We came up with a list of approx. 10 potential company names and shared them with our “crowd” (friends and family). When we asked our crowd, the result was deflating. A perfect distribution of individual preferences and arguments against the other names. Most people automatically explained their reasoning. That astonished me. My niece Vanessa also shared her reasoning. She did that in a very professional way and explained why she believes that a certain name may create a better response with a specific customer group. Getting this kind of feedback is just great and you can learn a lot!
Crowd intelligence
Asking the crowd helps you to cross out names from the list. You may like a name, but if 90% of the crowd clearly don’t like it you can’t use it. A crowd can also make you aware if a name is ambiguous, which you probably have not noticed. The only name from our list which got overlapping votes was exactly such a candidate, “seed2gether”. Thomas made us aware that this name could be “miss understood”. Shoot, I really liked that one, but now I see the problem. For such things a “crowd” really helps - Crowd intelligence!
Analyze the feedback and decide
It really was time consuming – but it was worthwhile. We got many feedbacks, we had to cross out several names and the name preferences we received were diverse. But all together helped us to decide on the company name.
We decided to go with “StartupSpider”.
• it reflects our business model (spider-technology collects data and brings it together)
• it is easy to remember the name (also for non-English-speaking people)
• it is easy to pronounce the name (also on the phone)
• it reflects the spirit of the time
And most important… We really like it!
Thanks again to everyone who supported us in the process!
