How Good Names Can Help Products Succeed
Naming a product well matters. Let me tell you two stories.
Let me tell you two stories about how naming a product can make a difference between success and failure.
dotCloud was an interesting product with a terrible name. “dot” reminds people Microsoft’s .NET platform. I always resisted learning more about dotCloud even though I knew that they are not related to Microsoft. The name was just repellent.
With a simple change from dotCloud to docker, they started growing like wildfire. Programmer communities like Hacker News started filling posts about docker. For the first time, I got excited about their product. I read their documentation and I forwarded their links to many people who are now using the product.
Let’s move to my second story.
Every entrepreneurs dreams of a big launch. Journalists and bloggers writing about them. Message boards filled with heated discussions. They happen very rarely. Apple can do it. But, they are Apple.
Last week, two unknown brothers came up with a simple app. It was an amazing launch to watch. Every news organization wrote about them. Online communities filled with heated discussions about it. What made them so successful was the name they chose for the app: Hemingway. It is an app that let’s you enter some text and it tells you how to make the text simpler. It gives a grade. It is a useful app but I wonder if they would be this successful without such naming.
What is common between Docker and Hemingway? They both tell stories. People love stories. Stories make it easy to understand and remember things. Stories give people something to talk about.
What are the stories in these product names?
Docker is for a technical audience but the name describes it well. You can pack apps and their configurations into a package and carry them around between servers. dotCloud did not tell a story.
Ernest Hemingway is an author who earned people’s trust as a writer. Who doesn’t want to write like Hemingway? The naming suggests that you might also be able to write like Hemingway. Journalists loved it because it gave them a chance to talk about Hemingway, and how to write better.
Good names can make or break a product. So, next time when you need to name a product think about the story behind it. Make it interesting and easy to remember. Bonus points if you can create controversy with it!
