Naymz That Make Us Insane

I was interviewed this week by Inc. Technology on what the biggest mistakes are in choosing a domain name. I wish I had remembered this doozie - Naymz, which is the epitome of everything WRONG with a name... It's seriously spelling-challenged (we'll give it an A+) and beyond annoying. The cutesy spelling is downright offensive to anyone who knows how to spell. The irony is that Naymz is a professional "Reputation Network" site (think LinkedIn wannabe) with a homepage that screams "Put your good name to work." Okay, Naymz how about you put your BAD name out of its misery.

Here are some other recent Head Scratcher submissions to our Name Shame Hall of Fame...

Technorganic (a seriously twisted website with a forced name that tries too hard and doesn't work... the "o" in Techno is silent when you merge it with Organic, so it sounds like Tech Norganic. Next time hire a naming firm... we know a really good one.)

Adayana

Sambazon (they export Acai from Brazil )

Norvax (Insurance Agents - sounds like a vaccine)

Hauppauge Digital

NuCo2

Frebreze

Far 4 (ceramics store)

Keep those bad naymz coming!

 

 

Comments

[Tom Drugan]

Hi Alexandra,

We appreciate the candid feedback about our brand. Here is a little more background from a founder's perspective....

When we first launched in the summer of 2006, our product was primarily a way to aggregate one's online identity (social networking profiles, blogs, photos, etc.) and get it at or near the top of Google for one’s first and last "name". As this concept revolved somewhat around vanity and self promotion, we thought it would appeal to a younger demographic. It was also a bit of a tribute to the company that all of the founders of Naymz came from (Orbitz). What we found was that mostly professionals were using our service rather than the Facebook/MySpace crowd, and so our product morphed into a professional social network last year.

Because our offering is heavily focused on helping our members achieve high search engine rankings for their names, we rely on our Google PageRank and inbound links from other sites. For us to start over on a new domain would have devastating effects in terms of the search engine positioning for our members (and ultimately traffic to our site). Despite this, changing our name in the future is not out of the question and something we are continuously evaluating.

So, you aren’t stating anything we haven’t heard before. Hindsight being 20/20, we most likely would have started with a different domain and company name. However, there are many successful companies that have overcome unconventional names (see Google, Flickr, Yahoo, del.iciol.us, Digg, etc.)

We are a small self-funded start-up, so we don’t have the coffers to go out and spend tons of money on a coveted domain name. However, despite our name, we are growing quickly and have received a lot of mainstream media coverage (WSJ, USA Today, ABC, NPR, etc.).

I hope this helps shed a little bit of light for you and your readers.

Cheers,
Tom Drugan
Naymz Co-founder