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Startup Names Are Still Getting Less Silly (crunchbase.com) 36

Posted by msmash from the what's-in-a-name dept.
Every year or so, Crunchbase News likes to take a look at what's hot in startup naming. The process involves reading names of over 1,000 recently founded and funded startups in English-speaking countries, looking for trends. It then get a naming expert's take on the situation. From the report: Probably the standout trend for the past year is the feel-good word. This could be a noun, adjective, adverb, or verb. The qualification is that it evokes something positive, commonly an admirable trait or desirable state of being. Examples include Mighty (workflow for remote teams), Cured (health care software), and Elate (operations platform). Part of the reason simple, positive words are cropping up more is that startups are less concerned about getting a dot-com domain with their exact brand name, said Athol Foden, president of Brighter Naming, a naming consultancy. They'll take an alternative suffix (Cured is Cured.health, for example) or add a word to the domain name (Elate, for instance, is goelate.com).

[...] Another popular branding approach is the straightforward description. Companies are picking names that describe exactly what they do. Some examples are: Grow Credit, a service for building credit histories, New Age Meats, a startup cultivating meat from animal cells, and The Browser Company. In Foden's view, there's something to be said for these simpler, clearer names. They tend to be easier to remember than a made-up brand name, and everyone knows how to spell them. [...] One of the most enduring startup naming strategies is the creative misspelling. By dropping vowels, adding consonants, or taking other steps, companies can get a name that's both familiar-sounding and unique. Over the past year, we've seen plenty of companies with misspelled word names raise seed funding. The lineup includes Cann, a maker of cannabis-infused tonics, Puzzl, a payroll provider for hourly workers, and Shef, an income-earning platform for local cooks.
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Startup Names Are Still Getting Less Silly More

Startup Names Are Still Getting Less Silly

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  • "Chrunchbase" News? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Waffle Iron ( 339739 ) on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @02:20PM (#60462562)

    I guess it takes a silly name to know a silly name.

    • Beat me to it. But yes. Crunchbase indeed. Ranks up there with Snapfish, Rocketfish, and anything else with "fish" needlessly tacked on to something having nothing to do with fish.

    • "Athol Foden, president of Brighter Naming"

      Indeed.

  • Because people want names like "Chat Central" and "Visual Technologies" to identify what a company is about rather than being confused and befuddled with named such as "Mookiemook" and "Zxzvv".

    • > "Chat Central" ... being confused and befuddled with named such as ... "Zxzvv".

      xyzzy tho

    • Was chatting with a coworker and and he typed "fux" instead of "fix", and we laughed. He said "fux" sounded like a startup and we started coming up with startup names, and he next offering was "Fuxly". He was too scared to search for it only, but I checked and no apparent startup with that name.

  • Please, go back to the dot-com times (Score:4, Interesting)

    by stevenm86 ( 780116 ) on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @02:43PM (#60462662)
    I, for one, am getting utterly sick of startups naming themselves after dictionary words. Not only are these names pretentious, they are so, completely, utterly bland. It's like chewing on a stack of paper. The adverb names are the most irritating of all. Unlike what is pointed out in the article, many of the single-word names bear little to no connection to what the company actually does, and the only impression these names provide is that the company is too cool to be found via search engine. Yes, this is slashdot, and I realize that naming has little to do with technology, but COME ON. Also, I think we should paint the bike shed red, so it's easier to see.

    • "Not only are these names pretentious, they are so, completely, utterly bland. It's like chewing on a stack of paper"

      Strangely, I buy products that I need and are useful to me, and I don't even stop and think for a moment about how bland a name is. Indeed, the dictionary word name helps me to identify the company who may have the product or service that I am seeking.

      But that's just me.

    • "many of the single-word names bear little to no connection to what the company actually does, and the only impression these names provide is that the company is too cool to be found via search engine"

      Now this is grating, and I hate it when I try to
      look up a product or company that seems
      to be search engine proof. Especially with
      software I am looking for.

      I don't mind 'bland' names that are related
      to the company's products or services, but
      they need names that can be easily searched
      for in a search engine. This

  • Talk about a silly name.

    • Talk about a silly name.

      To be fair Slashdot was chosen to be purposefully obtuse back in the era when we would spell out the whole url including the http the semicolon and slashes.

  • Maybe this is just the result of so many Asian companies moving into western markets. They have used warm and fuzzy names often with humorous results. There are names like the Lucky Chemical Company (Yup, that is the L in LG), and Smile. Smile was a Korean company that made computer monitors, their first attempt at naming was just to use founders initials, which were KFC. Took them a few years to decide that wasn't the best in the US, so they rebranded to Smile. I think many Asian companies had traditio

    • There's a Korean restaurant in San Francisco called the Lucky Pig. I presume not all the pigs inside were so lucky.

  • Not in favor (Score:3)

    by Headw1nd ( 829599 ) on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @03:00PM (#60462732)
    Honestly, I can't say I'm in favor of anything that makes a brand/company/software product name less unique. It's annoying to have to search for something that is a common word, and even more annoying to try and search for something that is buried under a million results for some product with the same name.
  • I guess no more generic grammar mistakes, e.g. "Startuply"

  • Boring name (Score:3)

    by DavenH ( 1065780 ) on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @03:13PM (#60462778)
    Possibly influenced by Musk's startup names? The Boring Company, SpaceX, Tesla, etc all in one or both camps. It's a very welcome change from nonsense like "Fuzzly" or "Coinify"
  • ...for a Startuppy McStartuppyface [wikipedia.org] to appear on the market.
  • Maybe this is just the result of so many Asian companies moving into western markets. They have used warm and fuzzy names often with humorous results. There are names like the Lucky Chemical Company (Yup, that is the L in LG), and Smile. Smile was a Korean company that made computer monitors, their first attempt at naming was just to use founders initials, which were KFC
  • what about their silly walks? Are they still doing that?
  • If you're wife makes the best cookies in the world and you want to sell them. Your first instinct would be cookies.com. But obviously that's not available. Then you consider that searching for "cookies" on search engines would probably return a shit ton of results about web browsers and privacy scenarios. So given those two things, you probably give your wife's company a name like Cookeeze.com or something equally retarded. First, it protects your brand from fair use lawsuits. Cookie is generic, Cookeez

  • Blame the cybersquatters (Score:3)

    by MobyDisk ( 75490 ) on Tuesday September 01, 2020 @07:45PM (#60463720) Homepage

    One reason for the past decade of funky naming is that cybersquatters have purchased domain names for so many combinations of 2 English dictionary words. So startups try to invent non-dictionary words that still have the feel of the service they want to offer.

    Also, never forget the true genius of the random startup generator [tiffzhang.com].

  • You mean "are becoming less silly"?

    And the editors are still getting less attentive.

  • This is less determined by changes in naming fashion, more by the fact that different names work for different purposes.

    If your market is normal consumers (like an Android app), then you need a unique, memorable, Googlable name. A lot of the good names which fit these criteria are already taken (like Google and Instagram), so you might be stuck with a "weirder" unique name.

    If your market is businesses (like the "workflow for remote teams" and "operations platform" in the summary), then uniqueness is less im

  • I always assumed that part of the reason for having a "silly" name was that it made it slightly easier to find a domain name that isn't owned by some squatter who is demanding silly money for it.

  • There was a marketing campaign back
    in the 1990s that had commercials that
    would end with a black screen with this
    word and a weird voice reciting it. I think
    it was meant to make people think
    "What the hell was that?" and go look
    it up.

    20 years later, I don't remember what
    "IDYYIGG" was supposed to be about,
    and such an awkward, tell nothing name
    would be a very bad name for a company.

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