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If Scoble Thinks He Found Bad Startup Marketing, He Ain’t Seen Nothing

If Robert Scoble thinks he found examples of poor startup marketing (Startups: your web site sucks) he ain’t seen nothingsmile_eyeroll.  How about picking a name that almost actively drives visitors away?

A few months ago Ben Kepes drew my attention to Viisibility, and I promptly called out their really poor naming:  how can they call their supply chain company Viisibility when there is already an ERP business named Visibility?

Now a friend who’s watching TechCrunch50 on site tells me he likes FairSoftware.  OK, let’s check them out… what is so innovative about Fair / Trade Show management software, and it does not even appear to be a  startup!

Hm… but Crunchbase says:

FairSoftware is the place to start and grow a virtual online business. It only takes a few clicks for software developers and website publishers to incorporate, hire and share revenue with other project members.

Bloggers, designers and developers can use FairSoftware to grow their business by working together online, without having to deal with the complexity and limitations of traditional corporations.

What’s wrong here?  They picked a name with only the .net domain available: fairsoftware.net .  Not too good… but perhaps not the end of the world – unless the .com version belongs to another software company.  Now it’s a disastrous choice.  Unless, of course if they already have a deal to acquire that domain.smile_omg

Update: iCharts is another one with the .net domain only, but it’s by far not as bad as FairSoftware.  icharts.com does not appear to be a real business, just a parked domain whose owner is probably holding out for a high price.  Hm… will they buy it?

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Comments

  1. I absolutely agree to your comments reg. start-up names -up names. The intentional misspelling of “Viisibility” will only drive potential customers to their competitors with one “i” (like everybody will type it).

    On FairSoftware I also think they should change their name, but I really like their concept. It was one of my favorites from the first day of TechCrunch50 today:
    http://www.begemann.org/techcrunch50-day-1/

  2. Hi,

    I know that it’s confusing for people when you don’t own the “.com” version of your site. But we had the choice between an ugly or/and misspelled name as a “.com”, or a good name as a “.net”. We picked the latter.

    Bottom line: all the good (and not so good) dot-com names are taken.

    Alain.
    CEO, FairSoftware .NET 🙂

  3. Alain,

    Not just taken. Taken by another SOFTWARE COMPANY…

    Thanks for coming over here 🙂

  4. In the spirit of FairSoftware, here’s what I offer you: if you find a better name than fairsoftware.net, which uses a “.com” domain, and we use it, we’ll give you shares in fairsoftware.

    After all, our entire company is based on that premise: trade shares for work.

    You’ll see that it’s not so easy. And once we decided to call our company XYZ Software, of course the “.com” was taken by a software company…

    Our offer stands: find a better name, become a shareholder.

    Alain.

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  1. […] have a choice: they should pick a name with available *.com name.  Last year I picked on a few TechCrunch 50 presenters with the wrong […]

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