Cogito Optimus

In our old blog, I wrote about the Alexa traffic for Kawasaki’s Truemors, and how it compared to TrenchMice’s traffic.  Even though Alexa has become nigh worthless as a traffic metric, we were still stunned to see more than an order of magnitude difference between the two sites.

On July 23, “DennisG” posted a reply, in which he suggested that our branding was the problem:

I think the TrenchMice brand misses because it speaks to being a mouse in the trenches — not to the aspirations of people who would like to get ahead. The brand connotations are of people whispering in hallways, not of successful business people using a powerful tool from their community and their own smarts to get ahead.

The question - “what are you? a man or a mouse?” kind of says it all. I think you’d see more word of mouth marketing with a brand that people might aspire to.

We were in the middle of moving the blog to this location, so I didn’t reply to him at the time.

But talking about the naming of TrenchMice has been on my list of blog topics for some time.  So I’m going to write about that now, and answer DennisG in the process.

We didn’t have the benefit of The Name Inspector  when we named TrenchMice.  He started blogging about 15 days after we went live.  If I had to do it all over again, and he was in business, I’d buy him a steak dinner at Canlis and ply him with sufficient alcohol to get his help.  Hopefully he’s not a vegetarian, otherwise there would be a fatal flaw in this cunning plan.

We did the site naming all on our own, relying on only our own (limited) wits and resources.  Here’s the story.

In the beginning, there was InsideScoop

I started working on the idea that became TrenchMice in 2003.  I called it, “InsideScoop,”  because it was about employees sharing the inside scoop about their employers.  You can see an obvious lingering reference to this today — a “scoop” is the primary information about a company or manager.

InsideScoop.com was a great name!   But the domain was taken by what appeared to be a real company.  (Interestingly, both it and insidescoop.net are available now.  Sigh…)

We considered inserting hyphens into the name, or something else to keep the basic name but make the spelling unique.  At some point you cross a line when you do this, and you’re better off throwing it all away and coming up with a new name.  We crossed that point with insidescoop, and so we decided to look for a new name.

The new name search

Note for the entrepreneurial newbie: Coming up with a good company or site name is hard.  (I got lucky naming Singingfish — it happened in a flash and was a great name.)  In the end, we considered easily over 1,000 names to get to TrenchMice.

We went around and around the question of what we wanted the new name to do.  Which was, briefly, all of the following:

• It had to be memorable and easy to spell, as we would be a b-to-c service
• It should convey, “inside info about the working world.”
• Ideally, it should connect with the notion of, “employees reporting on what’s going on inside their firm.”  Less ideal would be the notion of, “anyone reporting on what’s going on in a company they do business with, or know well.”
• It should convey insight , not news. The former would be up-to-the-minute, might carry multiple news feeds, and be impartial.  The latter might also carry news, but might not be up-to-the-minute, and would carry opinion. (Yes, there’s an overlap…)
• It should be serious, but not deadly serious
• It should convey both positive and negative news
• It shouldn’t be obscenity in a foreign language
• The fewer the syllables, the better
• Although we were designing an international site for any industry, our initial thrust would be in the Pacific Northwest high-tech industry.  The reason is simple — it’s where we are, and you gotta start where the startin’s easy.  So if the name was going to skew, it should skew to the Pacific Northwest and/or geekdom — but not so much that it would curtail future growth.
• It should sound cool.  We didn’t have N years of linguistic study and experience, but we knew what sounded good to us.

A couple of other points are that we refused to buy a name from a domain squatter, and we didn’t have the funds to hire a marketing research firm.

This is an easy list to satisfy, right?

Our search went through different (and overlapping) phases, highly correlated with our frustration level…

On target

Our first instinct was to work on names conveying exactly what the site was about. We came up with names like: opinion8r.com, myreput8n.com, yourreput8n.com, youcalledit.com, opinionator.biz, datally.com, and zoomtally.com.

None of us especially liked names with embedded numbers. They sounded like we were trying too hard. Names with made-up words (opinionator, infomator, etc.) didn’t sound right to our ears. A combination of trying too hard, and a, “What? Huh?” characteristic that didn’t bode well. If we were scratching our heads, imagine what Jane Randomuser would do.

We very briefly considered domains other than .com and .net.  But as so many other companies have concluded, relegating our site to third-tier real estate wasn’t a good tradeoff.

What’s interesting is how unsuitable all of these names were, even though we were trying very hard to come up with a deliberately on-target name. It’s as though the actions of trying to be on-target kept us locked in uncreative names. All of these name categories had names we didn’t like, but the “on target” names were uniformly uninteresting.

Word plays

We started off considered interesting combinations of two or more words.  Coldluna.com, firsthandbuzz.com, divewithin.com, tallycue.com, blueammo.com,  joekur.com,  sidefish.com, loudpin.com, tuneafish.com, etc.  They were all available domains, and were memorable to varying degrees.

(I couldn’t believe that tuneafish.com was available!  It’s taken now, but tuneafish.net is still available.)

We discarded all of them because they didn’t have much of a connection to what the site was about, and were in some cases irreverent to the point of being silly.

Italian or Latin phrases

Some of us were nuts for HBO’s Rome. (And some of us still are.  “When I am done speaking, you will walk away.” )  So early on, we investigated Italian and Latin words related to searching, knowledge, employer, etc.

Did you know that, in Italian,

• “Verifichi” means verify?
• “Ricerca” means search?
• “Osservi all’interno” means look inside?
• “le informazioni dell’azienda” means company information?
• “esamini” means examine?
• “cercatore di verità” means truth seeker?

It turns out that domain-parking and every-single-word-domain-is-already-taken problems exist in other languages, too!  Every good Italian or Latin name we thought of was already taken.  (Early Latin favorites were sum.us and summ.us…  But they were taken and/or squatted upon.)

Anagrams

We thought an anagram might be intrinsically interesting, easy to remember, and less likely to be already taken.  So Fritz wrote a program to generate anagrams from syllables, use them in a DNS lookup, and report on which ones were available.

Most of these were ugly.  Names popped out like wimiw.com, bavab.com,  reyyer.com,  pojop.com, etc.  In most cases, their consideration was very brief.

Except for one name.  For a while, “lumul.com” was the front-runner.  It was easy to remember, hinted at illuminating the way with knowledge, was only two syllables, etc.   Then, one day a friend remarked that when he said “lumul,” the word disappeared into the back of the throat.  It had a very soft ending – too soft, in his opinion.  We changed our minds and discarded it for that reason.

Letter doubling

Digg got us thinking about letter doubling.  It’s a way to use a word for a site name, but in a way that can still be DNS-unique.

We briefly considered names like iitipii.com, iinnffoo.com, and ttiipp.com.   In the end, we saw that letter doubling didn’t get us to where we wanted to go.

Imagery (good and bad)

I went through a phase where I wanted a name, dammit, and I wanted it to be easy to remember, dammit, so let’s just pick a goofy name and move on, dammit.

From this frustration came names like dogphart.com and screamingdonkey.com.  But common sense prevailed in the end.

Silly words

Some names, for different reasons, sounded interesting.  Sometimes it was just a whim.  Names like arveeq.com,cliqd.com, gorph.com, kniph.com,  indepinion.com, infogotto.com,  janswer.com, inphlate.com, and inzyde.com.

In the end, we decided they were too silly, or too hard to spell or remember, or just too “out there.”

TrenchMice

In April, Karen came up with TrenchMice.com and TrenchMouse.com.  They were generated from the notions of:

• WWI trench warfare being a metaphor for intra-corporate or inter-departmental conflict
• A rodent being synonymous for an informer (but we hoped for this in a good way…)
• A mouse being smart, cute, and friendly
• And with mice/mouse you’ve got the navigating the maze of information

Also, they were only two syllables, didn’t rely on unusual spellings, and were catchy.

Trenchmouse was slightly harder to pronounce than trenchmice.  The mouth and lip movement you go through made the former slightly more work to pronounce than the latter. For that reason, we ditched trenchmouse.com and focused on trenchmice.com.

I wondered if the name might be too cute.  One early logo design was a mouse with a large magnifying glass, and I countered that maybe we should show a rodent belly-up, dying of dysentery in a WWI trench.  But I didn’t know if rodents could catch dysentery, and I also knew that I’m sometimes not exactly in the middle of the bell curve.  (My wife will attest to this.)  So we tried it out on our friends.

Short version: Everyone liked it. So TrenchMice stuck.

Over time, we’ve chosen more of an imagery emphasis on “trench” than on “mice”.  E.g., the logo is based on trenches, and the tag lines are about “insight from the trenches.”  The name has worked well for various ancillary uses, and we’ve been happy with what we’ve heard from people. (Except for DennisG.)

Reflecting on the search

It would be easy to dismiss some phases as being a waste of time. For example, the anagrams. But on reflection, every phase was worthwhile and necessary for us. Each one brought us closer to the final result, and we had to go through each one in order to cross it off our list.

I’m not saying that everyone should go through the phases that we did!  But I’m saying that we needed to go through the phases that we went through.  And when you name your site or company, you’ll go through your own phases, unless you’re very lucky.

It is certainly possible (likely?) that we could have hit the mark earlier with more linguistic knowledge or analysis.  We could have avoided some dead ends.  Perhaps one of you is reading this now and thinking, “Anagrams?  What a stupid idea!   I’d never waste my time considering those!”  Maybe so. OTOH, you might spend time on other alternatives that we didn’t think to look at.  Certainly, I wish we had started out at or closer to the end point, but I don’t know how to do that.  You either do that, or you don’t, and in our case we weren’t that lucky.

I find it fascinating that the final chosen name did not come from our efforts to try to come up with an on-target name!   It name from someone who looked at the desired brand connotations more creatively and ambiguously.

The bottom line is, naming a site or company is a process that you just have to go through.  Read and think and research,  and get help if you can.  But even so, you’ll probably still need more time than you would expect to, to find a good name.  Some of it is science, but there’s a lot of art and gut feeling that comes into play.

The TrenchMice brand

DennisG’s observations are all correct, at face value.  But I think he misses a bigger picture.

The relationship of a brand name to its image isn’t simple.  99% of the explanations for why a particular name works make sense a posteriori, but I’m sure they weren’t so obvious a priori.  Examples:

• The brand image of O’Reilly is great. And has nothing to do with some Irish guy’s last name.
• TechCrunch is a highly regarded brand with an barely related name. (Yeah, it’s tech.  But it’s a crunch?)
• GigaOm makes sense once you know the author’s name, and if you know a little about electricity.  But if you don’t know the site, you couldn’t tell me what GigaOm was.
• The last time I checked, RealNetworks doesn’t manufacture network gear.

I’m not saying it wouldn’t be great if a name conjured up the best possible brand image when you first heard it.  Sure.  But if our site becomes “the” place to go for inside information,  it’ll do great as long as the name is reasonably on-target.  There’s an image/functionality loop here, and you can inject into the loop at multiple points.

I look at this as a bell curve.  At one end are names like insidescoop or linkedin, and at the other end are names like dogphart or tuneafish.  We want to be at one end, avoid the other end, and in the vast middle are names that will hit the mark in most, but not all, ways.  And you have to remember that if the site isn’t useful, no amount of branding will make it successful.

When someone hears, “TrenchMice,” I don’t think the first thought is, “am I a man or a mouse?” Most will think it’s an interesting name, and when they see the tag line, they’ll get the notion of, “insight from the trenches”.  If they remember the site for that reason, the name will have done its job.

TrenchMice is a very good name for the site, and I’ve been happy with how we’ve been able to use the components of it in our marketing, tag lines, and associated marks. I wish I could make the story of its creation sound more profound, but this is how we did it.  YMMV.

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UPDATED August 19: This post required about six hours of editing, and I got sloppy by the end of it. I neglected to document one name category, the “on target” group, and I added them today. I also added a fourth notion that generated the name, “TrenchMice,” which I found this morning while rooting around in my old email.