Up to a point. There are some things that the right name can help with:
- It gets really boring to have to spell your name out to everyone you meet and talk to. Therefore having one that is unambiguously easy to communicate will save you hours at the boot strapping stage where one of the primary forms of marketing is talking to a lot of people at a lot of events.
- Having a name that can only be spelled (or, mostly only spelled) one way will stop a potential competitor stealing traffic. You don't want to be PlayBlox.com when PlayBlocks.com gets bought up by an offshore competitor who you can't sue. Equally ColourLite.com would suck as a name with potentially four common variants to buy or lose traffic to.
I certainly think that memorability is overrated. Generally the second time I meet people the conversation goes like this:
"Hi, I'm the guy from X..."
"Oh, that's the thing for figuring out how to do nasty projects, right? I remember you. How's it going?"
No recollection of the name at all. Of course it could just be a bad name! :)
Me too, my first thought .. 000FFF is blue not B&W.
Names: Zyp, love it; Metallica, very masculine and "metal" perfectly 80s, hard edged; Flickr defines web-2.0 naming, was it the first, it's a better name than Flicker IMO regardless of the reason for the choice.
In the commnets "I’m not any less of an entrepreneur because my name is Joe. " - except that introductions would be a lot harder if your name was something unpronouncable, maybe a series of clicks (Khosa (sp?)) or something that sounds like swearing in your propositions native language.
IMO names matter a lot and no amount of interface will fix a bad name. A terrible name on the other hand you can work for ironic advantage.
I am aware of that. I'm merely putting forward an alternative explanation, which, in my opinion, is more plausible than that, considering the site's title.
Key advice missing from this is to be dilligent about Trademarks. I've seen a friend's company burn through $250K in trademark law suits. They are transitioning from the startup to small business stage so it can be absorbed, but would kill an earlier stage venture.
In their early '80s book on 'Positioning' and cutting through the mass of advertising consumers see, Jack Reis and Al Trout use the example of executives who are known by their initials (TJ, AR etc - they use real examples, but I don't have my copy at hand).
Anyway, they demonstrated that a lot of junior executives started using initials as well, without success.
The Junior people saw the execs with initials and thought Initials = Success.
Of course, in reality, that equation is Success = Initials. Be successful first - your name is less (hat tip, notauser) important.
I like that that 25+ year old research has a modern-day equivalent.
To a certain point your name matters because it can make it hard to spread by word of mouth and if it's downright stupid, that can reflect poorly on founders.
Beyond that, it's pretty much the color of the bikeshed:
I've not heard that expression but changing the colour of the walls in a room alters the behaviour of people in that room including how long they stay. I'd say the colour of the bike-shed matters.
> If you are not in the business of domains no domain name is worth more than $50.000
And related to that: A domain name is (almost) not real estate.
What would inner-city real estate cost if a city had an endless supply of perfectly nice cheap houses all within a ten minute subway ride away? This is essentially the case with domain names.
I think your analogy is very poor - indeed I'd say if an analogy can be wrong, this is.
The proximity of the location of a dwelling to the city is analogous the the beneficial qualities of a domain name. Memorability, zeitgeist, aptness, etc.. The unity of each name is responsible for the cost of obtaining it (second hand) as much as the proximity of location to an economic centre is responsible for real-estate costs. Both are scarce.
Your analogy is good for one thing, both situations are impossible: you can't allow everyone the same domain name and you can't enable everyone to occupy the same physical space.
The point I was trying to convey with the analogy is exactly that of (the lack of) scarcity in domain names.
Especially pre-bubble there was this real-estate-scarcity angle on domain-names: if you have a website about shoes, you need shoes.com, or you'll never be leading. But today we have Zappos which is a name I'm certain was purchased for $2.99 back when they launched and is developed into a first-class business today. If they'd insisted on getting shoes.com, chances are they might never have launched.
When it comes to consumer goods and services, short, sweet, and memorable should be your 3 primary objectives IMO. Be careful not to be to descriptive with the name or logo design, it can be problematic if/when you try to expand into other markets or grow new products that are different from your existing focus.
Most of these obscure short names are chosen because #1 the domain is available and #2 they're hoping they can somehow brand them.
Name does play a role in the success of your company. However if your product sucks then a good name isn't going to fix that. If people can't remember or spell your name, that can kill your word of mouth marketing.
When a startup begins seeing success and can afford to buy a better name then in many cases re-branding is seriously considered.
Great post. I would also say:
1) don't get caught up in any one name
2) having too descriptive of a name can be disastrous as you won't have as much flexibility
3) have fun with it!
Perhaps you should go on to say it's hexadecimal RGB shorthand and that when concatenated it should be interpreted as the long hand which gives rgb(00h,0Fh,FFh) which is blue with a little green.
Shorthand hex notation is commonly used in HTML styles, eg p { color:#000; } gives paragraphs black text.
