Should You Change Your Startup Name?

When you are starting a new role as a CMO in a startup, one of the dilemmas you face during your first month is whether you should keep the company name or change it.

Why Should You Change Your Startup Name?

There are multiple reasons to change your startup name:

1. It doesn’t fit the brand promise
2. It is a generic word that will make your SEO efforts complicated and expensive
3. It worked when the company launched, but it is not relevant now that you plan to grow
4. Your target audience confuse it for another company with a similar name

Famous Brands That Changed Their Names

Many great companies have done it before. Here are a few examples:

1. BackRub > Google
2. Cadabra > Amazon
3. Matchbox > Tinder

And the list goes on.

Monday.com shared their journey of changing the company name from Dapulse to Monday.com in their Startup for Startup podcast, episode #78. It’s a great story, and I highly recommend listening to it (It's in Hebrew).

My Naming Story

When I joined HyperSpace as a VP of Marketing, I faced this dilemma. On the one hand, I wanted to re-consider the company name for SEO reasons. If you search for HyperSpace on Google, you will get almost 8M results. It means that it was complicated and expensive to stand out. On the other hand, the CEO & Co-Founder was in love with this name, the name reflected what the company does (if you have a creative mind and you read the website), and we wanted to move as fast as possible with the marketing efforts.

Nevertheless, the CEO was open-minded enough to consider it, and we started a frustrating journey of finding a name that would be better than HyperSpace.

We set 2 rules before setting off:

1. The whole process should take up to 2 weeks
2. The new name must have an available .com domain at a reasonable price

I've created a list of 100s of names, and we were brainstorming with a lot of super creative people to narrow down our list. The process was enriching, frustrating and funny at the same time. For example, I learned that companies that included the letter Z in their names were unsuccessful. Anyway, it turned out that the biggest challenge was the domain name. It was impossible to find an available .com domain for the names we considered an option. Eventually, we decided to keep the name HyperSpace, but the company did not survive long enough to determine whether it was a good decision or not.

Before Making a Company Name Change

1. Complete your Go-to-Market plan - Understand your buyer persona and their needs, decide on your target market, and analyze the competitive landscape.
2. Internal alignment - Keep the management team involved in the process.
3. Allocate resources - Renaming your startup takes time and money. Make sure you have it.?

Did you ever face this dilemma? If so, please share!

Do you know a successful company with the letter Z in its name?