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How To Pick The Perfect Name For Your Startup

March 17, 2011 | Leave a Comment

I’m often asked by young entrepreneurs whether it’s important to find a strong name for a new startup.

The name is important, but the process to come up with a unique name can easily distract you. For example, it took us nearly 50 hours to come up with “crowdSPRING” – time that would have been better spent focusing on developing the core business.

If you don’t have time too invest in coming up with a great name for your new company, you can leverage crowdSPRING’s community of more than 87,000 creatives to come up with your company name or a product name.

Whether you work on your own to come up with a name or leverage crowdSPRING’s community, let me offer 10 useful tips that should guide this process:

1. What do you want your company name to convey?

Your company name is an important part of your company’s identity. The name will appear on your business cards, letterhead, website, promotional materials, products, and pretty much everywhere in print to identify your company or your company’s products and/or services.

Service oriented businesses should consider whether it will be easy for their prospective customers to recognize what services the business provides, based on the name of the company (example: Friendly Dog Walkers or Bright Accounting). This is especially important early in the life of your new company, when your brand is not well established and people don’t know who you or your company are.

Businesses located in rural areas and serving rural communities may want to project a smaller, hometown feel with their name. However, businesses planning to focus on bigger markets or bigger customers might want to project a larger, more corporate image with their name.

2. Brainstorm to identify name possibilities.

Start by thinking about words that describe your industry or the products/services you plan to offer. Think about words that describe your competitors and words that describe the differences between your products and services and those of your competitors. Consider too words that describe the benefits of using your products or services. Finally, think about words (and phrases) that evoke the feelings you want your customers to feel when they see your company name.

Tip: while brainstorming, look up Greek and Latin translations of your words – you might find new ideas from doing that exercise. Look at foreign words too (we spent some time with a Swahili dictionary looking for strong names).

3. Short, simple, and easy to write and remember is best (and consider acronyms of the name).

Obscure business names are often difficult to write and even more difficult to remember. This is a problem because for most startups and small businesses, word-of-mouth advertising is the most successful form of marketing. If your customers can’t remember your name or can’t spell it for others, it will make it difficult for them to help promote your business.

Think about the names of companies you admire. They typically have a few things in common: their names are short, simple, easy to write and easy to remember. (Examples: Apple, Google, Virgin, Southwest).

While it might be tempting (some startups think it’s cool to do), avoid using a “K” in place of a “Q” or a “Ph” in place of an “F” when coming up with your company name. Such letter substitutions makes spelling the name very difficult and will only cause confusion.

Also, don’t forget to consider the acronym of your company name (an acronym is composed of the first letter of each word in a phrase). You might not use an acronym, but your customers might refer to your business by an acronym. A name such as Apple Support Services can result in an unfavorable acronym – ASS.

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How Often Do You Ask Why?

July 27, 2010 | Leave a Comment

Why do birds fly? Why is the sky blue? Why do you drive a car? Why do I have to wear shoes? Why do I have to go to bed?

Toddlers are relentless in asking “why?” questions.  The questions are driven by sheer curiosity – they want to know about everything and it’s not unusual to hear dozens of “why” questions from a toddler – even if you think you’ve answered their question.

As toddlers become older, they stop asking “why” questions. They’re not less curious – they just assume, more often than not, that they understand “why”.

We all tend to assume – more often than not – that we understand why something happens. In delivering customer service, for example, many people try to correct a problem but rarely try to understand why the problem occurred. When a piece of code breaks, many developers implement quick fixes but often neglect to ask why the code broke (poor Q/A practices? never worked in the first place?).

Toddlers want to be heard and they want to listen. They often don’t really care that you answer their question – but they do care that you listen and they really care when you engage in a discussion with them. For example, a question: “why is the sky blue” can be answered in different ways. One could say that it’s blue because that’s the way the sky looks during the day. Or, one could take an opportunity and talk about the sky being blue on sunny days, gray on overcast days, and gray/black at night when the sun is sleeping. And sometimes, it’s orange or pink.

This is an important lesson for all of us and one we should not forget, particularly when talking to other people, and for those of us running businesses – when talking with our customers and our employees. We should never forget to ask why. If a customer or employee is unhappy and complains, asking a few “why” questions could uncover deeper problems than merely what appears to be the source for that unhappiness. When we answer questions, we should take the opportunity to explain, to probe further, and where possible, educate (if appropriate).

Our customers, employees and people around us want to know that we care about them and their problems, and that we hear them.

We can learn a lot from toddlers.

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Startup Tip: Marketing One-To-One

May 5, 2010 | 3 Comments

When most people talk about marketing, they talk about broad, strategic tactics focused on large groups of customers or potential customers. Adwords, banner ads, print ads, email marketing – these are all common tactics used by many businesses to market their products and services.

It’s easy to forget that some of the most important marketing opportunities arise when you deal with customers or potential customers one-to-one. The one-to-one marketing opportunities (while providing customer service, answering email, talking with people on social networks) are sometimes far more valuable than broad marketing tactics. Here’s why:

Do you agree?

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Goals, Strategies and Tactics

April 26, 2010 | 4 Comments

It’s not uncommon for young entrepreneurs to focus on tactics at the expense of also setting appropriate goals and developing core strategies. It’s easy to fall into this trap when you see someone else successfully executing a tactic – and trying to duplicate their success by doing the same thing.

It’s not enough to understand your core business. Without clear goals – and strategies to accompany those goals – tactics could prove to be futile and a waste of time. Here’s why:

If you want to read more about this subject, you might be interested in today’s post on the crowdSPRING blog – New to the world: strategic marketing for startups and small business.

Do you agree that it’s impossible to succeed without clear goals and strategies? Are tactics enough?

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To Succeed, Don’t Obsess About Reasons You Might Fail

April 15, 2010 | 1 Comment

A few months ago, I talked about why startups must focus first on the problem, not the solution. A few days ago, I talked about the need to refocus from time to time.

There’s another side to focus that’s rarely discussed – focusing (and often obsessing) on reasons you might fail versus focusing on reasons you might succeed.

To succeed, don’t obsess about the reasons you might fail. If you do, you WILL fail.

The recent reactions from the developer communities to moves by Apple and Twitter underscored both the importance of making sure that you don’t tie your business to that of another company, and also the importance of making sure that you obsess about and focus on success – and not on failure.

At the end of the day, even if there are 99 ways you could fail and only 1 way you could succeed, there’s a very basic and undeniable fact: you can only succeed if you focus on the 1 way you can succeed. Focusing on the many ways you could fail will NOT lead to success. I discuss this in the following video:

What do you think? Do you agree that focusing on possible failures significantly increases the chances that you WILL fail?

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What is Your Core Business?

March 23, 2010 | 4 Comments

Too often, startups risk getting misdirected by the media and customers to add features and functionality to a product or service that turn out to be collateral to the core business. I believe this is happening now with Gowalla and Foursquare, among others. Both services have recently become media darlings, but neither has managed to break out beyond a relatively modest group of technology enthusiasts.

Last week while at SXSW, I tested both services and believe even more strongly now than I did before SXSW that the feature creep evident in the recent releases from both companies may do more harm than good to their ability to compete with other companies focusing on local advertising (Google, Facebook, and MANY others).

By following the media’s lead (and thirst for more “cool” releases), Gowalla and Foursquare seem to be focused on features collateral to their businesses.

Are Gowalla and Foursquare squandering their opportunities and visibility? I believe they are.

Location based marketing is important, but every website and service will soon be able to execute location based marketing strategies. Importantly, location based marketing is expected to take up a 70% share of all U.S. interactive marketing spending as soon as 2014 – $4 billion in 2015 (up from $34 million in 2009). Companies that don’t focus on their core business will cede leadership and market share to those who do.

As I discuss in this video, there’s a danger when you split your focus and forget about your core business.

Do you think that the features being introduced by Gowalla and Foursquare are critical to their location based advertising models? Why?

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Startup Tip: Dealing With Customer Resistance To Change

March 17, 2010 | 4 Comments

Whether you are a small or a Fortune 50 company, customers typically resist attempts to change products or services they perceive work well. People prefer to deal with the things they already know rather than get used to something new. But innovative companies must constantly find ways to improve their products and services.

How can innovation and resistance to change be reconciled? In this short video, I talk about the lessons we’ve learned along the way in introducing changes to the crowdSPRING marketplace.

What have you done to help your customers or your community deal with change?

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Startup Tip: The Dirty Secret About Features

March 8, 2010 | 2 Comments

I have little doubt that every investor has heard an entrepreneur touting how their new product or service will “crush” the competition with great features that the competition hasn’t yet seen. Many entrepreneurs – especially aspiring entrepreneurs – believe that product or service features represent a great competitive advantage.

There’s a dirty secret about features – they’re rarely a competitive advantage. I discuss why in the following short video.

What do you think?

Filed Under: Business, Marketing, Social Media, Startup Tips, Strategy, Technology Tagged With: , , , ,

Buzzwords and the Credibility Problem

March 3, 2010 | Leave a Comment

It’s tempting to promote a product, service or company by using popular buzzwords. The formula is simple: pick some buzzwords, string them together in a few sentences, and voila!

Buzzwords can be appropriate and convenient. But 90% of the time, they are misused.

I am growing increasingly sensitive to how I use buzzwords, because I am noticing that I react negatively when others use buzzwords in written and verbal communications. When I start hearing a parade of buzzwords, I conclude that the person isn’t communicating – they’re just stringing together a bunch of words for effect.

I suspect that you too react negatively or that like me, you start to tune out the conversation when you hear many buzzwords. That’s the rub with buzzwords – if everyone uses them, they are no longer unique. Who cares if you have a ground-breaking or viral product if every single other company claims to have a ground-breaking or viral product?

If your audience is tuning you out, your marketing or fundraising message will fall on deaf ears.

There’s an easy solution. Talk with people.

Cut the buzzwords. They are not necessary.

image credit: Zach Inglis

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Not Everything That Can Be Counted Counts

March 1, 2010 | Leave a Comment

It’s tempting for startups to count everything that can be counted. After all, prospective investors and the media are often influenced by numbers of followers, visitors, users, paying customers, etc.

But there are a number of challenges when trying to count everything. Relying too much on statistics can be very distracting and can lead to decision paralysis. Startups that become obsessed with metrics often lose their way.

Many entrepreneurs and business owners forget that not all metrics are important. Albert Einstein famously said:

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

Wise words – and most startups (and small businesses) should take those words to heart.

We tend to rely very heavily on metrics (at my company, crowdSPRING) and therefore, are more likely than other companies to become distracted if we don’t smartly pick and choose the metrics that influence our decisions. Sometimes, we make the right decisions and focus on the right metrics. Other times, we make the wrong decisions and lose focus, paying attention to metrics that aren’t nearly as relevant as we mistakenly thought they would be. (Last week, I suggested four questions you should ask when making decisions based on metrics and statistics).

Given the wide availability of good software and plenty of data (from your internal and from many external sources), it’s pretty easy for startups to put together measurements on just about anything.

One of the lessons we’ve learned from our successes and failures: we are more likely to succeed when we spend a greater portion of our efforts discussing and debating what should be counted – and a smaller portion of our effort counting.

Numbers are good – but as Einstein correctly pointed out, everything does not need to be counted.

Do you agree?

image credit: cambodia4kidsorg

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