Stories
How real companies found, paid for, or changed their names, and longer pieces on naming. Every fact in a name story comes from the sources listed with it.
- ArticleThe Radio Test: Why Your Business Name Fails Before Anyone Ever Sees It
A name doesn't live on paper, it lives in the ear. Why most founders misjudge their own names, and how to test one before you commit.
- Name storyA seed-stage startup spent most of its funding on one domain
He renamed the product Friend and bought friend.com for $1.8 million, nearly three-quarters of the $2.5 million he had raised.
- Name storyA spin-off outgrew the site named after its founder, then replaced it
In June 2011 the company spun off its gaming streams as a separate site, TwitchTV.
- Name storyInstagram started life as a check-in app named after bourbon
Systrom and Mike Krieger dropped everything but photos and renamed the app Instagram, from "instant camera" and "telegram".
- Name storyThe name promised an air mattress and breakfast, and soon offered neither
In March 2009 the founders shortened the name to Airbnb.
- Name storyThe name is a sentence the founders hoped people would say
Ohanian came up with Reddit one day in the university's Alderman Library, as in "I read it on Reddit".
- Name storyThe browser needed three names to get past two trademark clashes
On February 9, 2004, Mozilla renamed the browser Firefox, another name for the red panda.
- Name storyA gold mining company owned the domain, so Echo Bay became eBay
Omidyar shortened it to eBay and took ebay.com.
- Name storyThe world's best-known domain started as a typo
In a September 1997 brainstorm, fellow student Sean Anderson suggested googolplex, Page shortened it to googol, and Anderson checked whether the domain was free, typing it as google.com by mistake.
- Name storyIts first name sounded like "cadaver" over the phone
Bezos dropped Cadabra within months and settled on Amazon, after the biggest river in the world, for what he meant to be the biggest bookstore in the world.
- Name storyTheir first-choice name belonged to a toilet paper company
They went through words containing "nv" until Jensen Huang suggested building on invidia, Latin for envy.
- Name storyA Bronx ice cream with a made-up Danish name sued a copycat, and lost
Reuben Mattus invented Häagen-Dazs, a name meant to sound Danish.