HN Explorer

13 comments

[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 34.9 ms ] thread
JacobAldridge
Seems like an interesting field - specialised, yet creative, and demanding core business skills as well.

Just one thing - surely he put Network Solutions in there as a red herring trap for young players? Why, oh why would you name check URL availability with a provider notorious for squatting?

rokhayakebe
I didn’t have to listen to people in market research groups ramble on and on about their ATM usage or what kind of features they wanted in a mobile phone.
gojomo
The bay area seems the nation's capital of naming consultants, too. Here's an old article from Salon about some of the agencies:

http://www.salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/11/30/naming/print....

JacobAldridge
Great article - thanks. Naming is all over the news down under at the moment because one of our most beloved brands - Vegemite - just released a new product and called it 'iSnack 2.0'

Truly a name chosen by a committee only because nobody hated it ... nobody except the consumer.

netsp
I still think it may have been all a joke made by someone who had never tried one before.
ramanujan
Seriously, if this is the kind of thing you're outsourcing, you have major creative problems.
slice
Coming up with the right name for a variable or a function can easily become the most difficult part of my day. I always wanted to open variable and function names consultancy.
elai
if you get stuck, just do the objective c thing: aInt, anArray, aXMLFile, etc. Still fairly generic, but still useful and easy to read (vs single letter variables or random things. Worse comes to worse, you can also just make a sentence out of it.
huhtenberg
I sometimes have a problem coming up with variable names of the same length so that they would align nicely in a struct declaration :)
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
holaamigos
After we raised our series A, the new investor insisted we change our name. The old name kind of sucked. We discussed it as a team for months - it was a pure time-sink, never getting to agreement, so looked into hiring a naming agent - I thought it would be like $1000, a full day workshop, beanbags, hit the bong...... I contacted a namer and it was like $45k....WTF....$45k for a fucking name. I tried haggling, and she brought her fee down to $15k, but this would be for a list of 10 names.

Fuck that! I pushed through my favorite name and moved on.

vaksel
these type of prices are common in the old world of business.

I know a non-profit, that paid $30,000 for a logo and a tagline, and thought they got an awesome deal, since the going rate is like $150,000.

huhtenberg
That's an OK number since it likely covers more than just a logo and a tagline, but rather a full brand, positioning and identity definition.

But $15K for a name alone is an overkill.