[actual contents of super-secret, internal fanpop email]
From
Subject: fanhound!
it's available!
FanhOUND and a dog as our mascot!
doooood
Coming up with a name for a business is a pain. And coming up with a business name AND an available domain name? Doubly so. Early on we considered going the Web 2.0 route. Had we done that you might be surfing on a site called “Oogloo”, “Mondoblotto” or some such nonsense.
Fortunately we settled on having “fan” be part of the name early on. But fan- what? The possibilities were (sorta) endless. Each time we thought we had a winner, we’d rush over to instantdomainsearch.com and punch in the domain to see if it was still available. Fantabulous? Taken. Fantropolis? Ditto. Fantacular? Gone. Unbelievable.
If we uncovered a domain that was available, we’d jump up and down, high-five each other and celebrate like we’d won the state lottery no matter how bad the name. At various points in time the following contenders had us positively giddy: fanstations, fanslot, fanposts, fanpop, fanbase, fanhub, fanlinx, fanspy, fanbeat, fantown, fanedge, fanpage, fancast, fanpicks, fansof. For a little while I was particularly enamored by “fanglow”. Dave Lu was partial to “fanfresh”. Cliff liked “fanbase”. Of course, after the initial euphoria, the lingering suckyness of these names would soak in (but only after we plunked down $10 to buy the domain).
I was especially proud when I came up with “aficionutto” (a nice little mashup off aficionado and nut). Thankfully Dave Lu hated it.*
For a little while our site was called “Fansters”. I don’t think that name ever sat well with any of us but it was the best we could come up with.
Thank goodness one day Dave Lu came up to me and said, “I’ve got it…Fanspots!” It was pretty much unanimous that that was the name to go with – though we did give second consideration to “Fanfresh”. From there things just fell into place. The “spot” was quickly adopted as our logo and individual topics on the site were coined “spots”. Dave was especially happy that we had a verb to go with the name, “fanspotting”. It all came together perfectly.
So we spent the next 4 months building the site around the fanspots brand. Everything was going smoothly. And then, right before launch, a much larger corporation launched a sports social network called “Fanspot”. We were stunned. There was no way we could go head to head with another social network with nearly identical names.
We spent the next several hours scouring instantdomainsearch for a new name. Our morale was shattered. We had come so far only to be thwarted at the last moment by our now redundant brand.
Fortunately, the earlier brainstorming sessions had left us with a stockpile of other semi-suitable company names. Fanhound was out of the question. Dave suggested recycling “fanpop” which we already owned. We were somewhat wary of it initially, but I had always been fond of the “pop” brand as we had nearly gone with “globepop” as the name for our initial venture.
We slept on it, but by the next day, fanpop was sounding better and better. Dave had made a new logo which had us jazzed. But more importantly, the name was scoring well with the women-folk (which at the end of the day is what really matters).
So after some additional scrambling the site that was originally known as Fansters and then Fanspots was reborn as Fanpop.
So when someone asks rhetorically, ‘what’s in a name?’ I can only respond by saying, “A hell of a lot. Stress, laughter, care, disappointment, frustration, joy, ridiculousness and anguish. It’s all there”.
In the end a name is no trivial thing. The name needs to be that succinct nugget that encapsulates the attitude, energy and spirit behind the company. The name needs to be fun, short, memorable and unique. And the name needs to be something you can proudly stand behind. I think fanpop is more than qualified on all counts.
(what? you woulda rather been surfing a site called ‘aficianutto.com’? get outta here!)