It’s official - we’ve named it “Amigo”
Jason was supposed to start the design work tomorrow and Gill and I still hadn’t picked a name for the web app. Argh!
The good news is that we had a meeting in London, so we had a good four hours in the car to brainstorm. Driving is perfect for brainstorming. In fact, I think most of Carson Systems’ good ideas have come from Gill and I driving somewhere and throwing around ideas.
We tried to think about what the software was going to do, and we came up with a bunch of short words. For some reason, I had the idea of trying to use a French word, instead of an English word. The web app is based on creating relationships, so we thought “Kiss” would be good, for which the French word is “bisou”. I thought the phonetic spelling of “Beezoo” would be good.
We knew what we didn’t want. We didn’t want a name that didn’t mean anything. A lot of people think that once you get a product to market and everyone knows what it is then the name doesn’t matter (like Google). We agree (if you’re Google) but we also think that using a name that is basically gobbledegook makes it harder in the beginning for people to identify with your product. And to some extent makes it harder for us as the creators to pin down a personality (hey we’re all about making life easy!). So we decided we didn’t want a ‘nonsense’ name.
The other thing we didn’t want was to find two words that meant something and put them together to make the app name example Drop and Send = DropSend, or Blink-Sale, Num-Sum. We like the name DropSend (and we like and use the other apps) but we didn’t want our name to be pigeonholed as a ‘type 1′ web app name. Come on, you have to roll with the times!
So from playing around with various words that conjoured up “relationships” we came up with “Amigo”, and we both liked it (a rare occurrence during this particular meeting).
After thinking hard about all the angles, and if there were any major flaws with the name, we decided to keep it.
Full steam ahead with the branding, maybe Jason will use these South American banana stickers as a starting point. Or maybe not!
[…] No, it’s not a Getting Real, Less is More, Ruby on Rails version of a porn portal (although that would be pretty interesting…), it’s a weblog devoted to documenting the building of Carson Systems‘ next web app. It’s been up for a while (I just hadn’t noticed it until now), so there’s already a lot of good content up there, including discussions on how they came up with the name and logo, how they settled on a freelane developer (next time, don’t forget MissingMethod!) and other important business decisions. […]
Pingback by SFW - Bare Naked App - The Whiny Nil at MissingMethod - Build Something Beautiful — May 9, 2006 @ 4:54 pm
Aha: “The web app is based on creating relationships”!!! I knew you’d have to slip sooner or later! ;)
Great name, by the way! Easy to remember, pronounce and market.
Comment by Olav — May 17, 2006 @ 11:09 am