Bad names for startups can cause big problems

(written by Lawrence Krubner, however indented passages are often quotes)

Embarrassing:

While building the technology we didn’t spent (nearly enough) time on a name for the company. At some point we decided we understood the basics concept and reached a point where the question of a name for the company/service needed to be answered. We did the usual brainstorming, mind mapping, finding inspiration elsewhere, but couldn’t get to a name we felt comfortable with.

One day I decided we should just pick something. Not having a name was blocking our release schedule (we needed a web site!). We already knew we would do iOS development (Android was on our radar too), so a lot of associations we made were somehow related to Apple.

We ended up combining a color with an apple, pink and Elstar (the Elstar is a famous Dutch apple).

The star was interesting as it would fit perfectly in certain aspects of our service and made a good icon. It sounded ok, although we did worry if English speaking customers would know how to spell it (PinkelStar, PinkleStar?). We grabbed the domain and had ourselves a name.

In the fall of 2010 we had our first public appearance. We got featured on VentureBeat, drew more attention to our site and got other sites to publish about our new service. We landed a $500K funding round and were building on the service. We got developers to test the service and provide us valuable feedback. The first apps were finding their way into the different marketplaces with PinkelStar integrated.

And then it all happened. After a TechCrunch post someone made an smart remark about our company name. Were we aware that ‘pinkeln’ actually means ‘to pee’ in German, and that we effectively managed to call our company ‘Peeing star’? WTF?

Our company is based in Amsterdam, Germany is our neighboring country. But none of us realized what PinkelStar translated to in German. We were hoping that developers would pick up on the benefits of our service. Instead that one comment lead to an entire new discussion.

The comment got picked up by ‘a few’ German Twitter users, and a ‘peeing’ storm was born. Hundreds of retweets appeared and traffic to our main website surged to a level twenty times higher than usual.