Finding Momentum

Hsiu-fan and I have been crack­ing away (well, he much more than I) at a new Rails web appli­ca­tion. The con­cept? Easy, intu­itive online signup sheets (a la mysignups.com, minus the circa-1996 look).

We had a heck­uva time find­ing a name. What do you call this thing? We wanted a name that eas­ily gave away the program’s func­tion­al­ity with­out being too much of a mouth­ful. We wanted it to be.. well.. not dry, drab or bor­ing. We wanted it to be easy to remember.

We decided to look for a domain name first, then name it accord­ingly (the guys at 37signals don’t agree with this, argu­ing that you can always rig up a domain name after the nam­ing fact).

But the prob­lem was that every sin­gle domain with the men­tion of “signup” in it was, well, long gone. We decided to brain­storm, draw­ing up a mind map with clus­ters of words involv­ing “time” “slot” “signup” “sheet” and adding all dif­fer­ent per­mu­ta­tions of the such. It looked some­what like <image to come>.

Then we stepped back and thought, what is this app allow­ing us to do? We wrote down a bunch of ideas: sign­ing up, com­ing together, ral­ly­ing the troops, join­ing an event…

Hsi­u­fan sug­gests, wejoinin. I check the domains, and it’s clear!

Adblog Snark Hunt­ing offers an analy­sis of the “Zune” name. A good look at the name/branding indus­try and how much thought goes into some­thing that is triv­ial at first glance.