Author Archive

When you start a company, eventually you are going to have to choose a company name. You may not take the decision that seriously – but trust me, a great name can make all the difference.

As the online marketplace becomes increasingly cluttered it is more important than ever to be memorable and to stand out. The name of your company is a critical factor in this.

In the following article I will describe a process you can use to discover and select a good name for your company; this process can be applied to product and service names as well. Okay, let’s get going!

The Critical Steps to Generating A Good Company Name:

Step I: Set Your Constraints:

So what makes a good name? There are five main characteristics:

1. It’s easy to remember
2. It’s easy to spell and requires no explanation
3. It describes your business category
4. It describes your benefit
5. It describes your difference

Here are three more constraints that I like:

1. It has to be one or two syllables long – no more
2. Each syllable starts with a strong consonant (B, C, D, G, K, P, Q, T)
3. It’s fun to say (”…that just rolls off the tongue”)

You can of course add to or remove from this list as you see fit. The most important thing in attempting to name your company is to pick a list of constraints and then to ruthlessly stick to it.

Examples of great company names that adhere to these constraints:

• PayPal
• Best Buy
• QuickBooks

Step II: Schedule Your Time:

Choosing a name is a process. Yes, sometimes a great name will just fall in your lap, but more often it will take time to “discover” one. You need to make time.

1. Establish a ‘Naming Team’ – three to four people who are responsible for meeting regularly until they have found your name. Expect it to take eight to ten sessions of one hour each. That is about 30-40 hours of your organization’s time. It will be painful. It will be worth it.
2. Get the tools you need:
• Thesaurus
• Dictionary
• Pads of paper and pens because everyone who is not on a laptop recording words ought to be keeping their own notes with their own ideas. You can consolidate at the end.
• Spreadsheet
• We found that using a laptop with access to the web to check if the URL was available became invaluable. Go Daddy offers a plug in for Firefox that might come in handy.

Secret weapon: The New York Times “Crossword Puzzle Dictionary“.
It’s like an uber thesaurus and it lists words by length. Since you probably want short one-syllable words, this thing is worth its weight in gold.

3. Identify a ’secretary’ to keep everything organized. This should be someone who types fast and records the words in Excel columns as laid out here:

   

BONUS: If you want a book that will explain some strategic pieces with naming, read “Positioning: the Battle for Your Mind ” by Al Ries and Jack Trout. If you can swing it, have you whole team read it before you begin the process.

Step III: Structured Brain Storming

Now that you have done the prep work and have everyone in the same room, here is a framework to brainstorm with:

Don’t try to find your name right away – try to find your words one at a time. Chances are your brand will be two words, and finding those two best words is the real challenge. So break the problem down and brainstorm for individual words in the following buckets:

1. Words that describe your product category
2. Words that describe the differences between your product versus your competition’s
3. Words that describe the benefits of using your product

To keep things focused and manageable, try to spend each of your first three sessions focused on one of these buckets. Inevitably, you and your naming team will start to join the words you come up with to form alluring combinations. That’s totally natural, but try to stay disciplined because this really is an exercise that warrants follow-through.

Use the columns in the spreadsheet to guide you. You will want 50-100 words per column. Remember: be ruthless. In my opinion, single syllable words beginning with hard consonants are the best. They are hard to find. Hang in there.

Rinse. Repeat. Expect it to take eight to ten sessions.

Step IV: Got a Name You Like? Sleep On It

Once you have a name you like, sleep on it. We used to start every session with the question, “what was the name you remembered when you woke up this morning?” Invariably we would all agree on that one name and have a new front-runner that we all liked. That said, invariably this new best name would not satisfy ALL our constraints so we would cast it aside and press on.

To be successful with this process you have to be true to your constraints. Utterly committed. Unwavering. Every constraint you break will only dilute the quality of your name. This is one time not to be easy on yourself. Be hard and unrelenting. Be ruthless.

Step V: Once You Have Your Name – Test It

If you invest enough into this process, you will know a good name when you hear it. If it satisfies all of your constraints you will almost certainly have a great name. However, you do have to test it with your customers – your audience. Make some phone calls, run a survey, post the name on a forum and see what people think. Whatever you do, get some feedback from target customers outside your organization.

The Truth About How We Wound Up Choosing Our Name

As the process evolves you may find you like some words more than others. Some days, the exercise follows you around. It wakes you up, keeps you up and drives you nuts. Eventually some words will cut through. In May we renamed our invoicing service from 2ndSite to FreshBooks.
For us the word that cut through was ‘Fresh’. One day at lunch Kathy said, “What about the word Fresh? I like it.” In that moment, the coin just dropped. We loved the word because it is refreshing, it’s fun to say and it sounds good.

We never looked back, but we did go back to our list of category words. Since ‘Fresh’ describes the difference in our approach to something as tired as accounting, and one of the benefits of our service, we needed a word to describe our category. One word. Single syllable. Harsh consonant. The word ‘Books’ – as in “manage your books” – was perfect.

Now, I have told you this story not to contradict or undermine the importance of the process this article describes, I told you this story to illustrate its importance. Kathy had her breakthrough BECAUSE we invested in the process, and when she suggested ‘Fresh’, it was easy for the rest of us to recognize just how good the word ‘Fresh’ was.

A Quick Word Regarding Domain Names

If you are a web company, personally I think you have to own the .com domain. Make it another constraint. If you can’t get the .com, find another name. I know there are those that suggest otherwise, but requiring the .com domain name is just another constraint at the end of the day, and if your business is online, you don’t want to explain how to get to your URL. You just want someone to be able to hear your company name and go there.

You may have to spend money to buy your domain name. We purchased ours for several thousand dollars. While I would not have paid a penny more (literally the price was at our uppermost limit), our domain name and new brand have made the investment worthwhile.

Wrapping Up

While trying to find a name, and words that describe what your company is trying to do, you will find that your brain works overtime. Every word you read will be a candidate, every word you hear will have new potential, but only by embracing this process or something like it will you be able to recognize a great word/name when you hear it.

So is it worth taking the time to find a good name? You bet. Good luck with your naming – if you invest in the process you won’t regret it.

How have you come up with your own product or company names? Which name do you wish you’d thought of first?

Like this article? Digg it!

ringtone wallpaper free blackberry 7105tringtone montmartre amelieringtone 1812 overturemonophonic ringtone ctu 24il bryant barrington ave 711mp3 ringtones 8675309a flock seagulls ringtones ofemployment shepherd barrington good hospital advocate Map

So you are building a web application… good for you! How are you doing? “Lots of people have signed up so we’re doing really well”, that sounds nice in a “you probably have no clue” kind of way. Allow me to explain.

Part of the benefit of doing business online is you can track EVERYTHING. Web services are the pinnacle of such businesses in my eyes because they are eminently trackable. But the questions you will be asking are: what to track, and where to start, and why even bother. In this article I’ll show you how to approach these questions, so you can find out (or at least have a much better idea) how your web application really is doing.

Why Track Anything?

The Eisenberg Brothers at Future Now Inc. have put together a great body of work preaching the message, not for eyeballs and traffic, but rather for conversions. To explain why conversions are so important to your business, the Eisenbergs introduced the concept of the leaky bucket. Very simply stated, if you have a leaky bucket, to keep it full you can keep adding water, or you can patch the hole. If the bucket represents your website, and water represents your sales, you can keep adding traffic to keep your sales numbers high, or you can patch up the holes in your website and increase the number of sales with your existing traffic. Constantly adding more traffic is not sustainable for many small businesses (especially start-ups with a $0 marketing budget), so the only option is to patch up the bucket.

The Conversion Funnel

A good way to start tracking all the different types of conversion for your business is to put them together in a funnel diagram like this:

This is a classic sales funnel for a web application. At each stage of the funnel, you can expect to lose a percentage of your visitors. So, let’s say 10 per cent of the people who visit your website trial your product, and let’s assume 10 per cent of those people decide to pay for your service. Therefore you are in fact losing 90 per cent of your visitors at each step of the process. This is actually not a bad conversion rate for many services and in this scenario your sales funnel would look like this:

To sum up, if you lose people at every stage – and again, it is a fairly common scenario for you to lose 90 per cent at each stage with a web service – then your bucket is leaking.

A More Sophisticated Web Service Funnel

If your bucket is leaking, then you need to identify the largest leaks and plug them fast. Breaking up your funnel into smaller pieces can help. Here is a more precise funnel, useful for services such as FreshBooks, Basecamp or DropSend:

Whoa… how did things get so complicated? They actually aren’t. Comb over that list and you will see these are merely the general steps a user must go through before they pay you for your web service. Once you see this funnel laid out on the page, identifying your weak spots becomes easier.

How to Track Your Progress

Let’s assume you commit to tracking and defining each of the six number of steps I laid out above. Here’s how we do it with FreshBooks:

To track step #1 (visitors), go get yourself a good, remotely hosted JavaScript (not server log) analytics solution. Google Analytics is a free example. We recommend IndexTools. If you can afford enterprise software (or just like data and have the money) you might want to try Omniture. Again, I would avoid server log parsing solutions like AWStats, Webalizer and Urchin 5 because they are not as accurate as you need them to be.

You may have noticed in the chart above that we don’t use our stats to track anything but the first two steps in our conversion funnel: visitors and trials. That is true. I like the accuracy of database tracking – especially when your numbers are low (ie. you are just getting started) and inaccuracies can really throw you off. Tracking does create programming and database overhead, but since you are storing very little information it does not put much strain on your database, and you can always turn the tracking off at some point down the road. Also, and I would say this is much more important, analytics do not give you good active user counts. What does give you good active user counts is tracking the number of times a user logs in.

Stats are also AWFUL at tracking paying user upgrades for a web service, because the transaction is not immediate – it can take weeks and/or months – and sometimes one user will upgrade multiple times. For these reasons I highly advocate tracking these metrics yourself using your database. You will likely want to build some custom reports for yourself as well. Allocating developing resources for internal projects like this is part of a growing application development trend known as shadow application development. It’s an investment in yourself and it will pay off.

How to Decide What to Fix First

So let’s assume you take my advice and you build and track the conversion steps. And let’s assume your bucket is leaking (if it isn’t, email me with the subject “EAT MY SHORTS”). The question is, “what do I fix first?” The answer? Start as high up the funnel as possible.

Most people need to start with visitors to trials. If 5-10 per cent of first time visitors do not trial your service, you have some work to do – fast. If you need more specific guidance, I recommend adding another step to your conversion funnel. For example, if you can’t figure out where you are losing people before they sign up to trial your service, add another step in your stats called “view sign up”. If 30 per cent of your visitors are viewing your sign-up page, but only 2 per cent are actually signing up, you’ll want to redesign your sign-up page.

Here is a chart with some hints as to where to invest your time in an effort to improve each stage of your conversion funnel:

How Much Data Do You Need to Have a Decent Sample?

Ideally, you want 100 or more records so you have a decent sample in any stage of your conversion funnel. But think about that for a second, if you need 100 paying subscribers, and you convert one per cent of all site visitors to paying users, then you need to generate 1,000 trials, and drive 10,000 visitors to your website. That can take months when you are just getting started. This is why it is so important to start focusing on the top of that funnel first (ie. visitors to trials, the trials to successful registration form completion). These metrics are the fastest to track, and if you get them set right, you will get more people into your application who will then give you feedback so you can work on your other metrics. It’s a virtuous circle.

Conclusion

You can’t improve what you can’t measure, so start measuring your conversion funnel ASAP. It’s pretty remarkable when you see the results, and if you take the time to do it, you will know how you are doing in no uncertain terms.

Shout out to those of you who run web services: I’d love to know how your conversion funnel is doing so that I can aggregate some data and share it with entrepreneurs who are trying to get started. Shoot me an email if you would like to participate. Thanks.

Like this article? Digg it!