6 ms·

Before naming your startup, read this.

127 points by jsomethings 14y ago

bizodo 14y ago
Forgot www.domaintyper.com. The best way to look up a domain and also gives suggestions for shorter versions as well as random domain generator.
tzaman 14y ago
Interesting article, although I don't fully agree - naming a startup is like naming a baby - it has to "feel" right. Which is usually not the case with various generators out there. Whenever I was involved in naming libraries/websites/products it was usually the "A-HA!" moment one of the involved people had at any random point in process of coming up with a name.
- pabloIMO 14y ago
  I totally agree. I've named quite a few small projects over the last couple of years and every name I've been happy with has come to my in an "A-HA" moment. Everything just clicked about the name, and it was available. Any time I've settled for a name that I didn't really like (usually out of lazyness), I end up feeling like something is missing from the project. A little bit of the love I had for it is lost. That's why I'm building http://domiy.com http://domiy.com , a tool which helps teams of people brainstorm name ideas. I believe that the best names arise when a number of people are trying to come up with a name over an extended period of time. You have to give the "A-HA" moments time to occur.
rollypolly 14y ago
I've come across "wysija.com" while looking at wordpress plugins recently. I immediately thought that was the worse name anyone could pick. It literally looks like random letters. It's unpronounceable and hard to memorize. They have a pseudo-explanation of the name at the bottom of their landing page. But I don't buy it. It reads more like an excuse. But I ended up trying their product because I liked their video. So I think the lesson is: If you put enough work into your product, you can overcome a poor name.
- pkamb 14y ago
  If you didn't know, "wiz-ee-wig" is a very well-known term to a particular subset of the population. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG
  - StavrosK 14y ago
    I sort of guessed that it meant "what you see is... ja?" when I saw the name, but yeah, it looks random even to me.
justincormack 14y ago
Names that exactly describe your product can be a problem if you pivot. If you pivot a bit, then International Business Machines is not too bad, but Wire and Plastic Products was less useful for a media empire. Polaroid was ok for a pivot as it is both specific about polarization, but also just a nice word.
- philwelch 14y ago
  International Business Machines was named out of spite. Watson was a former employee of National Cash Register.
neilk 14y ago
This is all stuff to consider, but without actual numbers, this amounts to his sincere advice that you should use his services. Does anyone have a story of a project or business that was greatly helped or greatly hurt by their name, in quantifiable terms? Let's exclude obviously terrible names like "wyslja.com", or businesses where the whole point is SEO, like "sex.com". I want to hear stories we can use as experimental data, like, "we used to be called GetHobbyHorse.com, and our sales went up by 30% once we bought HobbyHorse.com." Or, a name change that had zero effect, or even made things worse. EDIT: I made a Google Docs Poll: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGF2bkV6UlRpNm1fQlh4QVdHVldLR3c6MQ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGF2bkV...
- keiferski 14y ago
  (self-plug: I run a naming company) - Mint's name definitely helped them, and Wesabe's name definitely hurt them. In short, Mint's name is simple and straightforward, which helped users trust them with financial information. Wesabe's was neither. http://nomvilla.com/blog/how-mint-beat-wesabe/ http://nomvilla.com/blog/how-mint-beat-wesabe/ - Under Armour's founder thinks that the name helped win over athletes (getting big tough guys to wear leotard-lookalikes) http://nomvilla.com/blog/how-under-armours-name-won-over-early-adopters/ http://nomvilla.com/blog/how-under-armours-name-won-over-ear... - FeeFighters' business increased 25x after they changed their name from Transparent Financial Services http://nomvilla.com/blog/feefighters-new-name/ http://nomvilla.com/blog/feefighters-new-name/
  - neilk 14y ago
    The Mint case describes ease-of-use, and you simply imagine that wesabe was very hard to communicate. You also make up this new criterion that Mint.com is better because it strongly implies a color, and wesabe.com lacks this. UnderArmour is product naming, not domain naming. I will grant you that this FeeFighters thing seems like a clear case of a domain name helping the product, although you are committing the post-hoc fallacy. The quote is saying "during this calendar year, we changed our name, and we grew our business 25x" not "we changed our name and as a direct result our business grew 25x". EDIT: I know that effects are hard to disentangle, but that doesn't mean you are allowed to make anything up about causation.
minimaxir 14y ago
A great example is Nyoombl. Guess how to pronounce it. Go on, guess. Read the comments of this TC article to gather how impactful the name is: http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/11/nyoombl-debuts-social-video-broadcasting-platform-for-conversations/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/11/nyoombl-debuts-social-video...
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
  ..."nimble"? That's pronounced... nimble? What?
kstenerud 14y ago
Some contradictions: MarketHear.com: bad because it fails the "bar exam" CardPool.com: how does this pass the "bar exam" again? Xort.com: bad - you settled on some domain because it's short and easy to pronounce Etsy.com: good because it's short
- jsomethings 14y ago
  Every startup name will have pros and cons to varying degrees. None will individually be perfect. The Strong & Weak examples are to spell out the extremes of many positive and negative criteria so that you have a base level to compare against.
- tomp 14y ago
  How do you pronounce "xort"? This is a serious question, I'm not an native English speaker and there are many pronunciations of X in English (Like "h" as in "LaTeX", like "ks" as in "extreme", like "z" as in "Xavier", maybe there are more...)
  - keiferski 14y ago
    I think it's either "Zort" like Xavier, or "Exort", where you pronounce the X as a letter.
    - ams6110 14y ago
      I've heard Xavier pronounced like Zavier and X-avier with about equal frequency. Also Havier somewhat less often.
  - mooism2 14y ago
    The X in "LaTeX" is not an English X but a Greek X (chi). I can't think of any actual English word where the X is pronounced like that. (But yeah, it's not obvious to me whether "xort" should be pronounced "zort" or "ksort".)
    - VigUi7vv8G2 14y ago
rglover 14y ago
This reminded me of an anecdote from Bill Cosby during an interview he did on my college radio station. I'm not entirely sure if he was just patronizing the educators, but he said that he attributed a lot of his success in comedy to education and his thirst for knowledge. Something along the lines of "the more I read and learned, the funnier I could be." Perhaps this applies in some form to naming companies and products. It seems like a lot of people limit their resources for discovering good names (e.g. Thesaurus, dictionary, domain randomizer, etc." It should come from your surroundings and what you learn. In fact, I believe Zynga is named after one of Pincus' pets.
Pheter 14y ago
I read an article[1] that, I think, was on HN a little while ago about naming apps. I find it a really good way to come up with good names. [1] http://blog.zachwaugh.com/post/9666969587/how-i-name-my-apps http://blog.zachwaugh.com/post/9666969587/how-i-name-my-apps
rdl 14y ago
I didn't find several of the "strong examples" to be much stronger than the bad examples. I absolutely believe in passing the telephone test: a receptionist (not expert in your field) should be able to transcribe your name accurately over a low quality cellphone call. Using technical terms (e.g. git) complicates this, especially if they're longer, and rules out homonyms, frequently confused sounds, etc. I'd rather have a mid-length two word name, or a long single word, than an ambiguous short single word. And, obviously, the .com/.net/.org for that domain, and ideally for all related spellings, hyphenations (between words), etc. I hate the abuse of country code ccTLDs for company names. "getXXXXX.com" is acceptable for a mobile-only app's domain.
- Silhouette 14y ago
  I didn't find several of the "strong examples" to be much stronger than the bad examples. I concur. For example, if I see a site named "somethingly.com", I immediately associate it with a whole bunch of negative connotations, including unoriginality, lack of substance in the product/service that would lead to a more meaningful name, and a high probability of being run by 21-year-olds who are more interested in landing a good funding round or two and then getting bought out by Google before anyone notices their service isn't very good than they are in providing any real value to their customers. Needless to say, such a name is not going to win me over as a customer...
  - rdl 14y ago
    I think 18-22yo who do startups are more likely to have something they're passionate about and build something awesome for the long haul. The 22+ yo who have graduated college and need to find something to do, or those who have worked for one startup and now want to do something (but don't now what), seem a lot more likely to do a "fund me!" perfunctory startup. I don't think it's really that related to age, though.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
LiquidSummer 14y ago
And this is coming from "_the_nextweb", why not just "nextweb".
ivankirigin 14y ago
Just to state the obvious: the author runs a site to buy good names. It comes down to money. If you can afford $10K right at th start, awesome. If you have $10, there are only better options among bad. Tipjoy.com was less than $10 :)
ohashi 14y ago
Seems more self promotional than anything. After visiting the author's site I was quite depressed. Claiming to be selling names for 25% of their market price. Stupid claims such as that one is just insulting. If there were a market price it would be selling for that. The names really weren't that good either.
joejohnson 14y ago
Chart.io, Like.fm (Extreme obviousness meets extreme brandability): I know exactly what these companies do before I even visit their sites. Really? Cause I have no idea what Like.fm does. Chart.io? It's a place to input/output charts or something? This post is pure pseudoscience.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
  I can't be the only one that was confused by the name Last.fm when I discovered it. I thought it was about FM radio.
  - batiudrami 14y ago
    It used to be separate from audioscrobbler.com (the charting and recommendations service) and only did streaming 'radio' based on your AudioScrobbler account. I'm guessing that, they realised that while AudioScrobbler is an okay name, Last.fm is a better one (it's short, easy to remember and implies something to do with music/radio) and merged the websites.
blahedo 14y ago
When I tried to tell my browser to scroll slightly to the right by pressing my right arrow key, the site hijacked the keypress and took me to an unrelated page. Wtf? FAIL. Edit: AND it keeps reloading itself every couple minutes. Who designs this?
- oftenwrong 14y ago
  This is why I use NoScript.
  - huhtenberg 14y ago
    There's a meta refresh= for that.
- minimaxir 14y ago
  TNW, and a few other blogs, support navigation by keypress. (left/right = new article)
micheljansen 14y ago
I felt a little conned when, a few thousand words on how I should not settle on a name and pay up for a good domain, I discovered that the author runs a domain portfolio website. If that would have been mentioned up front, I would have taken the above-mentioned advice with more of a grain of salt.
- jsomethings 14y ago
  First line of the article: "I’ve learned a lot from the development of NameLayer, and I’m ready to divulge every trick in my arsenal." Pretty upfront.
  - micheljansen 14y ago
    Ah, I am just stupid for not recognising that as a full disclosure (I did not know NameLayer before).
    - gammarator 14y ago
      And ironically, the name "NameLayer" doesn't give much insight into what kind of business it is...
      - skeletonjelly 14y ago
        That's some pretty sweet irony right there. The author should have dipped into some humility.
heyitsnick 14y ago
The writer's company resells domain names (I think, the site is down at the moment. It's that or a domain portfolio listing site). This taints everything he says. Of course he will say get[productname].com is bad because he is in the business of selling you [productname].com. I didn't see anything here backed up with any hard data.
nextstep 14y ago
I strongly believe that the rules or maxims presented here have too many exceptions. There's a lot of weak arguments to support a weak thesis. I remember Amazon.com being condemned for having a weird and confusing name. Ultimately, those detractors were wrong or the name didn't matter that much. The truth is that a company's name, like nearly every factor, demonstrates a weak correlation with success. But tech bloggers love to draw lines between the dots and claim they've painted a pretty picture.
- jaredmck 14y ago
  And yet amazon.com has, at least now, an awesome logo. It's got an arrow from a to z which makes a smile. Three elements related to what it does, or at least aims to do.
axiom 14y ago
My startup is called Top Hat Monocle. We do education software (mainly for universities, for now.) I can tell you that our weird name has had exactly zero impact on our success to date. If anything the weirdness has had the side benefit of making our name more memorable than the myriad of startups with generic but more literal names.
jen_h 14y ago
One thing I didn't see mentioned was searchability - it's so much easier to gauge sentiment and help folks out if you can pick your name out of the crowd. Useful for Twitter/Facebook/G+ searches, Web searches, and not getting overwhelmed with irrelevant Google News Alerts.
jorgenhorstink 14y ago
Talking about negative connotation: one can buy TrueHorror.com on NameLayer for a mind blowing bargain of $5000,- ;)
aneth 14y ago
"We price our domains at 25% of their market value." Don't we all sell liquid commodities at 25% of market value? You know, because we like our customers and we don't like money? Can you feel the credibility chasm expand with that statement? Much of this article is a reasonable point of view, but statements like this are a sure way to put my purchase clicker on the defensive.
- jsomethings 14y ago
  I actually fully agree. I originally chose that copy to reflect how good our prices are relative to the "old guard" domain markets, but it's too unsubstantiated of a claim. I've replaced this copy with something better. Thanks for the constructive criticism.
lubujackson 14y ago
Love how he contradicts himself all over the place. Such as IOBits sucks because no one knows what "IO" means, but Chart.io is great because IO tells you what it does, or something.
kmontrose 14y ago
A compelling product will make a mediocre name memorable, but not vice versa. My go to example for this is Google, the largest site in the world. It's a) a joke name b) that almost no-one knows c) and if you know it, it's misspelled! But because it's was head and shoulders above its competitors that garbage name is now part of the vernacular ( http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/google http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/google ). Other pretty bad names (that we all accept as "good" now): Wikipedia (the hell's a wiki in 2001?), Twitter (what part of that conveys online SMS, or micro-blogging?), Flickr (no e, at least it's not .ly). I think it's worth looking around for good names, but it's cut-throat out there in .com land, and if you're ever spending more time thinking up names than improving your product you're doing it wrong. This is all completely ignoring the "search to find" user behavior that is (by my measurements anyway) really really common, even in pretty technical audiences.
- bobsil1 14y ago
  Twitter evokes short bursts of speech, Flickr evokes light and movies, Google evokes size.
- lobster_johnson 14y ago
  Exactly. The notion that a name should be transparent -- that its linguistic meaning should make the product obvious -- is a myth. Google, Apple, Nike, Lexus and McDonald's are all brands where the name bears no resemblance to the product or even industry they represent. The product gives meaning to the name, not the other way around.
16s 14y ago
There's a difference between an excuse and a reason. The author does not seem to understand that.
thaumaturgy 14y ago
The article author of course has an interest in convincing startups that naming is important. That doesn't make him wrong, but I think it's easy to see that a name does not a successful business make, and that naming is one of the tarpits that any business owner can get stuck in. Pop quiz: rate the expected success of each of the following businesses based only on their name: Ford Reebok Nike Apple Chevy Applebee's Jack In The Box Google MicroSoft WalMart Lowe's (which, by the way, competes successfully with The Home Depot...) and finally, my personal favorite: Pets.com A "good" name only does one thing: it gives you a very brief head start. It might make it easier for people who aren't really interested in your business to talk about you. How far do you think that will carry you? How far can you get if you avoid the name tarpit entirely, and just concentrate on your brand, your product, or your service?
- Jach 14y ago
  For another pop quiz, figure out by using only the name and the logo (extra information!) whether these companies are in the hair care business or the digital audio business: http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/logos.html http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/logos.html (Submitted it http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3876253 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3876253 ) It really isn't that important.
  - halefx 14y ago
    That was really easy. "Computer scientist Alan Kay also plays Stan's father on South Park."
moonlighter 14y ago
I can't help it but... 'namelayer' doesn't sound like a 'great' domain name to me either. Hmm.

127 points by jsomethings 14y ago

Forgot www.domaintyper.com. The best way to look up a domain and also gives suggestions for shorter versions as well as random domain generator.

tzaman 14y ago

Interesting article, although I don't fully agree - naming a startup is like naming a baby - it has to "feel" right. Which is usually not the case with various generators out there. Whenever I was involved in naming libraries/websites/products it was usually the "A-HA!" moment one of the involved people had at any random point in process of coming up with a name.

pabloIMO 14y ago
I totally agree. I've named quite a few small projects over the last couple of years and every name I've been happy with has come to my in an "A-HA" moment. Everything just clicked about the name, and it was available. Any time I've settled for a name that I didn't really like (usually out of lazyness), I end up feeling like something is missing from the project. A little bit of the love I had for it is lost. That's why I'm building http://domiy.com http://domiy.com , a tool which helps teams of people brainstorm name ideas. I believe that the best names arise when a number of people are trying to come up with a name over an extended period of time. You have to give the "A-HA" moments time to occur.

rollypolly 14y ago

I've come across "wysija.com" while looking at wordpress plugins recently. I immediately thought that was the worse name anyone could pick. It literally looks like random letters. It's unpronounceable and hard to memorize. They have a pseudo-explanation of the name at the bottom of their landing page. But I don't buy it. It reads more like an excuse. But I ended up trying their product because I liked their video. So I think the lesson is: If you put enough work into your product, you can overcome a poor name.

pkamb 14y ago
If you didn't know, "wiz-ee-wig" is a very well-known term to a particular subset of the population. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG
- StavrosK 14y ago
  I sort of guessed that it meant "what you see is... ja?" when I saw the name, but yeah, it looks random even to me.

justincormack 14y ago

Names that exactly describe your product can be a problem if you pivot. If you pivot a bit, then International Business Machines is not too bad, but Wire and Plastic Products was less useful for a media empire. Polaroid was ok for a pivot as it is both specific about polarization, but also just a nice word.

philwelch 14y ago
International Business Machines was named out of spite. Watson was a former employee of National Cash Register.

neilk 14y ago

This is all stuff to consider, but without actual numbers, this amounts to his sincere advice that you should use his services. Does anyone have a story of a project or business that was greatly helped or greatly hurt by their name, in quantifiable terms? Let's exclude obviously terrible names like "wyslja.com", or businesses where the whole point is SEO, like "sex.com". I want to hear stories we can use as experimental data, like, "we used to be called GetHobbyHorse.com, and our sales went up by 30% once we bought HobbyHorse.com." Or, a name change that had zero effect, or even made things worse. EDIT: I made a Google Docs Poll: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGF2bkV6UlRpNm1fQlh4QVdHVldLR3c6MQ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dGF2bkV...

keiferski 14y ago
(self-plug: I run a naming company) - Mint's name definitely helped them, and Wesabe's name definitely hurt them. In short, Mint's name is simple and straightforward, which helped users trust them with financial information. Wesabe's was neither. http://nomvilla.com/blog/how-mint-beat-wesabe/ http://nomvilla.com/blog/how-mint-beat-wesabe/ - Under Armour's founder thinks that the name helped win over athletes (getting big tough guys to wear leotard-lookalikes) http://nomvilla.com/blog/how-under-armours-name-won-over-early-adopters/ http://nomvilla.com/blog/how-under-armours-name-won-over-ear... - FeeFighters' business increased 25x after they changed their name from Transparent Financial Services http://nomvilla.com/blog/feefighters-new-name/ http://nomvilla.com/blog/feefighters-new-name/
- neilk 14y ago
  The Mint case describes ease-of-use, and you simply imagine that wesabe was very hard to communicate. You also make up this new criterion that Mint.com is better because it strongly implies a color, and wesabe.com lacks this. UnderArmour is product naming, not domain naming. I will grant you that this FeeFighters thing seems like a clear case of a domain name helping the product, although you are committing the post-hoc fallacy. The quote is saying "during this calendar year, we changed our name, and we grew our business 25x" not "we changed our name and as a direct result our business grew 25x". EDIT: I know that effects are hard to disentangle, but that doesn't mean you are allowed to make anything up about causation.

minimaxir 14y ago

A great example is Nyoombl. Guess how to pronounce it. Go on, guess. Read the comments of this TC article to gather how impactful the name is: http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/11/nyoombl-debuts-social-video-broadcasting-platform-for-conversations/ http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/11/nyoombl-debuts-social-video...

TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
..."nimble"? That's pronounced... nimble? What?

kstenerud 14y ago

Some contradictions: MarketHear.com: bad because it fails the "bar exam" CardPool.com: how does this pass the "bar exam" again? Xort.com: bad - you settled on some domain because it's short and easy to pronounce Etsy.com: good because it's short

jsomethings 14y ago
Every startup name will have pros and cons to varying degrees. None will individually be perfect. The Strong & Weak examples are to spell out the extremes of many positive and negative criteria so that you have a base level to compare against.
tomp 14y ago
How do you pronounce "xort"? This is a serious question, I'm not an native English speaker and there are many pronunciations of X in English (Like "h" as in "LaTeX", like "ks" as in "extreme", like "z" as in "Xavier", maybe there are more...)
- keiferski 14y ago
  I think it's either "Zort" like Xavier, or "Exort", where you pronounce the X as a letter.
  - ams6110 14y ago
    I've heard Xavier pronounced like Zavier and X-avier with about equal frequency. Also Havier somewhat less often.
- mooism2 14y ago
  The X in "LaTeX" is not an English X but a Greek X (chi). I can't think of any actual English word where the X is pronounced like that. (But yeah, it's not obvious to me whether "xort" should be pronounced "zort" or "ksort".)
  - VigUi7vv8G2 14y ago

rglover 14y ago

This reminded me of an anecdote from Bill Cosby during an interview he did on my college radio station. I'm not entirely sure if he was just patronizing the educators, but he said that he attributed a lot of his success in comedy to education and his thirst for knowledge. Something along the lines of "the more I read and learned, the funnier I could be." Perhaps this applies in some form to naming companies and products. It seems like a lot of people limit their resources for discovering good names (e.g. Thesaurus, dictionary, domain randomizer, etc." It should come from your surroundings and what you learn. In fact, I believe Zynga is named after one of Pincus' pets.

Pheter 14y ago

I read an article[1] that, I think, was on HN a little while ago about naming apps. I find it a really good way to come up with good names. [1] http://blog.zachwaugh.com/post/9666969587/how-i-name-my-apps http://blog.zachwaugh.com/post/9666969587/how-i-name-my-apps

rdl 14y ago

I didn't find several of the "strong examples" to be much stronger than the bad examples. I absolutely believe in passing the telephone test: a receptionist (not expert in your field) should be able to transcribe your name accurately over a low quality cellphone call. Using technical terms (e.g. git) complicates this, especially if they're longer, and rules out homonyms, frequently confused sounds, etc. I'd rather have a mid-length two word name, or a long single word, than an ambiguous short single word. And, obviously, the .com/.net/.org for that domain, and ideally for all related spellings, hyphenations (between words), etc. I hate the abuse of country code ccTLDs for company names. "getXXXXX.com" is acceptable for a mobile-only app's domain.

Silhouette 14y ago
I didn't find several of the "strong examples" to be much stronger than the bad examples. I concur. For example, if I see a site named "somethingly.com", I immediately associate it with a whole bunch of negative connotations, including unoriginality, lack of substance in the product/service that would lead to a more meaningful name, and a high probability of being run by 21-year-olds who are more interested in landing a good funding round or two and then getting bought out by Google before anyone notices their service isn't very good than they are in providing any real value to their customers. Needless to say, such a name is not going to win me over as a customer...
- rdl 14y ago
  I think 18-22yo who do startups are more likely to have something they're passionate about and build something awesome for the long haul. The 22+ yo who have graduated college and need to find something to do, or those who have worked for one startup and now want to do something (but don't now what), seem a lot more likely to do a "fund me!" perfunctory startup. I don't think it's really that related to age, though.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

LiquidSummer 14y ago

And this is coming from "_the_nextweb", why not just "nextweb".

ivankirigin 14y ago

Just to state the obvious: the author runs a site to buy good names. It comes down to money. If you can afford $10K right at th start, awesome. If you have $10, there are only better options among bad. Tipjoy.com was less than $10 :)

ohashi 14y ago

Seems more self promotional than anything. After visiting the author's site I was quite depressed. Claiming to be selling names for 25% of their market price. Stupid claims such as that one is just insulting. If there were a market price it would be selling for that. The names really weren't that good either.

joejohnson 14y ago

Chart.io, Like.fm (Extreme obviousness meets extreme brandability): I know exactly what these companies do before I even visit their sites. Really? Cause I have no idea what Like.fm does. Chart.io? It's a place to input/output charts or something? This post is pure pseudoscience.

TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
I can't be the only one that was confused by the name Last.fm when I discovered it. I thought it was about FM radio.
- batiudrami 14y ago
  It used to be separate from audioscrobbler.com (the charting and recommendations service) and only did streaming 'radio' based on your AudioScrobbler account. I'm guessing that, they realised that while AudioScrobbler is an okay name, Last.fm is a better one (it's short, easy to remember and implies something to do with music/radio) and merged the websites.

blahedo 14y ago

When I tried to tell my browser to scroll slightly to the right by pressing my right arrow key, the site hijacked the keypress and took me to an unrelated page. Wtf? FAIL. Edit: AND it keeps reloading itself every couple minutes. Who designs this?

oftenwrong 14y ago
This is why I use NoScript.
- huhtenberg 14y ago
  There's a meta refresh= for that.
minimaxir 14y ago
TNW, and a few other blogs, support navigation by keypress. (left/right = new article)

micheljansen 14y ago

I felt a little conned when, a few thousand words on how I should not settle on a name and pay up for a good domain, I discovered that the author runs a domain portfolio website. If that would have been mentioned up front, I would have taken the above-mentioned advice with more of a grain of salt.

jsomethings 14y ago
First line of the article: "I’ve learned a lot from the development of NameLayer, and I’m ready to divulge every trick in my arsenal." Pretty upfront.
- micheljansen 14y ago
  Ah, I am just stupid for not recognising that as a full disclosure (I did not know NameLayer before).
  - gammarator 14y ago
    And ironically, the name "NameLayer" doesn't give much insight into what kind of business it is...
    - skeletonjelly 14y ago
      That's some pretty sweet irony right there. The author should have dipped into some humility.

heyitsnick 14y ago

The writer's company resells domain names (I think, the site is down at the moment. It's that or a domain portfolio listing site). This taints everything he says. Of course he will say get[productname].com is bad because he is in the business of selling you [productname].com. I didn't see anything here backed up with any hard data.

nextstep 14y ago

I strongly believe that the rules or maxims presented here have too many exceptions. There's a lot of weak arguments to support a weak thesis. I remember Amazon.com being condemned for having a weird and confusing name. Ultimately, those detractors were wrong or the name didn't matter that much. The truth is that a company's name, like nearly every factor, demonstrates a weak correlation with success. But tech bloggers love to draw lines between the dots and claim they've painted a pretty picture.

jaredmck 14y ago
And yet amazon.com has, at least now, an awesome logo. It's got an arrow from a to z which makes a smile. Three elements related to what it does, or at least aims to do.

axiom 14y ago

My startup is called Top Hat Monocle. We do education software (mainly for universities, for now.) I can tell you that our weird name has had exactly zero impact on our success to date. If anything the weirdness has had the side benefit of making our name more memorable than the myriad of startups with generic but more literal names.

jen_h 14y ago

One thing I didn't see mentioned was searchability - it's so much easier to gauge sentiment and help folks out if you can pick your name out of the crowd. Useful for Twitter/Facebook/G+ searches, Web searches, and not getting overwhelmed with irrelevant Google News Alerts.

jorgenhorstink 14y ago

Talking about negative connotation: one can buy TrueHorror.com on NameLayer for a mind blowing bargain of $5000,- ;)

aneth 14y ago

"We price our domains at 25% of their market value." Don't we all sell liquid commodities at 25% of market value? You know, because we like our customers and we don't like money? Can you feel the credibility chasm expand with that statement? Much of this article is a reasonable point of view, but statements like this are a sure way to put my purchase clicker on the defensive.

jsomethings 14y ago
I actually fully agree. I originally chose that copy to reflect how good our prices are relative to the "old guard" domain markets, but it's too unsubstantiated of a claim. I've replaced this copy with something better. Thanks for the constructive criticism.

lubujackson 14y ago

Love how he contradicts himself all over the place. Such as IOBits sucks because no one knows what "IO" means, but Chart.io is great because IO tells you what it does, or something.

kmontrose 14y ago

A compelling product will make a mediocre name memorable, but not vice versa. My go to example for this is Google, the largest site in the world. It's a) a joke name b) that almost no-one knows c) and if you know it, it's misspelled! But because it's was head and shoulders above its competitors that garbage name is now part of the vernacular ( http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/google http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/google ). Other pretty bad names (that we all accept as "good" now): Wikipedia (the hell's a wiki in 2001?), Twitter (what part of that conveys online SMS, or micro-blogging?), Flickr (no e, at least it's not .ly). I think it's worth looking around for good names, but it's cut-throat out there in .com land, and if you're ever spending more time thinking up names than improving your product you're doing it wrong. This is all completely ignoring the "search to find" user behavior that is (by my measurements anyway) really really common, even in pretty technical audiences.

bobsil1 14y ago
Twitter evokes short bursts of speech, Flickr evokes light and movies, Google evokes size.
lobster_johnson 14y ago
Exactly. The notion that a name should be transparent -- that its linguistic meaning should make the product obvious -- is a myth. Google, Apple, Nike, Lexus and McDonald's are all brands where the name bears no resemblance to the product or even industry they represent. The product gives meaning to the name, not the other way around.

16s 14y ago

There's a difference between an excuse and a reason. The author does not seem to understand that.

thaumaturgy 14y ago

The article author of course has an interest in convincing startups that naming is important. That doesn't make him wrong, but I think it's easy to see that a name does not a successful business make, and that naming is one of the tarpits that any business owner can get stuck in. Pop quiz: rate the expected success of each of the following businesses based only on their name: Ford Reebok Nike Apple Chevy Applebee's Jack In The Box Google MicroSoft WalMart Lowe's (which, by the way, competes successfully with The Home Depot...) and finally, my personal favorite: Pets.com A "good" name only does one thing: it gives you a very brief head start. It might make it easier for people who aren't really interested in your business to talk about you. How far do you think that will carry you? How far can you get if you avoid the name tarpit entirely, and just concentrate on your brand, your product, or your service?

Jach 14y ago
For another pop quiz, figure out by using only the name and the logo (extra information!) whether these companies are in the hair care business or the digital audio business: http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/logos.html http://ridiculousfish.com/blog/posts/logos.html (Submitted it http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3876253 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3876253 ) It really isn't that important.
- halefx 14y ago
  That was really easy. "Computer scientist Alan Kay also plays Stan's father on South Park."

moonlighter 14y ago

I can't help it but... 'namelayer' doesn't sound like a 'great' domain name to me either. Hmm.