Kraig Swensrud on Naming

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Before I tell you my story about Kraig Swensrud, it's worth noting my first interaction with naming things and why I think it's so important. Keep in mind, I'm not talking about branding nor positioning...just names which is an art in itself. My first experience was back in 4th grade. As I mentioned in About Me, I came from a poor background and back then UCLA had a summer camp program they called UniCamp where they took kids from the ghetto and took them up for a week to Big Bear, a mountain area outside LA. (What a swell idea! If that sounds like a recipe for disaster, you know where this story is going.)

I got onto a schoolbus in South Central, and being alone, braced myself for the adventure. Suffice to say, I was a little nervous. Anyhoo, me and 300 boys about my age convened in the campsite and each found their respective troop. Our first assignment was to pick a name for our group, and so we like all the other campers assembled started coming up with the traditional names boys our age might nominate: lions, tigers, bears, you get the gist, fierce animals to establish our fierceness.

But our camp counselor was not your typical leader. One might also say, he had a hard time reading the room. In fact with his long blonde hair and hippie demeanor akin to John Lennon, he had a different idea for the group name. One inspired by a movie he had seen that summer.  When the time came for each troop to declare and proudly yellout their name, he promptly named us: The Merry Pranksters.

That didn't go over so well. In fact, later that night as the camp leader slept alone under the wooden A-frame, my fellow troopmates proceeded to haze him by pouring buckets of icy cold water they had carried from the nearby creek. Our camp counselor left the next day, but we were stuck with the name. Be careful with names.

Back to Kraig and his lesson. Kraig was SVP Product Marketing during the second half of my time at Salesforce; the startup he had founded had been acquired by our employer. He was (and is) a great communicator and at heart, a serial entrepreneur. So when I told him I was thinking of leaving the company to do my own startup, his ears perked up and he volunteered to give me some advice.

I sought out the counsel of dozens of colleagues those last couple months, and the help I wanted from Kraig was around naming and positioning my startup. I came up with a logo for my event SaaS based  on the beanie cap and venti coffee cups that I was known for (see homepage photos). Then proceeded to come up with a couple dozen ridiculous names including BeaniEventi...notice the embedded word Event. In the nicest and most abrupt way, Kraig put an end to such nonsense and gave me a couple pieces of great wisdom around naming and positioning:

• keep the name short
• make it obvious and include the market you're going after
• spend a little more to get a .com
• keep the tagline short, snappy and aspirational

All good advice. Evently was taken already, but he liked what I came up with, and we had some brand recognition for awhile:

Eventley.com

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