Names & Domains For Startups
From the always excellent Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series at Stanford, this excerpt from a recent talk by Leah Busque describes how RunMyErrand.com became Taskrabbit.com.
We came up with hundreds and hundreds of names, so many names, it was such a grueling exercise. We had naming parties at our house, an we brought our friends over, and we had pizza and beer, and we’re like, ‘Come up with names!’.
Click arrow to play audio. Leah Busque – Naming TaskRabbit
Jack Dorsey talks with All Things D’s Kara Swisher about inventing Twitter and later, Square
Don’t you love podcasts? Podcasts for me are what I’d always hoped television could be. Whatever your interest, the best of the best are talking about it somewhere. In this case, Jack Dorsey talks with All Things D‘s Kara Swisher about inventing Twitter and later, Square – two giant ideas that are changing the way we see the world. In these excerpts from a great talk at the Commonwealth Club, we hear about the naming process. The takeaway for me is that as genius as Jack is, when it comes to naming, we’re all of us in the same boat. Kara contributes her own ‘domainer’ story as well that will resonate with anyone who’s spent any time in the domainer forums.
Entire interview: YouTube iTunes.
(Click arrow to play audio) Naming Twitter
(Click arrow to play audio) Naming Square
(Click arrow to play audio) About Square.com
[Update: Square.com now redirects to SquareUp, so it looks like Jack got the domain.]
I love Mixergy and Andrew Warner’s interviews. Over the last few years I’ve listened to Andrew interview hundreds of startup entrepreneurs. I’m sharing this particular interview because it’s covers my favorite territory – domains and naming your company. You can find this interview, a transcript, and an audio version at Mixergy.
Sean Harper kept hearing that people didn’t like his company name, which at the time was TransFS.com. They’re a credit card processing price/feature comparison engine that helps you get the best deal for your merchant services. Somewhere around the time Sean heard his father mispronounce the company name, Sean and crew decided to go ahead and begin the painful process of renaming.
If you want to cut directly to the discussion of finding a name and then acquiring the domain, that starts around the 11 min mark. By the 24 min. mark, Sean has acquired the domains and then begins discussing implementing the changeover.
These are my notes. The process Sean describes is helping me formulate a process for an idea I’m working on called CrowdNamer.
My takeaway is a simple extrapolation: The easier it is to pronounce, spell, and remember your company’s name, the better off you are, especially at launch.
I’m loving all the data coming out of behavioral science. It really does turn out we’re biased towards idiocy. Fortunately, by studying our biases we can keep ourselves from acting on them. A favorite source of fascinating and useful psychological insights is Dan Ariely, Professor of Behavioral Economics at Duke University and author of two excellent books, The Upside of Irrationality, and Predictably Irrational. He’s also the host of a podcast series called, Arming the Donkeys. In this excerpt from an interview with Princeton University psychology professor Danny Oppenheimer, they discuss the findings of a study [pdf] where Danny’s team discovered that the difficulty of pronouncing a stock’s name predicted how it would do on its IPO. The area of inquiry is called fluency. Fluency is the property of a person or of a system that delivers information quickly and with expertise.
(Click arrow to play audio) Easy for you to say?
My takeaway is a simple extrapolation: The easier it is to pronounce, spell, and remember your company’s name, the better off you are, especially at launch.