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Wakoopa, Frengo, Squidoo: Are Stupid Startup Names Hurting Silicon Valley? (blog.wired.com)

11 points by drm237 ↗ HN
The search for a unique corporate name and identity may be backfiring in the Silicon Valley, according to an amusing article in last week's Los Angeles Times. Wakoopa, Frengo, Squidoo or Meebo all might be acceptable on an individual basis. But when every startup in the Valley begins opting for whimsy (and a non-stop barrage of vowels) over, well, making sense, the results can be less than desirable.

15 comments

[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 48.5 ms ] thread
rokhayakebe
It is true that some names are completely ridiculous, but at the end i doubt that it really matters to users. What this blogger fail to realize is that some of the companies with the coolest names are completely worthless also.
indie01
"Stupid" is such a subjective opinion. Individual brand-carving matters much more. . . immediate association is more relevant. These abstract names (wakoopa, frengo, squidoo) aren't really built upon any particular app of substance . . . it's a kind of reverse-branding that hurts in the long-run. Selling names works, but only a bit. Sooner or later, you have to sell substance.
kingnothing
Stupid can have objective qualities as well.

For example, the three company names listed in the link title are stupid because you can't just say the name to someone without having to spell it out for them.

cstejerean
i've had this problem trying to recommend things to friends over a lunch conversation. I think part of the reason for the success of sites like facebook and myspace is that they had simple names that one could recommend to their friends.
brlewis
> three company names listed in the link title are stupid because you can't just say the name to someone without having to spell

Huh? Aside from noting "with a K" when giving the first name, I think all three of Wakoopa, Frengo and Squidoo are phonetically spelled. What would be a non-stupid name?

gscott
This reminds me from the Internet blowout a VC person investing in a company because of the name (I think it was liquidaudio). When it failed, all I could think about was that story and what possible qualifications that person had to be giving other people's money away.
gscott
And to find good 2.0 domains go here https://www.tdnam.com/trpHome.aspx?t=2

Click on advanced search, include only "Expired Domains" in your search

Here are some domains I found that are available now:

sharedlist.com $10, sharesix.com $10, mybangi.com $5 sharedbutler.com $5, retrobots.com $15, ixango.com $15 newsilicious.com $5, itsnotthenews.com $5, whynotlist.com $5, listandget.com $5, filterlist.com $5, tripslist.com $5, hotwomenlist.com $10, flicklist.com $10

Getting domains this way helps spark my imagination and more "idea rich" I feel in that if nothing else works out I have additional ideas I could work on.

dood
The problem is that the demand for desirable names is vastly higher than ever before, while the supply is limited [1]. Moreover, since there are now so many named things competing for attention, finding a name that stands out and is desirable is pretty hard.

1. Interestingly, the market adaptation has been a slow erosion of the constraints on desirable names - 'Yahoo' and 'Google' sounded silly once upon a time, as did 'Flickr'. As the number of web apps increases, chances are the wackyness of the names, and people's tolerance for them will continue to expand.

This probably bothers those in the biz far more than most people, since they see dozens of these things a day while normal users only see those few apps they use or stumble upon. Though a lot of the names of the also-rans and almost-rans are truely terrible.

rms
I am absolutely delighted with all of my domain names.
blored
I don't like to quote Bob Parsons, but his essay describing the problem is second to none http://www.bobparsons.com/DomainKiting.html

It's called domain kiting/parking/squatting, and could be easily stopped if the ICANN introduced a non refundable deposit on a domain name.

The key point from the article is this,

- As it stands, domain names are fully refundable within 4 days. This causes million dollar corporations to buy domains in bulk, renew them every four days, and eventually buy domains that they think are profitable. In the mean time the average web-preneur sees no domains available.

sgraham
This is exactly what I was thinking when I read the article about naming phones with cryptic numbers earlier. Random strings of vowels in non-words are just as memorable as KR344-a I'd say.

Hmm, maybe I should register kr344-a.com just to be safe though.

oditogre
And easier to spell, to boot. Many of these names would be hard to guess how it is spelled; I know if I heard of reddit by word of mouth and didn't have it spelled out for me, I'd be looking at readit.com or read-it.com wondering wtf was so cool about it. I have absolutely no trouble remembering xkcd.com, and it's just a random string of characters.
brezina
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/200...

The original LA Times and Seattle Times article mentioned Xobni and said, "Many names come with little context. Firms such as Xobni, Meebo and Squidoo give no hint of what they might do (e-mail management, instant messaging and online recommendations, respectively)."

What? No hint of what we do? They should have talked to us. It's inbox spelled backwards!

gms
re: inbox spelled backwards, I think to most people it's not exactly the most obvious thing in the world. But anyway, no matter. After all, do the words "Google" and "Yahoo" give any hint about what those guys do?
wouter
As one of the founders of Wakoopa, I know it's really hard to find a good name for your (internet) company AND be able to buy the corresponding domain name relatively cheap.

As people pointed out above, "Google" and "Yahoo" also didn't describe the service they are offering and also are not really pronounceable without spelling. In the end, it's all about the service the company is offering and we're pretty sure that we're doing okay in this department.

More here: http://blog.wakoopa.com/archives/whats-in-a-name