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It's certainly more important to execute on product and market than come up with a good name, however don't discount the importance of a name. Consumers do judg
by aneth4 14y ago
It's certainly more important to execute on product and market than come up with a good name, however don't discount the importance of a name. Consumers do judge companies by name, and first impressions matter immensely.
Matasano is not a good name for an American company. It is difficult to spell and has no apparent meaning or association. That doesn't mean you can't be successful, but you will have harder time and lose consumers early in the funnel because of various points of confusion about what your company does, the spelling of your name, and what language your founders speak.
Compare mint.com to wasabi.com. Which one will my mother be more comfortable with? Which one will I remember easily? Which one will I go to first if both are equally positioned among a list of alternatives? Which booth will I (or more importantly an average consumer) walk into at a convention?
All of the above is somewhat less important for a B2B company, but still vitally important.
For sure, move forward with your business and product. Don't procrastinate on a name. But do carefully consider what impact your name will have on someone who doesn't know, and probably doesn't care, what your company does.
One analogy - if you want to invite people to a party, are you better off looking like a 60 year old, bald, fat man, or a beautiful 25 year old Argentinian woman? Both can probably get a party going, but one is going to have an easier time, need a less compelling case, and spend less money.
- tptacek 14y agoI feel comfortable arguing that Matasano has never lost a customer early in the funnel because of various points of confusion about what it does. I am willing to stipulate that there are names that can cost customers if you're a general consumer-facing company. For instance, Casimiroa edulis is the species name for the Matasano plant. If Matasano sold appointment reminder software to people like my mom, and had chosen the name Casimiroa instead of Matasano, we'd have lost business just because nobody could spell the name. It is a true but boring retort to my post to suggest that there are names that will cost customers; of course there are. But common sense will navigate you away from most of those names. "Braintree" says nothing about payment processing. "Ebay" says nothing about auctions. Those names work regardless.
- aneth4 14y agoJust because a company is successful doesn't mean it has a good name (just as a good name doesn't make a company successful.) Ebay is a terrible name, but they had other advantages. Braintree is a poor name, which may explain some of their struggles with entering the broader market. PayPal and Stripe are much better - emotive and associative. If github were called snaggletooth, they would have struggled much much more. Regarding your experience, the point where you lose customers is generally before they talk to you. You would not know that you were losing them. I don't know what Matasano does, and truthfully if I am honest with my emotions, I care less because I don't associate with the name and initially discount the company because of the naming choice. This is a base emotive response btw, not a conscious judgement. You may have a fantastic product that I would ultimately select if I were in the market, but you are starting at a disadvantage.
- tptacek 14y agoMost of us aren't really in businesses where customers find us by Googling relevant-sounding names and following one of the first 2 links on Google. The point of my comment isn't that there are names that are better than other names. There clearly are. My point is that the difference is unlikely to be determinative of success. Again: Heroku is meaningless. There are many companies in Heroku's space with much "better" names that do not manage to outcompete Heroku. I am now repeating myself, but because this is worth repeating: there is a long list of things that "founders" procrastinate on that won't really help their business. They include logos, designing replacement web frameworks so they don't look like they're using Bootstrap, finding the optimal company name, business cards, attending SXSW or going to meetups... the list goes on and on. Most founders would be well served to at least note that these are likely to be unproductive tasks. That doesn't mean you can't engage in those tasks. If you love web design, vent some steam by replacing Bootstrap. Just don't con yourself into thinking you're doing something vital by doing that.
- aneth4 14y agoOkay, I don't think we are too far apart. We probably just disagree on how strong an impression a name can make. Similar to bad design and user experience, a product can be successful with a bad name. That doesn't mean user experience, design, or the name is not important.