Would you pay for the added privacy?
Here's my take on a clean, simple HN client with just the necessities to browse. Any feedback would be appreciated, as well as feature requests for what to build next. Thanks!
We had a very relevant and favorable name for our startup. We've purchased the domain name, built the technology, worked on design and marketing/messaging, and purchased business cards. Only months later after all that work and talking to customers and mentors to develop our product did we start the process to trademark our name. We're fortunate to have access to a trademark attorney, who told us that our name has a big chance conflicting with another trademark recently granted which lists what seems like every internet software good and service under the sun, only a few letters off but pronounced very similarly. Overall, we're fortunate to not have incorporated yet, but I think it's more the attachment to the name and the time spent developing our messaging that's got us down.
After getting over the initial stage of feeling bummed we have to abandon that relevant name, we spent a week brainstorming new names that sounded unique, domain was available, and a uspto.gov search turned up no concerning results. We narrowed it down to a few favorites, and decided on our favorite one. We were so excited around this new name, started brainstorming how we could leverage a play on the name for marketing, design, and focusing the company around a cool character mascot we began sketching. Spoke to the trademark attorney today and he found another trademark with goods and services described as a desktop CMS application and selling prerecorded video/audio recordings for lessons in marketing. At first we said no, that's so different from what we're doing! But then he showed us a similar application for a different spelling of the name we wanted, along with the letter for rejection by the trademark office, which explained:
The goods and/or services of the parties need not be identical or directly competitive to find a likelihood of confusion. Rather, they need only be related in some manner, or the conditions surrounding their marketing are such that they would be encountered by the same purchasers under circumstances that would give rise to the mistaken belief that the goods and/or services come from a common source.
Now we're back to square one. We're thinking for this round we need to brainstorm names that are obscure, possibly in a different language, or a word that means nothing at all.
Does anyone have any similar stories or advice to share? Going through this frustrating process, I'm surprised any startup is able to choose any name with common words in them. Do many companies just go with a name once they secure the domain and hope for the best?
Thanks for any feedback.
What about payments? Would you be more inclined or deterred from purchasing something on a website if a certain payment method was or wasn't offered? (Paypal, Google Payments, Amazon Payments, generic credit card processing, etc...)
This is the first time I’ve posted here. I understand (doing some research) that HN is wary of “Ask HN: Review my startup” posts from new accounts without any/much activity. For that reason, this post is aimed primarily to generate interest and attendees to check out our talk tomorrow (11/8 at 6pm) in Sunnyvale. We’ll be speaking about how we’ve used MongoDB and Node JS at LookupLink. Please come if it sounds interesting! Below is a link and a description to the event details:
http://www.meetup.com/San-Francisco-MongoDB-User-Group/events/36531032/
“LookupLink provides a platform for individuals to easily access digital content through short tags and QR codes. We hope that one day people wont have to pass up on a car they are interested in buying, an event they'd like to attend, or a person they'd like to contact because they didn't have a convenient way to reference that information.
Our stack runs NodeJS and MongoDB and lives on Dotcloud (our awesome PaaS). We are very enthusiastic about the technologies that we use! MongoDB helps us stay agile, by not locking us into a schema, which helps us stay highly available while we continue to develop our product. We are a small team, so remaining flexible is essential to staying afloat. One of our challenges was finding a compromise between being completely schema less, and incorporating some structure. We managed to do so using some Node JS frameworks and our stack has never been happier, speaking only Javascript. Not to mention our developers too.”
Again, we know that this is being posted from a new account, but if you’d like to check out our startup and have any feedback, we would be very grateful to hear it.
www.lookuplink.com
Essentially yes, we are a QR code provider, but what differentiates us primarily is 1) the convenience of printing formatted flyers with your QR code and short tag (aimed at individuals and small groups wanting to post flyers linking to their content), and 2) our short tags. Short tags are convenient references to more info, something you could easily remember and verbally share with someone (e.g. “Lookup ‘A12’ on LookupLink for more info”). Anticipating a large amount of links being created, our free links provide users with a random short tag which expires after a few weeks (convenient for a craigslist ad, an upcoming event, or your contact info for networking at a convention).
Thank you for your time!! Steven & Andrew
