A few days ago, I wrote a naming post-mortem on choosing the name for our Video Discovery App, Denso.
I mentioned in the post that I still battle internally with our naming decision. I'm constantly in a state of flux about whether or not the name does the product justice-- and if it's the best name possible for us to promote the product and generate mainstream buzz.
Last night I realized something about naming that is often overlooked-- but that I feel could be as important as any of Paul Graham's Startup Naming conventions: Theme.
Picking a name based on an overarching 'theme' presents a remarkable opportunity to define a culture around your product and team.
Some big companies have managed to instill themes & culture incredibly well into their team and product. Facebook has always celebrated their HACK culture, of moving fast and breaking things-- which anyone who has visited their offices can attest to. Google celebrates their "don't be evil" pseudo-hippy culture, though it doesn't always seem to resonate throughout the company. They also have offer engineers 20% time; a day a week to work on their own personal project, as a way to promote creativity and celebrate individuality in a huge company. These 2 themes aren't built into the names of the companies, but it's evident that theme and culture are incredibly important to both organizations.
With Denso, because of it's Japanese roots, we decided to sprinkle some japanese characters and ninjas around the site. We referred to ourselves as "ninjas", because we were always watching server performance, building out features at lightning speed, and responding to feedback almost instantaneously. So okay, maybe not traditional ninjas, but hacker ninjas.
I honestly think that the speed, versitility and resolve of the "Ninja" theme has really been spun into the fabric of our small company.
Who knows, maybe I'm just fulfilling my old childhood fantasy of becoming a ninja (7 halloweens in a row FTW), but I honestly believe that the theme of being "Japanese"-- from the simple colors and design asthetic of our iOS app, to how we pride ourselves on speed and attention to detail does reflect the theme that we defined for the company.
So if you're out there right now banging your head against the wall trying to run down Paul Graham's naming checklist, try thinking about what you want your team and product to stand for first.
A lot of people have asked me how we came up with the name for our Social Video App, Denso.
We started by consulting Paul Graham's 7 dimensions of impactful startup naming (our title). In the article, Paul alludes to, as you guessed, 7 important considerations when coming up with a name:
Evocativity
Brevity
Greppability
Googlability
Pronounceability
Spellability
Verbability
I've always hated naming startups. I go through this rollercoaster of emotions, where one week I'm totally sold on a name, and the next I can't stand to hear it mentioned or see it typed out on the screen.
The naming of Denso was no exception. Our whiteboard was begging for mercy after all of the scribbling / crossing out / erasing (and cursing too, if you believe that whiteboards actually listen to us talking).
We went through a bunch of ideas, when Arun turned to Google translate. At the time, we were building mostly "Watch Later" services. So Arun punched in something like "transmit" and saw the phonetic spelling of "electricity ...movement...or something" in Japanese:
DENSO
As for the Paul Graham test? It was evocative (well, maybe in Japanese), brief, not totally greppable, not totally googleable, very pronounceable, very spellable and verbable.
As in most cases of startups, we needed to call it something and this name just seemed to "stick" in your head. It had maybe about a 5 / 7 on the PG scale, so we moved forward and threw the name out into the abyss.
So far, it's worked out really well. Most people I run into remember the name and mention it to me immediately. I've even heard people saying "I'm going to Denso this video"...presumably they mean "watch later" the video, but I guess the verbiage for the actions on the site are still being defined.
We've run with the Japanese angle in a few repects, and have had some fun with referring to ourselves as Ninjas (we're not, we sit pretty much all day and our reactions are slow).
Recently, I tried to get a few of my friends to write Haikus about denso-- fitting with the Japanese theme, but was thwarted. One of my friends responded, with a Haiku, but not about Denso.
AJ seeks a way to use a copywriter without paying him
After suffering the shame of my friends dissing me for getting them to do free work, I resorted to writing a few Haikus myself (although some dont adhere to the rules). So, without further ado, here is our Haiku pitch of Denso:
Bored on the train Wanting something good to watch Denso saves the day
Video In my pocket Makes me smile
Couch Apple TV Denso
Snow falling heavily All is quiet Denso seeks solace
Pocket Buzz iPhone out Denso says "Hello", You have new videos
Youtube Makes me search Denso Makes me smile
Boss sets deadlines Wife makes noise Denso quiets all
About a month ago, we blogged about how we made our first iPad demo video with just a $10 budget and we received great feedback from the hackernews community. Some people even used our tips to make their own demo videos.
Despite knowing that good video production is expensive, we set our budget super low and determined we would make a much better video the second time around, taking all of the suggestions into consideration.
And we did make a *much* better video, for under $500! We made not just one, but three videos. The video below shows our new rig and the resulting video of the iPhone app. You can also view our iPad version here or head to our website’s front page getdenso.com for HTML5 version.
Tricks we learned:
Robust aluminium frame setup
The $3 black corrugated plastic sheet with a hole in the center is still the most important piece of the entire setup because it removes the reflection on the surface of the devices. However, we needed much better support than the two chairs mentioned in the previous post. We asked around and a friend of ours was kind enough to give us free aluminum bars for the frame! The aluminum bars were too short for him to do anything practical, so he was going to just throw them away. We didn’t know how much the aluminum bars would cost in total, but we think it wouldn't exceed $250.
The best thing of all is that the height of the upper platform can be adjusted to fit different devices, so we can make demo videos for the tiniest phone to the largest tablet. The plastic sheet is simply glued to the platform and we cover the floor with white A1/A0 paper. In the future, we can even replace the white paper easily with a green color sheet and use the chroma-key effect to remove the background completely.
We now have a robust setup that we can reuse for multiple takes.
Better, Controlled Lighting
If you noticed in our previous "making of" post, we had only used one light source on one side of the iPad. The other side was just natural sunlight and clearly that didn’t produce consistent color across the clips (for proof, take a closer look at our previous video).
This time, we wanted to better control the brightness and color, so we mounted two small neon lights at the side of the frame and moved the entire set into a dark room. Unfortunately, because the lights were so low, they created a long shadow on both sides of the iPad when placed in the center.
So we began experimenting with different horizontal and vertical mounting positions for the lights, and we finally found one location that gives us the best brightness and least shadow: underneath the upper platform.
Removing Harsh Shadow
There was still a tiny, but harsh shadow cast around the iPad that would be hard to remove in post-production for the video clips. We would also need a different way of shooting the iPhone because it has to be held in my hand, and I couldn't just rest my arm on the paper as it would create an even darker shadow than the iPad itself.
So I decided to rest my hand on a raised platform that is more narrow than my hand so that it is totally invisible when shooting from the top-down angle. Coincidentally, this also removed all the harsh shadows around the phone! We were happy to find that the same trick also applies to the iPad-- you just need a thick dictionary that is smaller than the iPad itself (old dictionaries ftw!).
The photo here shows how we did it. Despite having some dark area underneath (see photo), a very slight increase in overall brightness would significantly reduce the shadows easily in our video editing software.
The Flawed iPhone 4S Camera
Next, we loaded up the video we just shot and stopped at the first frame. We found that the iPad was distorted-- it appeared slightly “sucked in” into the center of the video frame. Turns out, this is a flaw in iPhone 4S camera that we didn't notice the during our first shoot. We ended up fixing it in post-production using a "punch effect" (revert of pinch effect). It looks good, so no harm done.
Invested In Voice-Over
Of the many comments we received on our first demo video, the majority of them criticized the voiceover. We decided to invest in professional voiceover talent at voices.com. We posted the job there and waited for a response, and, within a few hours, we received several demos of actual people speaking our actual 4-line script! We took spliced some of them them out and played them over the video until we finally agreed on a tone and voice that matched our message. Then we paid him -- he even did a bunch of different takes and revisions!
We were very pleased that despite being a simple job, our voiceover talent was willing to many takes, with different pitches and speed. The version we finally chose wasn’t in the initial set of demos and we didn’t have to pay extra. Overall we really recommend voices.com for voiceovers. Our guy was $240, and was one of the most expensive of over 120 auditions.
Most Importantly, We Had a Script
We realized on our first attempt, that when we started shooting without a script, our video became very technical and it lost the "Apple" appeal of selling the experience. So before we started on our second attempt, we put our heads together and locked down the exact scenes, finger actions and voiceover before proceeding. We found the result is pretty remarkable when compared with our previous demo video.
You be the judge and tell us what you think, or even better, send us an email through our app, Denso!
