Arielle Jackson: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah. So the first thing is to do your product positioning. I really believe that positioning dictates so much of your marketing and should always be the first thing you do. I had a student in my last class that I taught through Maven. I teach a class on brand strategy and he was I think a second or third time founder, who had never taken a class on brand strategy. He worked really hard. He was awesome. Anyway, at the end of the class and you kind of do this closing thing. And he goes, I'll never write a line of code without doing positioning first. And that was music to my ears. I think positioning comes first, but in any case, you do that first, and we'll talk about that in a little bit. And then you write a naming brief and it's really simple. What are you naming? Are you naming a company? Are you naming the product? Are you naming both? Usually if you're early stage company, you're naming both and they're going to have one name because you don't want people to have to remember two things. What do you want the name to communicate? So in that example of Seesaw, we wanted it to communicate young childhood. In the example of Eero, we wanted it to communicate design, being designed forward. It can be whatever you want it to communicate. What do you want to avoid? We don't want it to sound like this competitor, or we hate this word or whatever you want to avoid. What are the names of competitive and related products? And then are there other considerations? I worked with another First Round company that was operating in China. And one of the considerations was this has to be pronounceable for a native Chinese speaker. That's a very valid, additional consideration. And then there are seven criteria for names that always apply in my opinion. And you could add additional ones, like that Chinese speaking one would be an additional one. The seven are trademark, which is kind of obvious, can you use this? Are you violating someone else's trademark? And the second step with trademark is, do you need to proactively protect the name? Domain availability, so everyone gets hung up on getting a.com like maven.com got maven.com. It was an arduous process that Gogan wrote about on Twitter. But these days, you don't necessarily need the.com. Square operated on SquareUp for very, very long time. Lots of companies are operating on variants of a .com. So domain availability, distinctiveness. Is it memorable? Is it sound like someone else's name? That's I think one of the most important ones, just is it different and distinctive? Is it timeless? So there's a lot of naming trends. If you tell me Optimizely I could tell you what year was the company formed when it ends in LY. If you tell me a word like Flicker, I can tell you what year it was, because that was the naming trend to remove vowels. So I generally stay away from naming trends, because I want your company named not to sound dated in 10 or 20 years. The last one is it's kind of related to that. as the naming trend to remove vowels. So I generally stay away from naming trends, because I want your company named not to sound dated in 10 or 20 years. The last one is it's kind of related to that. What we talked about in the brief, what do you want the name to communicate? Which is the name reflective of your key messaging or does it somehow suggest an emotion or feeling that you're trying to convey, and then sound and ease of pronunciation. Is it fun to say, is it easy to say, how is it to spell? We almost named a First Round company a while ago Lattice which is now a different company that's doing quite well, but we didn't name it that because this was a company that was B2B sales was going to be their main channel. So they're going to be people on the phone being like, hey, I'm calling from Lattice and we went through this exercise and we're like lettuce? It's not so easy to say and spell. So we actually didn't name the company that and went with something else. But there's a company now doing quite well. You think that was the right move?…

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