In the most polite way, I must ask: what are you hoping to accomplish with this poll? Of course a name "matters:" you can't call your flower company "moldy cheese flowers."
It is something I've thought a lot about and wondered. You consistently see "hip" short names come out of YC for example. Sometimes it's just a word with "ly" attached to it, sometimes it's the concatenation of two short words. Rarely do I see multiword names or traditional, older style names with "the" or "co"/"company".
So I think the answer is probably more nuanced than "as long as it's not a name that is blatantly awful" like the one you suggested.
Part of the reason I read HN now is to get a feel for whether any of these oh-so-hip start-ups is actually worth investing the time and money to integrate, or even the time to investigate in the first place.
My default position after watching this industry for a few years is that if you have a trendy name, I won't even bother visiting your home page. I'll change my mind given a good reason, but that would be something like a personal recommendation from a trusted source or seeing favourable comments from credible posters on sites like HN.
For example, right now, if you have a start-up and you have chosen a name consisting of some random, non-descriptive word followed by ".ly" or ".io", I am going to assume you would be a waste of my time without even looking. Sure, I might miss out on a good thing for a while, but I'm willing to accept that risk to avoid forming a foolish business partnership with a couple of youngsters who once read a book about MVPs, spent a weekend throwing up a sign-up page using Bootstrap, and hope to flip their company or at least secure an acqui-hire within a year. When you launch selfish.ly or blocking.io, that's what you look like in my head.
I believe that you could build a successful business like that, if you took on the name appropriately. Self-deprecating names do have some history. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-a-Wreck
I believe if you are developing something that the market is dying for the name and the marketing matters less; else make sure you don't screw that up.
The name, logo, and branding of your identity means a lot. Although the service you provide will likely matter more than these things, you need to be aware that a customers first impression of your company is huge.
I find it so odd that all of these companies have names that tell you nothing about the business. Welcome to swaply, we sell insurance. I always have thought that your business name should give some information relating to what your business does. 'Swaply Insurance', slogan here. You instantly know what they are about.
I assume the author of the poll isn't asking whether the difference between "Zap" and "Quacyxloctl" matters, but rather how important marginal differences between names are.
I think they're much less important than people think they are, and usually cite both Airbnb (a name that actually has negative connotations to the positioning Airbnb aspires to now) and Ebay (an utterly meaningless name) as examples.
And with Airbnb and EBay, the name just becomes a symbol at a certain point and any literal meaning recedes. The fact that "bnb" stands for bed-and-breakfast, for example, is something I completely forgot until you mentioned it. Similar to how a floppy disk means "save" even though an entire generation has now grown-up sans optical media. It's just a symbol.
The best metaphor for this might be aerodynamic drag. A bad name can slow you down. You'll prevail eventually if you're good enough, but slower than you would have done with a good name. Whereas a good name won't get you anywhere without a good product, just as a plane with a low drag coefficient won't go anywhere without powerful engines.
CUT TO: A glider, motionless on the ground, trying to go somewhere.
Stepping back to a less sarcastic point, your metaphor is useful. I don't really understand why Medium is called Medium, but it doesn't really matter, because I have a degree of trust in where it came from.
Freakonomics has an interesting series of articles about names. Maybe you should take a look.
I think it matters but in a very complex way, thus you can't be sure about your choice until in a very late stage.
But if you reach this stage, it means that you already have made many things correctly, so a rebranding is within your options.
Soylent is a great name. "Soylent is people" is perfectly on-brand, given that it's a product that aims to bring perfect nutrition in staple form to everyone, even to the very poorest people on the planet. It's the opposite of a luxury brand, in a way, a people product.
It would be naive to say the name doesn't matter at all; it's possible to imagine names that would be bad choices.
In the tech industry if you're planning to differentiate your product on its output: Come up with a few possible names, searched for them online, try them out on a few friends, check them with your team, and you've done about as much as Google did. You probably don't need to get million-dollar consultants to 'design your corporate identity', much though consultants would like you to believe you do.
On the other hand if you're entering a crowded market (energy drinks, for example) and your main product differentiator will be branding, getting the branding right is going to need a bigger investment. This may also be the case if your tech startup is entering a crowded market and differentiating with branding.
might be a bit irrelevant to HN but gives you an idea of people's mentality:
In the past i was in the music industry, organizing events and concerts. During one summer I remember a lot of large scale beach parties were being promoted, all relevant radio's were buzzing with things like: 'the largest beach party of this summer', 'the best beach party' etc. So we decided not to follow the herd and went out advertising our event with the name 'The Worst Beach Party of this summer'
As far as I know there is not very much solid evidence either way. There is one interesting study from the 1980s on how changing the name of already established large firms affected their stock performance. It seems to have had a moderately positive effect, especially for industrial firms, and especially for those that were doing poorly previously: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/183841 (paywalled, but you can read the summary of findings on the first page)
The authors tentatively conclude, however, that the actual name (old or new) doesn't seem to really matter, and instead what's happening is that a major rebranding effort is seen by stockholders as credible evidence that the company is serious about overhauling the business in other, non-name-related ways as well.
Yes, names matter a lot. Being that a name is a basis for a brand, and building the right brand is a core of building a successful business, you can not underestimate it.
Two of my favorite naming examples are Dropbox and GoPro, both manage to be memorable, succinct and convey a clear purpose without being cheap, literal or generic (e.g. "ShareAnywhere"). I'm sure these names helped the brands get to where they are.
Unless you adopt a definition of the term "brand" that is so general as to be useless, building the right brand is not the core of building a successful business; that is the kind of thing a PR firm would say.
Possibly the opposite. A successful business turns into being the right brand?
As one example, I can't think of a more generic name than Southwest Airlines, but somehow they've managed to brand themselves as the fun airline. With a little more effort, I'm sure even better examples could be identified. Coca-cola? McDonald's? Meaningless names.
Just playing devil's advocate here, but are you sure that the same sort of start-up culture pervaded the industry when these single-letter-NYSE companies formed (some over a century ago)? Don't you think that the presence of mass media (specifically internet presence) has greatly changed the importance of a name?
While we can debate on whether a strong brand precedes or is a product of the success of the business, there's no denying this is the main barrier blocking competition. Both GoPro and Dropbox have strong competitors that are fended off by the brand.
This is especially important in the consumer space (when you buy a GoPro you don't just buy a camera, but buy into the whole extreme filming experience). There are other comparable cameras, but consumers don't even bother researching them. They buy the brand. This is why GoPro is a $2.5bn company today; Panasonic or Sony could have made the same product with typically obscure naming (XVH-800 whatever) and it would have remained just a niche thing.
People are buying an experience no less than they buy utility, and branding is core to that. I do look at branding in a very wide sense; to me GoPro's branding starts with the name, continues with their sponsored videos and ends with the product packaging and store display.
I think where this might fork a little is consumer vs enterprise. Dropbox is meant to be understood by a much wider audience than Heroku. For a consumer facing company being easily understood makes you much more accessible to many more consumers. It also makes your service more memorable when your name is: simple, appropriate, and conversation-optimized.
"I'll put it in the Dropbox tonight."
If you treat this as an equation, you want to increase: % of people that 'Get' what you do (off the bat), and % of instances people can easily recall your name, the next time they have that problem you solve.
I'd be interested in any kind of study that demonstrated that rigorously, but I'm pretty skeptical by default. Most consumer brands I can think of are completely meaningless taken on their own, and to the extent they mean anything, it's not even the right thing. What does a "Wal" Mart sell? What do I buy at a "McDonald's"? IKEA?! Is "Siemens" a German condom company? Is a "Safeway" a shelter for victims of violence?
Consequently naming is not the end all be all of branding. But studies have shown that a name's: connotations, imagery, and ability to generate "top of mind awareness", has proven to generate equity and favorably move a company upwards in consumer preference ranking. This may be diluted at when a company reaches a certain critical mass.
But consider this: Why wouldn't you want a name that's expressive to: who you are, and what you do as a company? It makes you much easier to remember and talk about.
If you search brand name in google scholar there's many more interesting studies on this subject.
Yes, the name matters a great deal. Not just to your customers but to yourself. A great metaphor will act like a "concept crystallisation" in your mind. It's like a coathanger you can hang your ideas on when you discuss the business with investors, customers, recruits, etc.
The energy behind a great name will give your product momentum, it'll make it easier to evangelise, as the name will trigger off a narrative that pretty much tells itself.
There has been an increasing preoccupation with appearance that seems to be quite prevalent in the US. It seems to be quite pervasive through all aspects of the culture.
People mock Lady Gaga for her clothing, similarly Lorde gets criticism for dancing funny. The occupy protesters were dismissed with comments like "They might have a point but they're not going to convince anyone dressed like that". People have said that DuckDuckGo is awesome but they can't recommend it to people because of the name. In the last few days I have seen people say they wouldn't trust the cubieboard because http://cubieboard.org/ isn't a very good website.
So appearance matters. Your name is part of your appearance. This means from a pragmatic perspective I agree with pg's comment comparing it to aerodynamic drag. On the other hand I don't thing this is a healthy state for the world. In all of the examples above the substance is far more important than the presentation. In many cases accepting the presentation in it's own right would be even better. Looking different should not be a sin, and often it should be embraced as adding flavour to the world.
A final note, It is interesting to note that in the dotcom bubble, Many of the big survivers were businesses where their name did not reflect their function. Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Ebay. I think a big part of this is that while they built on a core product, their name didn't present the notion that they were restricted to their core product or even that their core product could change entirely.
It matters as people you'll meet should easy understand and remember it. Our is pretty simple to remember (theneeds).
Depending on your market, you want to find something that 1. you can pronounce well [1], and 2. whose pronunciation and meaning are clear across countries.
[1] I'm an Italian living in US, especially in the beginning I had this problem
Having a bad name is seriously hard to overcome in an early stage startup. Instead of discussing your product, idea or market, every conversation starts with justifying the name. It's hell to raise money in that sort of environment.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadSo I think the answer is probably more nuanced than "as long as it's not a name that is blatantly awful" like the one you suggested.
My default position after watching this industry for a few years is that if you have a trendy name, I won't even bother visiting your home page. I'll change my mind given a good reason, but that would be something like a personal recommendation from a trusted source or seeing favourable comments from credible posters on sites like HN.
For example, right now, if you have a start-up and you have chosen a name consisting of some random, non-descriptive word followed by ".ly" or ".io", I am going to assume you would be a waste of my time without even looking. Sure, I might miss out on a good thing for a while, but I'm willing to accept that risk to avoid forming a foolish business partnership with a couple of youngsters who once read a book about MVPs, spent a weekend throwing up a sign-up page using Bootstrap, and hope to flip their company or at least secure an acqui-hire within a year. When you launch selfish.ly or blocking.io, that's what you look like in my head.
I believe if you are developing something that the market is dying for the name and the marketing matters less; else make sure you don't screw that up.
I find it so odd that all of these companies have names that tell you nothing about the business. Welcome to swaply, we sell insurance. I always have thought that your business name should give some information relating to what your business does. 'Swaply Insurance', slogan here. You instantly know what they are about.
I think they're much less important than people think they are, and usually cite both Airbnb (a name that actually has negative connotations to the positioning Airbnb aspires to now) and Ebay (an utterly meaningless name) as examples.
Earlier comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4684845 --- shorter: equity goes into a name; it isn't extracted from it.
If your company makes several products (e.g. games), I think the names of your products matter far more than your company name does.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glider_%28aircraft%29
Stepping back to a less sarcastic point, your metaphor is useful. I don't really understand why Medium is called Medium, but it doesn't really matter, because I have a degree of trust in where it came from.
I think it matters but in a very complex way, thus you can't be sure about your choice until in a very late stage. But if you reach this stage, it means that you already have made many things correctly, so a rebranding is within your options.
In the tech industry if you're planning to differentiate your product on its output: Come up with a few possible names, searched for them online, try them out on a few friends, check them with your team, and you've done about as much as Google did. You probably don't need to get million-dollar consultants to 'design your corporate identity', much though consultants would like you to believe you do.
On the other hand if you're entering a crowded market (energy drinks, for example) and your main product differentiator will be branding, getting the branding right is going to need a bigger investment. This may also be the case if your tech startup is entering a crowded market and differentiating with branding.
If an app has an ugly icon, I think two things:
* If they skimped on the icon -- the gateway to the app -- what else did they skimp on? Security? Privacy?
* Do I really want the homescreen of my $X00 smartphone marred with bad design?
In the past i was in the music industry, organizing events and concerts. During one summer I remember a lot of large scale beach parties were being promoted, all relevant radio's were buzzing with things like: 'the largest beach party of this summer', 'the best beach party' etc. So we decided not to follow the herd and went out advertising our event with the name 'The Worst Beach Party of this summer'
it turns out .. people loved it and it was hit!
The authors tentatively conclude, however, that the actual name (old or new) doesn't seem to really matter, and instead what's happening is that a major rebranding effort is seen by stockholders as credible evidence that the company is serious about overhauling the business in other, non-name-related ways as well.
Please stop using the lybian country code TLD. It sounds stupid.
Two of my favorite naming examples are Dropbox and GoPro, both manage to be memorable, succinct and convey a clear purpose without being cheap, literal or generic (e.g. "ShareAnywhere"). I'm sure these names helped the brands get to where they are.
For every Dropbox, there's a Heroku.
As one example, I can't think of a more generic name than Southwest Airlines, but somehow they've managed to brand themselves as the fun airline. With a little more effort, I'm sure even better examples could be identified. Coca-cola? McDonald's? Meaningless names.
same sort of start-up culture pervaded the industry
I'd say that's the problem right there. Shouldn't the importance of a name be relevant to the customers and not the founders? :)
This is especially important in the consumer space (when you buy a GoPro you don't just buy a camera, but buy into the whole extreme filming experience). There are other comparable cameras, but consumers don't even bother researching them. They buy the brand. This is why GoPro is a $2.5bn company today; Panasonic or Sony could have made the same product with typically obscure naming (XVH-800 whatever) and it would have remained just a niche thing.
People are buying an experience no less than they buy utility, and branding is core to that. I do look at branding in a very wide sense; to me GoPro's branding starts with the name, continues with their sponsored videos and ends with the product packaging and store display.
"I'll put it in the Dropbox tonight."
If you treat this as an equation, you want to increase: % of people that 'Get' what you do (off the bat), and % of instances people can easily recall your name, the next time they have that problem you solve.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296304...
Consequently naming is not the end all be all of branding. But studies have shown that a name's: connotations, imagery, and ability to generate "top of mind awareness", has proven to generate equity and favorably move a company upwards in consumer preference ranking. This may be diluted at when a company reaches a certain critical mass.
But consider this: Why wouldn't you want a name that's expressive to: who you are, and what you do as a company? It makes you much easier to remember and talk about.
If you search brand name in google scholar there's many more interesting studies on this subject.
tldr: It's not everything but it certainly helps.
The energy behind a great name will give your product momentum, it'll make it easier to evangelise, as the name will trigger off a narrative that pretty much tells itself.
People mock Lady Gaga for her clothing, similarly Lorde gets criticism for dancing funny. The occupy protesters were dismissed with comments like "They might have a point but they're not going to convince anyone dressed like that". People have said that DuckDuckGo is awesome but they can't recommend it to people because of the name. In the last few days I have seen people say they wouldn't trust the cubieboard because http://cubieboard.org/ isn't a very good website.
So appearance matters. Your name is part of your appearance. This means from a pragmatic perspective I agree with pg's comment comparing it to aerodynamic drag. On the other hand I don't thing this is a healthy state for the world. In all of the examples above the substance is far more important than the presentation. In many cases accepting the presentation in it's own right would be even better. Looking different should not be a sin, and often it should be embraced as adding flavour to the world.
A final note, It is interesting to note that in the dotcom bubble, Many of the big survivers were businesses where their name did not reflect their function. Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Ebay. I think a big part of this is that while they built on a core product, their name didn't present the notion that they were restricted to their core product or even that their core product could change entirely.
Depending on your market, you want to find something that 1. you can pronounce well [1], and 2. whose pronunciation and meaning are clear across countries.
[1] I'm an Italian living in US, especially in the beginning I had this problem