joey’s penguin name

If you have created a product with the aim of getting people to think about something for a long time (i.e. “penguins”), then you will need to make sure that it uses images and phrases that people can associate with the idea of “penguins” for a long time (i.e. “Joey’s Penguin Name”). If your team has come up with other names for your product (i.e. “The Product”), then this is an excellent opportunity for them to re-use those names in their marketing materials, again and again, so please keep using them!

When I first started writing this article, I thought it was a great idea to summarize the various names people choose for their products. It’s a common problem even in the startup community and has become a topic of discussion among us.

In fact, there are so many different names being used for products that we have come up with an informal list of the top 25:

• App Store – Retail / App Store / Apple/ iTunes/ iTunes Store

• Android Market – Private Market / Google Play (now called “Google Play”) / Android Market

• BlackBerry – BlackBerry (now called “BlackBerry Social”) / BlackBerry Messenger

• Chromebook – Chromebook (now called “Google Chrome”) / Chromebooks

• iPod Touch – iPod Touch (now called “Apple”/”iTunes”) / iPod Touches

• iPhone – iPhone (now called “iOS”/”iTunes”) / iPhone 4s/ 5/ 6/ 7, etc.

• Windows Phone 7 – Windows Phone 8 (formerly Windows Phone 7.5) / Windows Mobile 8.x & 9.x

Most of these terms are by no means mutually exclusive; if you mix one term with another, you can get different results — depending on how you use those terms and what else is around them. Even within the same group of products, there is always room for variation: a product may be both an app store and an online store; an online store may be both a product store and an app store, or your product may also be part of another system altogether (such as a mobile phone provider). By reducing the number of options we need to consider to only two or three, we can make it easier for us to make decisions about running our company. As well as being more concisely stated, this list also gets us closer to our goal of providing everything customers need in one place in order for them to succeed with our software: just having one name isn’t enough anymore; we need multiple names in order to differentiate ourselves from other software companies and from each other as well. The above list is also not intended to be all-inclusive — if you want something more specific than these top 25 choices, feel free to let me know! If you have any suggestions on which other words should be added or removed from the top 25, please do! –Joey

If you have a baby penguin, you’re probably going to give it a name. And if you want it to be remembered, you are going to want them to be memorable. You should probably use something that represents the personality of your team because that’s how people will remember your name over the years.

One of the most common requests I get for naming advice is for naming advice for girls — but no matter how hard I try, I can’t think of girls with names like “Becky B.” Or “Samantha S.” (I know there are some out there, but this seems like asking for “Girls Who Play Solo Piano in their Own Home.”)

Similarly, when I was in high school, my first pet was a dog named “Bessie Mae Pelgrum,” and one of the things I remember most about her is that she loved to cuddle up on my lap and make me laugh (I end up never getting rid of her). She survived the fact that she was abandoned by the last person who claimed her as their pet. So she is still with me today!

If you have a pet of any kind:

• Give it a name that describes what it does well (for example: “Lolita JoJo Pelgrum Lionheart!”)

• Think about what else might help people remember your pet better than its actual name would suggest (for example Lottie Lou Pelgrum Blue Flutter.)

If you don’t have any pets or don’t want any pets:

• Give your new product or service a name that suggests what it does best (for example Cleo Pelgrum Optimal Software Management)

What do you think? What names do we need?

I have a favorite quote that I like to use when developing new product names:

“In the time of the explorer, it was wise not to ask questions.” – Sir Richard Burton

“In the time of the explorer, it was wise not to ask questions.” – Sir Richard Burton

What does this really mean? It means we should never ask questions about what we are building. We should never think about what we are building — we should never even think about “what” our product is. It is important to remember this as we experiment with new names and as we work towards launching a product. Questions like “what is it?” or “what is its value proposition?” will distract from what truly matters: getting people excited enough to buy into our vision for the future and paying for the privilege.

Joe Taylor, who previously wrote “Recruiting Your First Developer” and is now the Product Manager at Github, has a very interesting article about this matter. It’s worth a read.

The most interesting part for me was about the generational gap between those who have been at it for a long time and those who are first-time developers. The first-time developers are more concerned with the technical details of their code, but only because they haven’t had much experience with the product. This is why they ask questions in forums like Stack Overflow that are too technical to answer in an email or over IM.

The second-time developer wants to know enough about the product to get a sense of its value proposition and be able to communicate it for themselves. They may not be able to answer all their own questions until they see how others have solved them (so might not even need the help of some third parties like us).

So that was my takeaways from this month’s newsletter:

As always, I hope you’ll enjoy reading! Let me know what you think in the comments below or on Twitter @zilabs 🙂