The search for our startup’s name
How to go about choosing the right brand name (don’t be afraid to use the dictionary).
Branding is a topic that has always fascinated me. There is a great diversity of awesome brand names out there. I wanted to do the right thing for my own startup and of course, like every entrepreneur, find the next big brand.
Some companies end up with names that hold sentimental value like gaming company, Zynga. The company is actually named after founder Mark Pincus’ America Pit Bull. Where as Google is actually a misspelling of the word googol, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. Practically chosen to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information, and it certainly does. Sometimes names get chosen but have to change due to an unfavorable mistake. The name of company “Cadabra” (as in abracadabra) was misheard and mistaken for the word “cadaver” by the company lawyer. That’s when Jeff Bezos decided to call the company Amazon instead.
A lot goes into to picking a name for a company, different motivations and goals, yet there is no right way or formula for coming up with a perfect brand name. There are some tips you can follow. This was our process.
A meaningful name.
The first step was to ask ourselves,”Okay, what is our app all about?”
Basically, Mobs allows people to create video content together while attending social events; for example, a gathering of friends and family, a marathon, or a protest. Today there is no easy way for people to collect all the pictures and videos that are generated during these kinds of events. Any tools that do exist lack the ability to create compelling videos using all that media in one place.
If you distill our mission down to its simplest form Mobs aims to bring people together to build something bigger than the sum of its parts.
This is when using the dictionary and thesaurus came in real handy. These are great tools for coming up with words and phrases and a lot of options started to get put on the table.
Mass, congregation, group, crowd were all brought up. We stopped to ponder each word, each one’s meaning and connotation, looking for the right one that would fit with our mission statement. Having that clear reminder of what we were trying to convey in our brand name was immensely useful to guide us and keep us on track.
A name with distinction.
We needed a name that would help us stand out. We also wanted to be able to easily build a branded language around our company’s name, so we knew we needed something versatile. Making up a completely new word was an option but it would take significantly more effort to build our brand and reputation from scratch. We felt there was already too much “-ify” being used in the app world, like Spotify, Shopify, Cabify, etc.. This tactic can be a shortcut when it comes to creating a new word.
Doing some online research makes it easy to see how people are using a potential brand word or concept and with that knowledge you can assess how this might help or hinder your brand name.
After analyzing several words in this way, crowd seemed to be a good option, meaning a large number of people gathered together, but that didn’t seem quite right. Iterations and brainstorming eventually lead us to the term flash mob. A flash mob is a large public gathering at which people perform an unusual or seemingly random act and then disperse, typically organized by means of the Internet or social media and often for the purposes of entertainment, satire, and artistic expression.
We had a great time watching videos of flash mobs on YouTube and when we got back down to business we decided to drop the word flash, and keep mob. This suited our goals well and even though a nefarious connotation comes with the word, due to its historical association with the Mafia, we decided that this was an intriguing element and that it would give us the possibility of generating conversation. We made the word plural because we are all about bringing people together to create their own tribe and tell their own stories. One mob wasn’t enough, we wanted to convey the idea that this was something bigger, people all over are making new videos, a diverse and growing population of Mobs.
Accessibility in a name is key.
We knew we wanted a short word that would be easy to read and easy to remember in any language. This is not a simple task in the 21st century; good, short, and unregistered names are more and more rare now a days. In addition, there is the challenge of finding an available domain name, a key component of any tech company brand.
It’s easy to search if your chosen domain name is already registered, Mobs.com, Mobs.net, Mob.io are some examples of domain names that were already taken. ICANN released a number of non-traditional top level domain names a while back and .video couldn’t have been a more perfect fit for us.
Bam! We found our brand name. Mobs gave us everything we had been looking for, short and sweet, refers to groups of people coming together, and suggests exclusivity and group activity or a network. The fact that the word brings some history with it allows us to build a new language around the brand name. For example, a MOBSter is a fan and user of our app, starting a Mob is how our users communicate, interact, and collaborate to make magical video masterpieces at social events. MOBS are the tokens you can get from marketers interested in licensing your content through the in-app blockchain powered marketplace. It was definitely a journey but we’re so glad we put the work into finding the right name from the get-go. We like it and we hope you do too.
Join Mobs! We promise you can keep all your fingers :)
For more information about Mobs head to Mobs.video. Join the community on Twitter or Facebook or chat directly to the team on Telegram.
