What’s in a name
A few people have asked what was behind our name change announcement to the NZX yesterday.
MARKET RELEASE
1 May 2008
Xero is pleased to announce that its legal name has changed from Xero Live Limited to Xero Limited.
Background
When Xero was founded one of its early tasks was to find a .com internet address that was suitable for building a global brand. It had to be short, meaningful, memorable and be able to stand alongside existing brands in the business software space like SAP and MYOB.
Since its inception, Xero’s core brand has been based on the name Xero. This is reflected in its web address and its award-winning accounting software is also called Xero.
The directors were delighted to secure xero.com, but as Xero Limited was not available at the New Zealand Companies Office, they chose Xero Live Limited as the company’s legal name.
Recently the name Xero Limited became available, and has been secured. This tidies up an inconsistency and ticks off another small objective.
I was surprised the media picked it up but there is a back story that highlights a common startup issue.
When we started Xero (before it was called Xero) we needed a name. This was back in our rented week-to-week apartment in Willis Street. We actually registered Accounting 2.0 as a bit of a placeholder. Everyone (but me) hated it but time was ticking by and we still didn’t have a name.
As anyone who has started a web business knows, the biggest constraint in picking a name is picking a .com address. You have to have a good .com. For us with global aspirations we needed a great .com. We wanted it to be short, meaningful, memorable. SAP was taken and the likelihood of getting a good 3 letter .com was low. Ideally we wanted a 4 or 5 letter .com. We imagined where would be a few years ahead and wanted a domain that we wouldn’t be embarrassed of.
A friend of mine, Dot from KeyLogix, is a great .com finder and procurer. After looking at hundreds of .coms Dottie thought of zero.com and quickly found it was US100k to even start the conversation. Then she found xero.com and we loved it. Xero is a name that met our criteria, had a bit of x-factor (obviously) and we could build a brand around it.
Xero.com was not used by an active business but by a designer in New York. Dot built the relationship and a deal was struck over about a month. We appreciated the vendor listening to our story and making it work at a reasonable price. The actual purchase was handled over escrow.com and was very smooth.
After all that work we were gutted that Xero Limited was already taken at the New Zealand companies office. It must have been at the time when Windows Live was being talked about so the name Xero Live was chosen, but it was always a pain that our official name was Xero Live Limited.
Our eagle eyed Chairman spotted earlier this week that the company name Xero Limited had come free and within a day we’d changed our name to what we wanted at the beginning. So now we’ll ripple it through the NZX etc and see if we can get our newspaper stock page entry changed.
Since being Xero we found a MNVO in the US was called Xero Mobile and there is a comic book character called Xero as well.
Anyone got any other naming stories?
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Xero is also the name of a band, that later evolved into Linkin Park: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xero_(U.S._band)
Projectx is so called because i sent an email to john after we had met the first time signed ben nolan, cto, project x. It was a joke. But it stuck. Hahaha.
I have to say I think the company’s name is almost irrelevant.
No one knows what the company name of most major businesses actually is (nor do they care). The Trading name is all that matters.
So for example we all know the name “Subway” (their legal name is Doctor’s Associates Inc. - no one cares about this).
@Richard. So did I but that’s not the case for a public company. The legal name is used everywhere.
Two of us started heliocell in Gisborne, NZ, in 2000. We decided we could not pick a name that described what we did as that may change over time. Instead we settled on a name that connected with, and described us. We thought also that our business name was to be dictated by the availability of a domain name - at the time we disliked the disconnection of some identities.
Although from different backgrounds, we both have in common a love of coffee and the sun. Most everything to do with caffiene was taken and a sun related name HELIOS (Greek God of the sun) at the time was ironically owned by a Wellington design company. Somewhere along the way we shopped an ’s’ off and put a ‘cell’ on to speak about small parts of a whole or something (that last bit is lost in myth now) and bought the .com to set us up for overseas operation.
We actually have a photo of the instant we wrote the name down on piece of printers newsprint we’d hung up on the wall. Also, since this time of conception a US company has invented some nifty solar cells that you paste to buildings to generate electricity. They were profiled in Time mag 2 years ago I think. They call themselves helio volt. To my mind they are helio cells and heliocell.com would be just the ticket for their business site. It would be ironic if my business’ wealth was generated from a sale of a domain name. Mind you, that woudl just make teh story bigger.
Back in the early 90s I did a startup (in SV) we called ourselves Xenon Microsystems - turned out there was a Zenon around back then too - we hired a CEO from Xylinx - his one requirement coming on was that we change the company name to something that didn’t start with ‘X’ - he was fed up with trying to explain how to pronounce the company name - at the time the web was just starting up and we did something that had been unknown before then - searched whois for company names when we chose the new one - now days it’s the first thing you do
In the early nineties when I first heard about this thing called the internet, I was told that if you could prove you were a legitimate business you could get a coveted “.com” domain. I thought how cool it would be to get dave.com - I worked in video production and I figured I could set up a company called Digital Audio & Video Enterprises (DAVE). Sadly I lacked the foresight and motivation to follow up the idea. The domain was first registered around that time - I’ll never know if it was before or after my idea - and I’ll always rue the possible missed opportunity.
A few years later I did get into the domain game and acquired dave.co.nz - I noticed it was due to lapse so I stayed up until midnight and bought it the minute it became available. The previous owner didn’t seem to have been using it and he never contacted me so I assume he was happy to let it go.
When we founded Theta in the mid 90’s we spent ages coming up with a name. There was some tenuous link to Thetan’s being artisans and craftsmen so we had some sort of fit. In those days a .com wasnt such a big deal and .co.nz was available so we went for it. As an after thought we looked at http://www.theta.com and were amused to find it went straight to a Scientologist site :(
These days Provoking with Mase and Brendon has a good feel to it
Xero does break one of my normal rules (learned from GuyH) that company name has to start with an ‘A’. But that is the challenge of getting a good .com address.
Back @ Rod:
Good pt … I don’t have any public co experience
I guess the media picked up the change means it is important (my earlier statements miss the point I think).
I did have a friend who registered “domain.com” (and “domain.edu”) in the early 90s - mostly so that if you actually followed the instructions for your new mailer and mailed “user@domain.com” you’d get some snarky mail back - a great joke …. until people started offering him money for it - because he wasn’t really in the domain squatting biz he ignored them until the numbers started to get into the high 5 figures …..
We came up with the name cadabra for our travel website software…and were thrilled that http://www.cadabra.com was available and could be bought for US$4,500. Its previous owner was a shopping comparison engine that was bought out during the tech boom, and its technology incorporated into its new owners site. However its history goes back further…it was the name first chosen by Jeff Bezos for Amazon.com - but he dropped it instantly when his lawyer misheard it as cadaver!
We decided not to worry about that, since 99% of our marketing is online and therefore written. And the story has an upside….it is often repeated around the web and there are thousands of links to http://www.cadabra.com….which gave out SEO a great kick start!
Oh - I have another naming story - not long after moving to the US in the late ’80s I created a hardware product in my basement (for the Mac II - the first one with slots) - I had to create a paper company (a ‘DBA’ doing business as) to manage the money side of things - being a kiwi I chose something from home “Taniwha Systems” - mostly with my eye on eventually having a cool logo
Big mistake, no one there could pronounce it of course - it didn’t matter because it was just a front for a bank account, I was licensing the design to someone else ….. but a couple of years later I found myself selling the cards out of my house with customers calling up making orders - I couldn’t correct each and every one of them and anyway the customer is always right so I gave up - just so long as they spelled the name right on the checks I was happy - towards the end there, before I quit to have kids and a slightly more normal life, I outfitted the entire Icelandic fishing fleet
> and within a day we’d changed our name to what we wanted at the beginning. So now we’ll ripple it
> through the NZX etc and see if we can get our newspaper stock page entry changed.
Any printed listings that come from our systems ( Most of what you see around NZ ) should show your new name now. :-)
A bunch of us have been going through this process over the last couple of weeks. Not only do we need to find a cool .com name, but we all need to like and agree on it. I never expected it would be this hard!
Anyway, watch for future instalments.
;-)
Whats in a name?
Im sure the name “Xero” broke some marketing rule because of its obscure spelling with an X. I get sick and tired of having to say “Carl with a ‘C’ myself”. Surely there is a need for getting Xero up the list of results when typed “zero accounting” is typed into Google.