Here is a cut and paste of a Yahoo post:
I've gained a lot of respect for the investors on this board who zeroed in on Fatbrain.com as a possible name for the company a very short time after we thought up the idea.
By the way, I'm the CEO.
The process that led to it was really quite remarkable. None of us who were involved will ever forget it, and we had a lot of fun, but it's the kind of fun you only want to experience once.
First, we had to disclose the possibility of changing the name in our SB-2. Then, we hired Interbrand in San Francisco to help choose the name, and Goldberg Mosier O'Neill as our ad agency.
Naming on the net is now very tough. You need a short, distinct, memorable, easy-to-spell name that can become hip and cool. After hundreds of hours of sifting through various ideas, one of our own employees came up with fatbrain.com. I told her it was very clever but there was no way it could become the company name.
You can imagine my surprise when some very clever people on this board searched for the URLs we registered and Fatbrain.com caught their eyes. Although we didn't want that to happen, it was fascinating to see the responses. You can also imagine my surprise when the last question asked of me in a Bloomberg interview was "are you going to name the company Fatbrain?" (The reporter, Greg Chang, had been reading the Yahoo message board.) At the time, we hadn't conducted any testing so I didn't know.
Then we heard from some incredibly bright people at Interbrand and GMO that no name is more memorable; electricity flows as you say or hear it. It's distinct; you don't confuse it with any other name.
We quickly found that some people love it from the moment they hear it but a few react negatively. In our testing, however, no one (I have still not heard of one) forgot it after 7 days. And the vast majority of initially negative viewpoints had turned positive after 7 days.
I do want to thank everyone who sent name suggestions to us. We read them all and some were very, very clever. It was amazing how after reading through more than 3,000 names and testing perhaps 30, how such a simple one as fatbrain.com stood out so boldly in our testing. It reminded me of Mark Twain's famous quote: "The difference between the right word and the almost right word, is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."
Best regards,
Chris MacAskill |
