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- Rich Barton (Co-Founder of Expedia & Zillow) on how to name your company
Rich Barton (Co-Founder of Expedia & Zillow) on how to name your company
“There’s an easy way and hard way. You can use a literal word (hotels dot-com). You can use an existing word but make a new application of it (Apple). Or you can invent a new word.”
As he explains, there are pros and cons to each approach:
1. Use a literal word
“The easy way is if you're building a travel site to call it hotels. com…Every category has a literal word dot-com. The advantages to that are it's easy to explain to people what you do. And the disadvantages to that are you don't own any brand equity,”
2. Take a known word and give it a new meaning
”Apple Computer. Amazon. That’s viable, but you have to build a new definition for that word, which those companies obviously did successfully.”
3. Make up a new word
“The hard way, and the best way is to make up a word, which is super hard because you have to tell people what the word means,”
“You have to define it for them. But once you do, you own that word. The definition of that word is yours and only yours.”