[neilk]

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=dGF2bkV...

[keiferski]

(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/

- 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-ear...

- FeeFighters' business increased 25x after they changed their name from Transparent Financial Services http://nomvilla.com/blog/feefighters-new-name/

[neilk]

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.

[keiferski]

1. Mint's relation to a color that has good associations is a good thing. Mint = green, clean, fresh. I also think it's pretty obvious that Wesabe is difficult to communicate, especially compared to Mint.

2. UnderArmour: ok, but we're talking about naming in general here. The brand positioning of your company matters no matter what market you're in. A social network targeting seniors isn't going anywhere if it's named "L33tHacke.rs".

3. Correlation doesn't equal causation, etc. etc. but you're probably never going to get an isolated experiment involving a name. The market is too complex and the early stages of a company are too hectic to isolate any one cause for success. If it were that easy we'd have discovered the secret to success by now.

In short: they had issues with their name; they changed their name; a lot of good things happened. Take that as you will.

--

EDIT: the article is actually titled: "How a new name HELPED grow FeeFighers' business 25x". So my comment is the only thing in error. From the article:

Problems with the name:

We kept talking to customers on the phone, or in email, and they would say things like “How do you spell your name again? What’s your domain name?” Or, “I mentioned you to one of my friends.” We’re like, “Well, why didn’t they ever come back? We never actually heard from your friend.” It turned out that they had forgotten our name, because it wasn’t memorable enough.

After the name change:

Since we’ve changed the name [from TransFS to FeeFighters], we’ve raised a million and a half of additional capital. We have added five people to the team. We’ve grown our customer base 25X. And we’re growing like 30 percent over month to month. So it’s been a really, really good year.

[cpeterso]

"Mint" is also a place where money is made (minted) and, as an adjective, can mean something is in good condition.

[VigUi7vv8G2]

You're missing the obvious: Green = MONEY.

[utunga]

solid real example - though not strictly quantifiable.. but in this piece Max Haot makes absolutely no bones that changing their name from Mogulus to LiveStream had a massive effect on their success (he says it over and over again)

http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/08/founder-stories-livestreams...

Certainly passes the smell test for me. Mogulus = huh? Livestream = Oh, I get what they do and remember enough to come back.