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Comment by phillco | Hacker News Reader

I think the reason for your success is that Ninite is simply an excellent product. If your product is truly great, it'll usually overcome problems in naming, promotion, design, etc. (I remember there was a Joel on Software post about how Naptster's UI design was terrible, but it didn't matter, because it was Napster). But, we'll never know how successful Ninite could have been had it been easier to remember.

Of out curiosity, how did you come up with the name? EDIT: Ah. http://blog.ninite.com/post/620277259/how-ninite-was-named-b...

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I bet we'd be exactly as successful with a better name. Are there examples of products where an awesome name made them into successes? Or even had a significant impact?

I'm sure you could tank a product with an offensive name or something that required weird unicode characters. But I think it's only worth getting a passing grade on the name and then going for an A+ on the product.

I guess the argument is that if you're right on the margin a better name could tip you into winning. But I'd already consider a product a failure if it only gets to that middle ground on its own. If the name makes a difference I'd say you're not working on the right sort of problem.

It does make a difference for people: http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~cook/movabletype/archives/2007...

My hunch is that it also makes a difference for products, but I don't have any data on that...

> Are there examples of products where an awesome name made them into successes? Or even had a significant impact?

YouTube. What differentiated YouTube from all the other video sharing sites? A good name and logo.

I've got a hunch that there was a little more to it than just "a good name and logo."

For one, they tried hard to support every possible video format for upload (as opposed to, e.g., Google Video, which was much pickier about what it would accept). In general, they nailed the "just make it work" factor.

(Subjectively, I remember YouTube being the first site that made me think, "wow! video on the internet! it works!". Ironically enough, this is no longer really true -- half the time YT starts buffering part way through the video (sometimes never to go finish w/o a full page refresh), & the other half the time you get a disruptive pop-up covering 20% of the screen. Bah.)

For any product, the name is part of the "user story", although to a wildly different degree. In your case, the user story starts with "Joe finds and downloads your software". And the argument here, really, is how effectively "Ninite" as a name serves that part of the story.

The linked post seems to think it fails that step. You disagree.

I am not offering a conclusion to that argument, but just wanted to position the name debate in a less vague way.

I believe DailyBurn used to be called Gyminee until A/B testing showed a significant difference in conversion rate.

Pepsi Max built a whole market out of guys who didn't want to be seen asking for a "diet" soda.

From your linked article:

Naming is easy.

I think that statement is rather ironic, given the nature of this submission.

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