Certainty with branding

Determining the direction of the business is understandable. And then what? What to do next? Immediately sit down and write code? "This is stupid," I told myself. Why stupid - did not say. Before writing code, you need to do a lot of “smart” and “right” things. Write the code still have time. Becoming an entrepreneur, win a programmer. Think like a businessman, not like a coder. Business - this is not your bad luck. Do not think about technology, think about the product. The main thing is people, not technologies. Well, and so on. I thought a lot of beautiful mottos and aphorisms with which I buzzed my ears in the era of my work for hire. And I took all these beautiful words for my “understanding of business”. It turned out, to put them into practice is not very much what happens. And then I decided to start at least to name my company. Somewhere in the subconscious with the name associated the term "brand", the study of which I started.

Brand is the most important

Having opened Wikipedia and found that the word “brand”, it turns out, translates from English as “brand” and originated from the Old Norse verb brandr - “burn”, I was so glad that it was not clear that I decided that it was the branding I should think of first in all details. Having found articles and even books (who would have thought - even folios with 600 pages are written on this subject) about branding, I learned that branding is one of the most important activities of an organization. Almost all activities, ranging from marketing and PR, to product management, were involved in activities related to branding. Moreover, it turns out that it is very important to keep the brand consistent throughout its life, otherwise ay-ay-ay, users will get confused and worthless to your brand.

In the wake of my blinding, I firmly believed in the primacy of branding over all other business activities (including even coding), and improperly organized branding considered the main reason for start-ups to fail, and start - ups are extremely common . It was already later that I read in other articles and books that the most important activities in business are marketing, design, public relations, business process and risk management, apart from team building, user support and finding the right partners. Fortunately, I did not read catering or welding articles, otherwise they would have been added to many of the most important business activities. As a result, from all this history, I drew a very useful conclusion for my future education:
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The statement about the exceptional importance of any activity has at least some meaning only if it comes not from the one who earns a living.

Well, or every sandpiper praises its own swamp, if we turn to popular wisdom.

Uncertainty is the norm for entrepreneurship

Almost all tutorials on becoming an entrepreneur unanimously assert that an entrepreneur needs to get used to uncertainty , otherwise it is better for him to do something else. So I began to get used to uncertainty, being engaged in what is not known, not understanding how this will directly affect the results that I will receive in the near future. For me, a coder who has the ability to feel the immediate results of his work, such an activity was unusual, but I consoled myself that “but I am an entrepreneur, but they should be incomprehensible.” Fortunately, I just read Business from scratch by Eric Rees, who turned my twisted brains back on track.

Uncertainty definition

Uncertainty is external and internal. External uncertainty is a property of the environment in which activities are conducted, for example, the weather, the whims of users, the exchange rates and the timing of delivery of the Russian Post. This is an objective uncertainty, with which nothing can be done except to try to minimize its impact on its activities. Internal uncertainty is your lack of understanding why and why you are doing something. This is your attitude to your activity, which depends on you and only you.

So, when they talk about entrepreneurial uncertainty, it is the external uncertainty that is meant, and not internal. To get used to internal uncertainty is akin to becoming a zombie sectarian — dancing naked in front of a bonfire so that the rain god sends the end to drought. Well, of course not! Thanks to Rhys, I realized that:

The task of the entrepreneur is the endless transformation of external uncertainty into internal certainty.

If you do not know why you are doing something, do not do it, but find out whether it is necessary to do it, and if necessary, then why. All ingenious is simple!

First create, then brand

Receiving the right to trust my intellect and intuition, I realized that branding nafig I did not give up at this stage. Quite the contrary - while you are experimenting with early users, investments (financial and temporary) in a brand are at great risk, because if your hypotheses prove to be wrong (which is more than likely due to external uncertainty), then your brand will create another user’s feeling sad product. First, gain the approval of users, make sure that you have created something truly useful, and only then fix with the brand of the brand your discovery from now on and forever. Uncertainty (being unknown) has its advantages!

How do you call a ship, so it will sail

It turned out that at this stage I need only a name. What for? Yes, at least in order to register a domain. And to track the effectiveness of the virality of the service, which in my case represents one of the criteria for user satisfaction. So, having understood why I need a name, there naturally arose the requirements that it must meet. By the way, the criteria that I derived independently turned out to be suspiciously close to those recommended by experts .

Uniqueness

To track the spread of the name on the Internet, I need a mechanism to easily find all the links to me, and the non-unique name will litter the search engine results. If Google returns less than 5 thousand pages when searching with such a keyword, then the name can be considered unique.

Unallocated domain

Although some experts argue that the vacancy of a domain with your name is not a problem, because you can easily buy it when your company fires (and if it does not, then you don’t need a domain), but I personally feel more comfortable going to my domain, but not some kind of instagr.am (the original Instagram domain, by the way, the Armenian domain).

Short

Short names are easier to pronounce and remember. And it sounds better. Especially in most languages ​​(but not in English!), The shorter a word is, the more primary and important it is - no wonder that in most languages ​​the most important pronoun “I” rarely exceeds two letters and one syllable.

Unambiguous pronunciation

If the site is aimed at a monolingual audience (that is, for some reason it does not want to be global), then it will be pronounced the same way, but in the context of globalization, the name may be distorted, which worsens its findability in search engines. How to Russify - Microsoft or Microsoft? And maybe melkomyagkie? I have a general language site - when in the future I will be teaching other languages, I must take into account the difference in the pronunciation of sounds in different languages.

Energy

I recently read a book about the Third Reich , where there was a reasoning that if Hitler’s father had not changed his name from Schicklgruber to Hitler, you see, there would be no Nazism - it’s somehow difficult to introduce yourself into exaltation, shouting “Heil Schicklgruber!” I want a name that you can safely use as a battle cry. Here, by the way, shortness is indirectly involved.

beauty

Well, the subjective factor - where do without him. I should like the name, but I have a special sensitivity to the names.

Ranging

I came up with a few names that could somehow fit the language service, and the choice was made by the solution matrix already described:

Name	Unique?	Domain	Short?	Definitely pronounced?	Vigorously?
Govoriteka	Yes	Free	Not	No, an Englishman will break his tongue	Not
Madrelingua	No, in Italian means "native language"	.RU free	Not	Yes	Not
Nomix	No, 1.8M records from google	Busy	Yes	Yes	Yes
Parlate	No, it means “speak” in Italian	.RU free	Yes	Yes	Yes
Parlix	Yes	.RU free	Yes	Yes	Yes
WordsLive	Not	Free	Not	No, W is an ambiguous letter.	Not
Wortgut	No, German means “vocabulary”	.RU free	Yes	No, W is an ambiguous letter.	Yes
Yomix	No, 43K entries from Google	.RU free	Yes	Yes, although Y is a bit doubtful.	Yes

So, the best of these names is Parlix . The name is not only the most suitable for the requirements, but the one I like the most because it is multidimensional. First, the verb parl- in Romance languages ​​refers to a conversation (parleu wus?), In particular, from the Italian "parli" translates as "speak", and x can be simultaneously viewed as X from mathematics, Roman ten (hint at 10 languages ​​that I know) or traditional use in the sense of eXtended. Hooray! Register a domain and book accounts in social networks.

Naming-as-a-Service

On the Internet, with the help of sas4us , which advises start-ups on its getStart website, the VotImenno service for inventing a name for a company was discovered. Personally, I didn’t like their approach, if only because he is not able to come up with a name like Parlix , but only with composite names like Proplata24, which he throws at you in large numbers, and you have to dig into them yourself - as if the whole essence of inventing a name in quality selection, not generation. Anyway, the procedure I described is well automated, so if you wish, you can make a naming startup by first offering the client one of 10 naming templates .

Conclusion

The only thing you need to strive for in your work, be it your business or work for your uncle , is a certainty in answering the question “why am I doing this?”. Work done without an answer to this question runs the risk of being meaningless. A successful company is one that only does what is needed and spends its main efforts on finding out what needs to be done and what is not. Of all branding, I only needed a name at this stage, because branding plays a major role in attracting users on a large scale, which makes sense only when you have proved yourself to real users that you are doing what they like.

And yes, Business from scratch is a great book. Many thanks to Eric Ris !