The Entrepreneur’s Essentials #7: What’s in a name?
For this lesson from The Entrepreneur’s Essentials, I decided to go with the recency effect again. Earlier this week, I was discussing company naming with a new entrepreneur, one that I used to work with at Edgecase (when I served as their Chairman of the Board). A company name should have longevity and it shouldn’t be limiting (as you eventually — and hopefully — grow into international markets, other industry verticals, and other product lines). It should explain your mission but also be memorable, with a great story behind it. I think really hard when I’m naming a new startup. It isn’t an easy exercise when done right and requires a lot of reflection and a healthy dose of inspiration.
data.world was no different. My co-founders and I wanted a name that would reflect the incredible ambition of our mission: “to build the most meaningful, collaborative, and abundant data resource in the world”. It literally happened spontaneously while we were brainstorming the foundational idea for data.world, which initially was the brainchild of our brilliant co-founder and CTO, Bryon Jacob. In the midst of the brainstorm, I blurted out, “It’s like data.world!” We quickly did a search and found out that the .world TLD (top-level domain) came into existence a few months before. We slept on the name and it eventually stuck. data.world was a perfect name — we would not be limited by geography, industry verticals, or expanding into new product lines (data is a truly huge industry with no TAM, or total available market, limitations). The reason we lowercased the name is that we wanted to reflect the utility nature of our platform — kind of like you “plug into” data.world (and we have a full set of APIs to back that up). We also thought lowercasing data.world would “understate” the amazing power of our platform, kind of a “humble” move on our part.
So here we go with this lesson from The Entrepreneur’s Essentials. It was first shared at Lucky7 on Dec. 14, 2012. When I refer to “yesterday” below, I literally mean Dec. 13, 2012 — I haven’t updated the language (but I did make sure the grammar and links were corrected):
Yesterday’s post on why I named my blog Lucky7 in honor of my mom and my resulting Twitter banter on our company’s name with Sam Decker reminded me of a few stories about how I came up with the name Bazaarvoice.
I remember the day I came up with the name like it was yesterday. Rachel was just six months old. We were in Cabo San Lucas in April 2005 using our last few weeks of vacation at Coremetrics before I left to take the plunge to start Bazaarvoice with Brant Barton. I was reading Chapter 4 of The Cluetrain Manifesto and it hit me — big time. That chapter, “Markets Are Conversations”, moved me more than almost anything I had ever read (you can read it for free at that link). The “voice of the marketplace” — it was perfect! Like the name Coremetrics, it described exactly what the company did. It was a bit of an irreverent name, likely to be confused with Bizarrevoice but that was actually a good thing in this case. There was meaning in that — the voice of customers would indeed sound “bizarre” to all of the corporate people that had been locked away in their towers instead of walking their store aisles like Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, used to do to “keep it real” and then taught his children in his book Made In America.
Also, Bazaarvoice, like Coremetrics, was near the top of the alphabet, which matters if your primary marketing expense will be tradeshows. Why? Because everyone alphabetizes the list. Yep, just like the days with the Yellow Pages where plumbers would name themselves ABC123 Plumbing to be at the top of the Yellow Pages. I picked up this little tidbit out of Guy Kawasaki’s brilliant book, The Art of the Start.
Most importantly, though, there would be a great story behind the name. That story was perfectly told in Chapter 4 of that irreverent book — that Manifesto. We were going to change the face of commerce forever, and we needed a radical calling card to do so. The fear of negative reviews had held the industry back from embracing the voices of their most important stakeholders — their customers. “You mean that customers can write negative things about the products we’ve curated?!” Yes, just like they can talk to each other about your products over dinner. It seems so obvious now (everything is in hindsight) but back then it wasn’t — only around three retailers had customer reviews on their websites in 2005.
I phoned Brant and told him the name and the backstory. He was in. We were locked.
Then we hired our founding CMO, Sam Decker, a few months before our launch. He hated the name. Austin Ventures hated the name. John Hime (who never invested in Bazaarvoice) hated the name. “Just call it Bvoice”, John said, “long names are horrible”. Sam asked Guy Kawasaki what he thought. He hated it. Guy suggested “Pheedbax” as his top pick. He also passed on investing (although he did invest in Coremetrics). Whatever happened to top of the alphabet, Guy?! As CEO, I stuck to my guns and, as co-founder, Brant did too. And now I just smile when everyone says they love the name. It is easy to say that when you have a global brandname, are publicly traded, and have over 2,000 clients in 27 international languages. It is much harder to say when you are two guys, a dog, and a PowerPoint.
Sam and I have good laughs about this every now and then, as we did yesterday over Twitter. And I’ve joined Austin Ventures, where we laugh about it too. But I haven’t yet had that laugh with John or Guy. Perhaps this post stokes that fire.
In all seriousness, though, think hard about your company name. It took me weeks to come up with the name Bazaarvoice, as it did Coremetrics. As compared to PowerReviews (a competitor that we recently acquired at Bazaarvoice), the name Bazaarvoice was superior for several reasons. First, it was not just limited to a reviews product. Second, it had a better story behind the name. Third, it was descriptive of what we did. Fourth, it had global appeal — bazaar was an ancient word in human history. Fifth, it was at the top of the alphabet (at least the English alphabet). Later on, it led to the b: moniker in our rebranding prior to IPO, so it was also playful. b: bold. b: authentic. b: changing the world.
I find it interesting that both Bazaarvoice and Coremetrics are 11-character names. To be descriptive, your company name usually needs to be a little longer. But Google found a great name, with a great story, that actually describes what they do and also captures the geek ethos of the company. But it isn’t at the top of the alphabet (nor does it need to be). So did YouTube.
Note: this was originally posted on my blog at Lucky7.io, where I’ve been writing about primarily entrepreneurship since 2012. The original post is here.
I would love to hear what you think of this post and how you decide on a good company name. Have you seen names gone bad? Have you ever had to change the name of your company? What do you think are the best company names and why?
