I feel like every IT company founder must come across this quote while their fingers splash amongst the tears dropping onto their keyboard as they type into Google “how to name a business”
“There are only two hard problems in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.” – Phil Karlton
While that’s true for computer science generally, and business at large, I feel like for SaaS founders in particular such words are crushingly accurate. Why?
1. You’re starting with nothing
You need a name that’s going to suit what you want to become, not what you are now. It seems like charlatanry with which only the delusional would feel comfortable, calling yourself something like CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet if there’s nothing but a blog and a wireframe at day one. Conversely, calling yourself ‘Minimum Viable Product in Competitive Market of underperforming global giants’ lacks a certain allure.
2. The internet is a classless society
If you run a corner store, it’s fairly unlikely Bill Gates will pop-in and ask for a million cans of coke and even if he did at least you could see him come in, quickly hide your Macbook, reboot that kiosk that gets amusingly stuck on a BSOD [kiosk BSOD] and smile pleasantly. With the internet you have no idea who is going to see your site, when and how. You’ve cast your die and may not have a chance to sway that lead if the first impressions of the service don’t even merit a click-through.
So if your target audience reaches from the hobbyist to the enterprise, sometimes it will be Bill Gates, other times that weird guy who smells vaguely like a homeless fish, you just don’t know until that order comes through. This makes the initial impression, of which the name is the very first thing they will see, especially important to appeal to your demographic.
3. Enterprises believe in the Federation
Cue Star Trek references… in the Enterprise they say things like ‘Make it so’ rather than ‘Yeah, let’s do that… cool bananas’
For a “B2B” SaaS the target demographic is exceedingly broad, but on a cash-weighted basis often skewed heavily towards enterprise. We want small time hobbyist developers to have the same tools available as the largest users, as testing needs are universal, but they’re attracted by different things in the product. While small customers can help build a market, improve the ideas, etc. enterprise customers are often the prime driver of ARR and in those more staid environments there’s always the risk of looking frivolous or otherwise “non-enterprisey” by having more creative names.
I’ve certainly heard a few scoffs or seen raised eyebrows talking with senior IT managers about products and tools like Splunk, Cucumber, JHipster, ORQA, DuckDuckGo, Slimer.js, Simian Army… even the whole .io domain! If you don’t live and breathe these eco-systems it’s sometimes hard to step back and realise how silly some of these names are.
Anyone who has moved in corporate circles understands that buyers treat these procurement activities as Serious Business and anything suggesting it’s not an enterprise-grade service may mean you’re not even put on the short-list. Would such a name affect you if you were already in the frame?
Probably not, but if you call yourself ZenGreenBadger.io and you sell SecOps services, a busy buyer who doesn’t already know the space but needs an answer quickly may not recognise your name when canvassing for a short-list, while the freelance developer to reads /r/programming every night may have seen your service and mentally bookmarked it.
With more junior staff often there’s a disconnect between what they have experienced in the career and what the business needs. When it’s behind the covers (like one our internal scripts, GargleBlast.py) it’s fair game and a nice release for creative urges. But it’s hard to convey how uncomfortable it would be watching the face of the Head of IT as he thinks about having to explain to the CEO why he’s recommending investing tens of thousands into a service called, say, https://www.profilactic.com/ or https://www.dogpile.com/.
4. The SaaS Industry moves increasingly quickly
“Times a Changin’” – Bob Dylan
As Bob Dylan sang, times are a changin’. Who is that, and what did he mean, you ask? Exactly. But specifically in the SaaS space the prevailing knowledge is it’s growth or bust and if your product and market doesn’t grow, you pivot or you die. Not knowing if what you release will grow as you intend it or take a life of it’s own and leave you with a dissociated brand can be disconcerting.
For example, say people realised they could use TestZoo to automate daily scraping of their Facebook account and process the results on a regular basis to detect who has defriended who and that ended up being a runaway success. Well, then maybe we should have called ourselves Stal.kr (and yes, I just checked, it’s taken).
Perhaps we hook up an automation script into https://shipyourenemiesglitter.com/ as a full end-to-end Revenge-as-a-Service. You just don’t know how people will react and what the best path to take for growth will be, and with SaaS this can happen insanely rapidly.
As painful as the naming exercise is, it’s even more painful to accept that you may have to go through this all again before you even exit beta or your custom designed logo ever sees the cool egg shell white of a business card (in the vein of American Psycho).