From BlaBlaLines to BlaBlaCar Daily. Tips to find the right name for your product.

On the 26th of April 2021, BlaBlaLines, the commuting application developed by BlaBlaCar is becoming BlaBlaCar Daily.

Changing a company or even a product name can be a challenge. And there are lots of good reasons for a change. Sometimes, the initial name you choose for your product doesn’t fit anymore. It could be because you had to pivot to find your product market fit, or because you now have international ambitions… Long story short, you end up at the same conclusion: you need a new name that fits your value proposition (for the years to come).

Companies change names all the time.

We all know famous companies which have changed names. Actually, it’s something quite common.

To name a few:

• Airbnb was first called AirBedandBreakfast.com.
• Google. Did you know that Google’s first name was BackRub? (Agreed, it doesn’t sound as sexy as Google).
• And of course, BlaBlaCar: BlaBlaCar’s first name was covoiturage.fr (covoiturage means carpooling in French). Switching to BlaBlaCar definitely helped for internationalization.

Names are key, and while it’s hard to measure the impact of a good name on the company’s growth, I’m 100% convinced that the name Google, Airbnb or BlaBlaCar strongly contribute to these companies becoming what they are today.

So, to celebrate our new name, BlaBlaCar Daily, we wanted to share the process behind this change and some tips to help anyone on the great journey that is finding the perfect name for a product.

We needed a new name for our app.

BlaBlaCar Daily’s goal is to help you carpool on your daily trips, such as going to work. BlaBlaCar Daily was launched in 2018 in France during an important strike period, following a test in 2 specific areas in France.

BlaBlaCar Daily’ growth significantly accelerated starting September 2019, with a great momentum in December 2019 because of a major strike in public transportation in France. Our members base grew from less than 200K members to more than 1,5 million in less than 1 year 🚀. We had our product market fit!

But with that growth came the issue of the name “BlaBlaLines”.

French people had issues pronouncing it correctly, and worse, associated “BlaBlaLines” with buses (as BlaBlaCar launched long distance buses in France in 2019).

As most of our growth was coming from word of mouth, we knew we were missing an opportunity.

To top it off, we knew that, sooner or later, we would take the app abroad, and the name BlaBlaLines wasn’t adapted for that.

These reasons were strong enough to make us take the decision to change the name.

Set constraints will help you find the good name

But where should you start? It might seem counterintuitive but our recommendation is to start by setting boundaries. Constraints can actually help you find a good name. They help to avoid getting lost (because, yes, the variety of names is infinite!) and be sure this name will answer your expectations.

For BlaBlaCar Daily, our constraints were:

• Leveraging the BlaBlaCar name, as BlaBlaCar’s brand is extremely powerful.
• A trusted and well-known brand in the countries where it is operating. In France, aided awareness of BlaBlacar is above 90%! (As a comparison, the low cost airline EasyJet has an aided awareness of 62%)*.
• BlaBlaCar has become a generic name to describe carpooling, like Uber has become the word for on-demand taxi. If you need a ride, I bet you’ll be asking for an Uber rather than for a taxi. Same for BlaBlaCar. If you plan to carpool, you’re very likely to say you’re going to do a BlaBlaCar and not a carpool.
• A name that is more explicit about our app usage ie. being a carpool commuting service.
• A name easily pronounceable and memorizable in France that could also work for an international expansion.

Taking all these points into consideration, it appears that the structure of the name should be BlaBlaCar + something.
Now, let’s find the “something”!

To do so, we organized brainstorming sessions. BlaBlaCar Express, BlaBlaCar Daily, BlaBlaCar Work, BlaBlaCar Pool, BlaBlaCar Eqo2, BlaBlaCar City… Yes, imagination and creativity were not something we were lacking!

In the end, two names stood out: BlaBlaCar City and BlaBlaCar Daily; both had advantages and disadvantages and we weren’t able to pick one.

Ask your users their opinion about the name you consider

Being the member is a core principle at BlaBlaCar. Our users are at the center of what we do and our community is very important. Members NPS is one of the 5 KPI’s we systematically follow and that everyone at BlaBlaCar can refer to.

Asking our members which name would best describe BlaBlaCar Daily’s usage was natural for us. They’re the ones using the product the most.

Core users of BlaBlaCar Daily are aged between 25 and 34 years old, living outside big cities and working in areas with poor public transport. We chose 12 users who were representative of BlaBlaCar Daily’ community, prepared an interview guide to follow and called our users.

Listening to your users is something everyone, even if you’re not a Product Manager, should do on a regular basis. You’ll gather insights you might never have thought of, just by seeing things from their perspective.

The main contender was BlaBlaCar City, but many users saw this name as describing a product only for inner-city rides. For some, BlaBlaCar City led them to believe it was a taxi service, which we want to avoid. BlaBlaCar Daily, on the other hand, was self-explanatory, easy to memorize and understandable for all users we called. Our users were unanimous: BlaBlaCar Daily was the right name.

My advice to find the right name for your product.

Finding the right name for your product shouldn’t be an impossible challenge to tackle. By following steps such as (i) asking yourself and the team why it’s the necessary and what problems it would solve, (ii) setting up constraints and (iii) asking your users, you have the keys to find the perfect name for your brand and product.

Many thanks to Fanny Janicot, Adrien Tahon, Ardena Gonzalez, Artabaz Shams for helping me with this article and to Alizée Landeau for the cool illustrations!

*Results from the brand tracker implemented in Latana — October 2020