A pair of cousins in New York City founded a digital singing recording storybook company. The company's name is "Mibblio", that is, the combination of "music" and "biblio". In Australia, there is a start-up company whose business is to connect large companies with big data scientists. The founder of this company chose its name as "Kaggle". "Shodogg" is a mobile screen sharing platform created by a former toy industry executive. It has been two years since its establishment. A Mississippi man created a website to allow consumers to contact local businesses and service providers. He named the company "Zaarly".
In Silicon Valley, the name of strange start-ups first emerged about 20 years ago. In the Silicon Valley at that time, companies such as Yahoo and Google began to emerge. The former's company name represented "Yes Another Hierarchical Official Oracle" (another kind of hierarchical unofficial prophecy), while the latter's company name was rewritten from the English word "Googol" (10 to the 100th power) according to the usual English spelling.
By the beginning of the 21st century, this trend had spread to start-ups outside Silicon Valley, such as Flickr, a photo sharing website headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, and Tumblr, a light blog platform headquartered in New York. Today, the naming of the latest wave of start-ups is even more bizarre. The reason, they say, is that every new company - whether a lollipop manufacturer or a furniture retailer - needs its own website. With about 252 million domain names registered on the Internet, relatively short and easily identifiable URLs have long been occupied.
Some entrepreneurs say that the only feasible solution is to invent new words, such as Micblio, Kaggle, Shodogg and Zaarly, so that you don't have to pay up to $2 million to buy a simple and practical URL. For example, Investing.com sold about 2.5 million dollars last year.
When naming, many start-ups will learn from successful start-ups such as Spotif, a music sharing platform based in Stockholm, Bit.ly, a domain name abbreviation service in New York, Box, a cloud content management service provider in Los Angeles, or Square, a credit card reader manufacturer in San Francisco.
The following are some unofficial naming trends of start-ups according to Christopher Johnson and Nancy Friedman, brand consultants:
——Use "ify" or "efy" as suffix: 102 start-ups;
——Use "ly", "li" or "lee" as the suffix: 161 start-ups;
——The company name includes "box": 28 start-ups;
——The company name includes "square": 10 start-ups.
For entrepreneurs, choosing to invent new words to name their companies can also help them avoid problems related to trademarks. However, the challenge faced by these entrepreneurs is that the new words invented cannot be just a pot of "alphabet soup", but must be able to convey the intention and be easy to remember. But the reality is that most founders of startups don't have much budget to hire naming consultants.
Steve Manning, founder of the naming consultancy Igor, pointed out that the founders of the company tend to prefer words composed of five to seven letters, because they are worried that longer words will make customers difficult to remember. In terms of linguistics, there are only a few ways to invent new words, including misspelling, compounding, mixing and patching.
David Leiberman, the 28 year old co-founder of Mibblio, said that the company's naming process is as long as "human pregnancy"; Sammy Rubin, another co-founder, added: "But only (more painful than pregnancy and childbirth).". The two people had planned to name the company from scratch for many times. The names they considered earlier included Babythoven, Yipsqueak and Canarytales, but in the end they felt that they were not perfect. Both of them used to like the name "Squeakbox", but in the end Lieberman thought that "music" and "biblio" (which is the Latin root of the word "book") were mixed together to spell the word "Miblio".
"The word looks like 'MY blee oh'," Rubin said, so he suggested adding a letter "b" to help pronounce it. In addition, the two letters "b" also play two roles, which has become the image of an octave in the company's logo.
As for the company name of Kaggle, Anthony Goldbloom, a 30-year-old Australian data scientist, wrote an algorithm that can generate all the vocal combinations of three syllables or less that can be formed by letters, and the domain names and addresses of these combinations have not been registered. "I want to save money so much that I don't want to pay for a (existing) domain name," he said. Among the 700 domain names calculated by this algorithm, he finally found two words: Sumble and Kaggle; Then he wrote an email to his family and friends, asking them which one they preferred. As a result, most people chose Kaggle, so he chose this name.
Kaggle's current supporters include many investors in Silicon Valley, as well as PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, who is also the chairman of the company.
However, Gudrum said that since he transferred the company from Australia to the United States, he found that residents in the central and western regions tend to pronounce "Kaggle" as "KAY gel", that is, the same pronunciation as "Kegel", while "Kegel" refers to "Kegel Muscle Strengthening Method", which is a way for women to tighten and relax their pubic muscles in turn, In order to facilitate the smooth delivery of babies. In other words, "Kaggle" is probably not the best name for this online data startup.
Manging, the founder of Igor, said: "For start-ups, the main driving force behind their naming is a misguided task, that is, to find the shortest (unregistered) website domain name that is easy to pronounce." He added that start-ups may have underestimated their potential customers. He also said that insisting on using shorter URLs has brought unnecessary restrictions to start-ups.
In the mid twentieth century, the heyday of Yellow Pages, it became very popular to name companies with "A" as the first letter. By the turn of the century, 800 phone numbers had promoted the trend of companies to use seven letter words for naming, which was to make their names compatible with touch tone phones. Like today's trends, these trends also reflect entrepreneurs' determination to create the best virtual real estate.
In 2004, Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield started to name their photo sharing website. They originally wanted to name the company Flicker, but the domain name Flicker. com has been occupied, and the domain name owner does not want to sell it. Therefore, Fick suggested using Flickr as the company name. Nine years later, the website said that its number of photos had exceeded 8 billion.
