The Importance of a Good Name: Ditching SimulScribe For PhoneTag
Erick Schonfeld
52 comments »
Too often in the rush of trying to launch something new, entrepreneurs pay too little attention to coming up with a good name for their product or company. It might start off as a part-time project and they just want to get it up and running. So they pick the first name that comes to mind—often something awful—and then they are stuck with it.
That is what happened to SimulScribe, a handy voice-to-text service that turns voicemails into e-mail. When James Siminoff and Mark Dillon started SimulScribe in 2003, both had other full-time businesses. It was a side project that they codenamed “Simultaneous Voicemail Transcription,” which they shortened to SimulScribe. But now five years later, it is a full-time gig that’s growing but the name is holding back the startup. Siminoff admits:
The name SimulScribe totally sucks for our business. People have a real challenge remembering the name and they cannot spell it, which is a real problem considering that new customers need to type in our web address to sign up. When your company offers a consumer product that relies on viral marketing, a difficult name is a really bad thing. In fact, I’m constantly amazed at how well we have been able to do with such a shitty name.
Name recognition is especially important when you are up against better-funded competitors like SpinVox (which could also use a better name, but has raised $200 million to SimulScribe’s $5.7 million). Siminoff has been looking for a new name for two years, one with a domain that wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg. Finally, a few months ago after a red-eye flight from LA to New York, after not returning many phone calls for days, a friend left a message saying he was tired of playing phone tag. Siminoff immediately called his chief marketing officer (at 6:30 in the morning) and told him to buy the domain. But PhoneTag.com was taken.
Four months and $30,000 later, he bought the domain, and today SimulScribe is changing its name to PhoneTag. It is a much better name. SimulScribe was so off-putting somehow, but PhoneTag sounds fun. What do readers think, will it make any difference?
In celebration of its new name. PhoneTag is giving away a free 30-day trial plus a special “F*#@ Voicemail” T-shirt to the first 100 TechCrunch readers who sign up here. The service is also launching a new feature today. You upload your contacts from Outlook, Mac Address Book, Gmail, or Yahoo, and every time you get a voicemail from a contact, you can email them back. That’s the kind of phone tag I could play all day.
The right price for a domain - is whatever price the buyer and seller are able to agree at.
I like the new name but that new logo is crap.
I’d be happy to design them a new one for…I dunno…30k.
http://www.imageco.com
With that much VC money, there is no excuse for a bad name / domain.
Definately an improvement.
I think the name is worth it.
Its a better name .. I think it will def make a difference .. for better
PhoneTag.com is so 90’s… and I love it.
I’ve simply lost the ability to keep up with all the Flernbys and the Shpoobas and the Squaldigoos. I think this will be the best $30k this company ever spends.
Though I think the service might be swell and I’m going to be happy to test drive it, also wondering how you cash in on the t-shirt
Didn’t see anything about it on their site.
Is it just me or does the shirt say:
F–CK
S–CKS
Definitely easier to spell, but SimulScribe sounds techier.
- Also, wondering bout the tshirt, the site didn’t say anything about it.
BINGO!
Owning a domain that can be remembered is key. How many people have typed in Flicker instead of Flickr. Luckily for Flickr it paid off having a shitty mispelled name.
“The right price for a domain - is whatever price the buyer and seller are able to agree at.”
By that logic $90 was the right price for Enron stock in August 2000.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.....tock_price
@11, yes it was; supply/demand equals the ideal, right price.
but I’m still talking about mainly domain names, and business properties.
- not stocks.
I like
Does anyone have suggestions on how you can test if your name is a memorable one?
I think websites should stick with easy to remember names. I don’t care if you call a book store Amazon, Green or Black. Just name it and make it easy for me to remember it instead of trying to figure out if “ogggy” has three g’s and ends with a “y” or two e’s.
The casual consumer thanks you very much.
@14
Tell someone the name of your site.
Ask them what it was 5 minutes later.
#14 try Google.com.
Separate the name to it’s original form and see if the results are larger than 1,000,000. If that is the case your name is memorable because it is being used /typed in web pages.
Good move but $30,000….
what’s up with the school bus colors in the logo?
p.s. domain squatters suck
Ah, perfect timing… just wrote about the Startup Naming Game yesterday. There’s a poll, too, please click and vote.
The name is good now, but I’d like them answer all my questions on their site, in the front and center of the page. That is the best way to market it, not using some race car driver.
1. How does it work with my phone? Does it replace my providers voice mail system, or does it just work with it?
2. Can I still click the voice mail icon on my phone to get to the audio version from Cingular/AT&T? Or do I have to dial their phone number and then enter my phone number and pin?
3. Do they send a text message with the voice mail, or just email? Can it go to multiple recipients?
4. How easy is it to revert back to how my phone is now if I don’t like the service?
Those are the things that I, as a consumer of something like this, want to know first. The name doesn’t matter to me too much, but I still voted that it was a good purchase.
Well, it may have cost $30K, but it got people talking about them again and how much is that worth? Good PR move AND a better domain name - money well spent and a great move in my book.
That’s a little spendy to be honest, we got an incredible name for a third of that cost but it took about three months of insane legwork. At the end of the day, $30k is nothing compared to the value of the business if it succeeds, and didn’t CNN pay something like $750k for ireport.com?!?!
@12
You’re using a definition of “the right price” that is wrong in two respects.
First, the notion that the market is always right has been increasingly displaced as economists study the effects of asymmetric information. Given a different dispersal of information, the price might be very different, whether the market is for domain names or Enron stock.
Second, the idea that the market price is always right is completely irrelevant to the discussion, which is about whether a good domain name is a good investment for a startup. Even if $100,000 is the market value of ILovePajamas.com, buying it for $30,000 to use as your domain name would be a pretty stupid use of your precious limited capital for a telecom startup, don’t you think?
A few thoughts on names:
- A name should be easy to use in conversation. Try using sentences like “I found it on [SITE NAME].” or “Just use [SITE NAME] real quick and do it.” These are great ways to instantly weed out really clumsy name. (Consider how some lucky developers used the word Google, which is now a verb)
- Be careful not to use industry lingo. I scream every time I see the word “social” on a brand. Do Facebook users talk about how they use their “social utility”? Then why does Facebook advertise their tool as a “social utility”? Use language that makes sense to average people.
- $30,000 is not a lot of money for a name when the economics match the price. If this company can be a multi-million dollar company, the value of an easy to remember name can easily reach five figures. Consider how much a company like Nabisco would pay a firm to name a new type of cracker.
- Finally, “Phone Tag” seems to me to be a tough name. It has so many immediate connotations that they might cloud the true use of the system.
- Try and do it yourself. You can come up with all kinds of cool names with word fragments.
This is great stuff to hear…being in the midst of this process, this post and definitely all the reader feed back is helpful.
Cheers.
How might I go about getting this t-shirt?
i wonder if they use Ajax, if they do maybe fonetagg is more appropriate ;p
25k-100k+ for a powerful, easily remembered and brandable .com like this is a no brainer for any one/company serious about long term success . . . and especially so for a company who has raised–or want to in the future–millions of dollars.
In fact, just their own use has already multiplied the value of PhoneTag.com to at least 10x what they paid for it . . . even if their company fails sometime in the future.
It’s good to see someone writing here about the importance of a good name for a company and yet not surprising to see the whining of “squatters suck” by the “entitled few”. I guess if I owned the hyphenated version of a domain name like book-bot.com, I’d be bummed too, but I’d just have to face the facts that someone had thought of my idea first. Having bought from the owner of bookbot.com before, I’d bet they’d sell for a reasonable price though. Oh well.
Loving how the poll shows a majority believe it is worth 10x as much.
Get in line folks, I can lead you all to lots of $300,000 domains
I really agree with this post, we took our time, while still in early development to source a good name.
We are an online travel site with extensive network features and booking availablity, therefore the name Off2.com was a good choice for us.
$60 on snapnames.com through an expiry domain auction and hey presto!
It gives us so many options for marketing in our travel sector that their neednt be a rush as often seen.
People don’t get it. You can have what title you want. - The product and services makes the company not the name.
It took us 3 weeks to come up with a domain / name that worked. Somehow we did it and we only had to buy the domain from a registrar for 6.95 per year
Chris Mancini
http://www.propertystampede.com
james #31 - I’ll sell you http://www.BookSeats.com for your online travel business.
tete
I would like to thank everyone for all of the comments. The most interesting thing about the domain buying business (for us) is that the prices paid and what something is worth is all over the place.
Domains are the real estate of today however unlike real estate where it is easy to use comparables to do pricing, how do you compare one name to the next. There are so many metrics that it makes it very hard. Additionally with the high variation of prices paid it just comes down to what the domain is worth to the business. In our case I would not be surprised if the name change is worth millions over the next few years. So while $30,000 is a lot of money for a good name I think it is cheap.
My next business will have to have something to do with domains as they will only continue to increase in value.
Jamie
James Siminoff, Founder
SimulScribe now PhoneTag
There is also an argument that if a business is not going well, a name change may help to distract attention. Siminoff may now have to go back and change every ‘ad’ he has left in the comments of blog posts about Nuance, SpinVox etc…..
I have a question guys !!!
Which name sounds better and which name people can remember easily?
FotoShoto or FotoKong ?
James could you reach out to us. I’d like to interview you for DomainNameNews.com . . THANKS ! Adam Strong (my name might be familiar to you
Btw you forgot to sign your post with your new domain !
John,
There is a great thing about having a company that the product is sold entirely on the web. If someone goes to an old blog post and they see a comment from me and click on it, they will be forwarded to a page that says “SimulScribe is now PhoneTag” and then proceeds on to the PhoneTag site. That is the magic of the internet…
Adam,
I will contact you now. As for the domain, oops, corrected it now.
Jamie
James Siminoff, Founder
PhoneTag
Test
So nice to see a post about the importance of a good name.
If anyone wants free advice about naming a company, please check out TheNameInspector.com. Non-free advice is also available.
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It is great !
Thanks
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Email team@simulscribe.com for the t-shirts (the team@phonetag.com email goes live this weekend)
Jamie
James Siminoff, Founder
PhoneTag
what’s stumblemusic.com worth?