use searches to see how long it took, if usage took a hit in the interim, even reach out to that team to see if they have any experiences to share.
endriju
'"Third option is to launch a clone of the product with a different name, use it for capturing the ad traffic and then direct it towards the original product. This seems workable, but also a bit too experimental for comfort."'

You might also have the option to twist the above - similar to what I did with my product http://exmerg.com. I created a copy of it at http://gridoc.com and directed the traffic from the old product to the new one. Users gradually started going directly to the new one (gridoc) and the original web is now almost forgotten.

aasasd
> > Other than the fact Linux has a cool name, could someone explain why I should use Linux over BSD?

> No. That's it. The cool name, that is. We worked very hard on creating a name that would appeal to the majority of people, and it certainly paid off: thousands of people are using linux just to be able to say "OS/2? Hah. I've got Linux. What a cool name". 386BSD made the mistake of putting a lot of numbers and weird abbreviations into the name, and is scaring away a lot of people just because it sounds too technical.

— https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.unix.pc-clone.32b...

yongjik
I'm pretty sure Linus was joking...
Aromasin
I'm also pretty sure he's right.
aasasd
On a related notion, I wonder how native English speakers were able to take ‘Windows’ seriously, back in the time when they didn't regularly encounter hundreds of apps with whatever names are left available. In the native language, the brain supposedly fires associations for you before you think consciously about what you hear. Like, do you browse window installation inventory in this program or what?
rmetzler
If your company and the product share a name, rename one for a year and then transition fully to the new name.

You could also launch a second product with a different focus but complimentary to you first one. If this gets traction, rebrand your original product to a name based on your second product.

legitster
Marketing wankateer here. This is a really great question even for professionals.

It's super hard to make a judgement call without knowing the name - keep in mind one of the options here is that you are overreacting. Changing a name can be really, really bad if you don't do it right. But here's a couple of things you should do:

- Approach this as a UX problem. Is the name negatively affecting people's ability to approach or remember the brand? Do people actually need to know the exact spelling of your company name in order to discover your product?

- Check with existing customers to see how they pronounce the name. Or if they have trouble with it. You may find customers already have their own fun or cute ways to say it, and you can formalize these alternate pronunciations. It can be a great nod to the community.

- Can you simplify the name but keep most of it? Kind of like Dunking Donuts going to DNKN.

- Others have the excellent idea where you add to the name and slowly turn it into an acronym. Very few people care that UTM actually stands for Urchin Tracking Module. But it gave a nice shoulder period for forums and naming to not be too confusing.

If you do go the route of a complete rename - yeah, it's better to rip off the bandaid at once and be done with it. But you had better follow some best practices:

- Plan on a HUGE marketing spend afterwards to break in the new name.

- Don't just pick something random and trendy out of the grabbag of available domain names. "HxHxHx is now Grokly!"

- Spend good money on an SEO expert so you don't royally screw up your web presence.

mrpotato
> Approach this as a UX problem. Is the name negatively affecting people's ability to approach or remember the brand? Do people actually need to know the exact spelling of your company name in order to discover your product?

Reminds me of the STIHL commercial from a couple of years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWSynIB68rE

tl;dw people are interviewed and each person says the company name differently. The video starts the sales pitch with "No matter how you say STIHL..."

motohagiography
What you need is an umbrella concept for the product and its needs, named for the new business and marketing view, for which the codebase is a realization of it. Think of it as a set of new abstractions that wrap your product functionality.

This is an unexpected application for an ontology like Webprotege. (https://webprotege.stanford.edu/)

Essentially, you build an ontology of needs and features and these become the new abstractions, and then reference the code bases that realize them in its nodes and attributes.

SippinLean
I worked at Time Warner Cable when they got acquired by Charter, and rebranded to their "Spectrum" cable product.

We got a customer email that went:

"Great, you went from being The Worst Company to Speculum, you're literally f*cking us!"

Point is: rebranding is hard and expensive, but it will get more expensive the longer you wait.

If you doubt it's possible for a _mature_ product, remember Kinko's?

nlawalker
> If you doubt it's possible for a _mature_ product, remember Kinko's?

Yes: it's now called "the copier place" - still frequently shortened to "Kinko's" - because FedEx is where one goes to ship packages (or where one avoids going when they want to ship packages, if they've had any experience there).

orasis
Is it “zipper cooter”?