Then there was the name...
There comes a time in every startup’s life when it needs to pick a name. That could be when you incorporate, or at latest when you launch your product. For us it’s been a long and short journey at the same time. Here’s why.
First off: thanks to everybody who put up with our name search. We had long discussions, made several informal facebook surveys, kept asking around in our network whenever we came up with a new list of possible names (and there were lots of them). And all of that to get right back to where we started out: qipoqo. We promise this was not to bother everybody!
The name qipoqo was the result of our very first name brainstorming session. We tried one of the creativity techniques. Although we didn’t come up with any name during the session, on the way back home the idea hit: why not play with the latin saying “quid pro quo” (this for that). How about qipoqo? Boom, there we had it, our name. We immediately fell in love with it. It expressed the idea, was cute to write and sounded nice, friendly and a little bit playful. Perfect.
Then we noticed people had a hard time spelling it. There was a bit of confusion and we had to spell it out whenever we presented ourselves. This got us second-guessing our name choice. So we started looking for another one. However, all the names we came up with were quite technical, just plain ugly or, for the more creative ones, they were either taken or not much easier to spell than qipoqo. None of them really beat qipoqo and what’s more, we noticed that people who were familiar with the service were able to remember the name and actually liked it. Fast-forward (let’s skip the countless brainstorming sessions and systematic excel-sheet-approaches): we’re back to qipoqo [pronounce: kipoko]. And that’s because we made the decision to be unique. Yes, it is a bit hard to spell, but the service is so amazing you’ll remember how to spell the name. And for the networking we’ll just have to hand out business cards instead of saying who we are. We are not another local barter/skill/time/something platform. We are qipoqo.
PS: and yes we have to admit there’s a little stipsterness in the name. Screw it, we have no Scandinavian in our team (yet). So that’s ok. (read this if you just went "huh?")