To brand or not to brand?

The story of how www.ProjectBorrow.com became born

For a very long time, I resisted naming the borrowing thingamajig I was working on. I would tell people, I’m working on a project or testing a hypothesis around borrowing. Or that I’m helping people to borrow things they don’t need very often. There are a hundred ways to say this sentence.

If I’m honest with myself, certainly part of this reason is fear of failure. By not naming it, it was less real and less likely to hurt when it burns (and I have no illusions that the probability is high).

The more prominent reason is that I feel like especially here in San Francisco, the hotbed of startups, companies are conceived and named so fast. I met quite a number of entrepreneurs that have a business card and website before they have a product, or have done any level of validation. As I mentioned in an earlier post, my process focuses first and foremost on rigorous hypothesis validation. A friend, a branding expert, told me that brands and names are only valuable because they provide a hint to the world as to what your value proposition is. Well, by definition, I don’t know what mine is yet because I only have a hypothesis! And I didn’t want to have to go through a re-branding effort later (what if I decide to do rentals, for example?).

Yet on the flip side, others were arguing that borrows.herokuapp.com was difficult to remember or understand. Real users thought herokuapp was the cute moniker that I had adopted! What finally got me, though, was that I realized my approach to branding wasn’t as lean/ iterative as everything else I was doing. On my site, I built and tweaked based on user comments, but I was ignoring the advice on naming. I realized that not having a memorable name, in fact, might be costing me valuable early users who would help me further test, refine, and validate!

Therefore, today I set up a new domain: www.ProjectBorrow.com, made a little logo, and made profiles on CrunchBase and AngelList (the latter more because I also heard the sites are great ways of finding talent). It sounds easy, but I spent hours searching and polling people for a domain name that sounded temporary but could also lend itself to become something more permanent (a-la-Project-Runway).

Since now my brand/name is fully part of the lean process, I look forward to seeing how it needs to change with time. As a keepsake, here were some of the names I rejected and why (i.e., thanks to all my testers who provided feedback):

• iborrow.it — second choice, but outside the tech community, the cute extensions are not very prevalent or as trusted as a “.com”
• borrower.im — same reason as above, and didn’t ring as well with testers as did iborrow.it
• borrow1st.com — decent, but 1st/ first would lend to confusion

This blarticle was written in the context of building a product that helps people borrow occasional-use items (e.g., camping tents, electric drills) from their friends & neighbors. Check out the prototype here.