Heads In Beds Show - Coming Up With A Brand Name That Sticks For Your Vacation Rental Company

Episode Date: April 10, 2024

In this episode Conrad and Paul explore naming and branding a vacation rental company as a way to make a brand that is SMILE worthy and not SCRATCH worthy. Enjoy!⭐️ Links & Show NotesPaul Manzey Conrad O'ConnellConrad's Book: Mastering Vacation Rental MarketingBuy This Book Too: Hello, My Name Is Awesome: How to Create Brand Names That Stick🔗 Connect With BuildUp BookingsWebsiteFacebook PageInstagramTwitter🚀 About BuildUp BookingsBuildUp Bookings is a team of creative, problem solvers made to drive you more traffic, direct bookings and results for your accommodations brand. Reach out to us for help on search, social and email marketing for your vacation rental brand.

Welcome to the Heads and Beds show where we teach you how to get more properties, earn more revenue per property, and increase your occupancy. I'm your co-host Conrad. And I'm your co-host Paul. All right, Hollywood Paul, what is going on? How are you doing today? Oh, yeah. As anybody who's going to see these video clips, these will be probably, I hope, they're

going to be out of the ordinary because I'm not going to do this more frequently. It is not easy. As Conrad knows, I lost my glasses over the weekend. How does someone do that? I'm not going to try to stop. But sufficient to say, suffice to say, I'm wearing the old, at least I have prescription sunglasses. So I can do things in the till can, I love this by the way.

This is awesome. This is awesome. Here's the thing. If this catches on and people like this, Hey, I can make this a thing. You're actually going to take off your regular glasses. Yeah. The non-glasses wearers don't understand the panic that sets into a glasses wearer if they were to lose their glasses. And I was shocked before we hit record. I was indicating to you that I have multiple pairs of backup glasses. To fair aesthetically i don't like them but just in an emergency in fact i'm about to go on this trip and with the trip i might i'm gonna throw a pair of backup probably both i'm gonna throw backup sunglasses and backup regular glasses into the luggage just in case but if i lose my glasses on the trip i'm just gonna be miserable

the whole time and i almost never have to use them but if you have to use them then they're valuable so lesson learned paul you were you a boy scout were you not a boy scout i was way back in the day but i cleared i don't have to say yeah what you would have learned is you always should be prepared so right yeah i think it was cub scouts i don't know how far up i made maybe a wolf or something i wasn't high enough where i was prepared so there you go we're having some we're having some fun with it, but it's all good. It'll be a dynamic recording today with Holly with Paul over there and we'll dive right in. It's actually fun because the topic today is actually a bit of a fun one a

little bit. It's not necessarily about a really narrow SEO topic or PPC. We're not going to bore you to death with link building or something like that. Although people do seem to listen to those episodes. I got a few emails about the last one. We're talking about a fun topic today, which certainly has come up a little bit more regularly, I would argue recently, which is naming the company. You have this idea for a vacational company. What in the world do you call the thing? And it sounds really my career to bring us back full circle here. I thought this was simple, or at least I didn't think it was as hard as it was. And then I started doing it, actually trying to do this a few times, naming either an individual

vacational rental property. That's one layer. We could talk about that as well as naming the whole company. And it's hard, it's really hard to name a company and you take for granted what a great name does for your company. Paul, I prescribed you something, which was to read this book. And this book, I've probably recommended it now, I don't know, 100 times at this point, or something like that. Maybe you could talk about reading this book, what the experience was like, what the book's called. And then we could dive through what our learnings is from the book and how it applies to the vacation rental. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. The book is called Hello, My could dive through what our learnings us from the book and how it applies to the vacation rental yeah yeah absolutely the book is called hello my name is awesome and i read the most updated version i don't know if you read i i don't know if there's

i might have an old version of it that's what i was wondering in the back of my mind like am i gonna have more than conrad that'd be okay but it is it's a really cool look at and it's a really fun pretty short read relatively short read on, I think, not just examples of good branding and poor branding, but really how you go through the process. And I think it lays out ways to, we've talked about cognitive biases on this before, to remove some of those cognitive biases and make sure that you're really choosing and selecting a name that's going to represent your business, represent what you're delivering well. And again, the steps on how to pick that name out or what you should do versus what you shouldn't do when you're trying to pick that name out as far as the order of operations.

So yeah, I thought it was a lot of fun. Some of the anecdotes in there are really hilarious. She does a great job of writing the books. To see some of the ridiculous names and some of the ridiculous businesses that she's worked with or that she's evaluated. And that, I don't know. It was a lot more fun than I was anticipating. Certainly not a dry book. Again, if you get some value out of this episode, I highly recommend going and reading the book yourself.

Because it's great. And if you're thinking about naming your business, changing the name of the business, rebranding, doing anything like that, I would say this is non-negotiable in that exercise. So I'll just brainstorm perpetually until I find something. There really wasn't a way for me to say or I myself could articulate why I didn't like the name of something or I didn't want to proceed with it, but I couldn't always categorize it very quickly. So the meat of the book, and it's a pretty short read, by the way, too, right? Someone could read this in one setting if they wanted to. But the core of the book is really comes down to the five reasons why you want to pick a name, which Alexander Watkins, the author calls a smile test. So these are the reasons where you want to

lean into these ideas potentially. And then she has seven reasons of why you wouldn't want to pick a name. These are called the scratch test. So it's and it's an acronym too, by the way, we'll get into that. Of course, she comes up with cool names for her naming book because that's just what she does. She's good at that. But both of them make a ton of sense to me of when someone pitches you the name, the natural conclusion that you want to get to is why would I do that? Why wouldn't I do that?

And I think there's some that are a little bit more acute of a problem for our industry, for the vacation industry. Restrictive is one that comes to mind in the scratch test, just to skip ahead a little bit, which is this idea that I'm going to name my company Myrtle Beach Vacation Rentals, right? Or something like that. Or Myrtle Beach Vacation Destinations is going to be the name of my company. What happens the moment I go to Surfside Beach? Do I have to rename the company or rebrand it or something like that? What if I go into Asheville, North Carolina? Do I have to come up with a different name? Is that going to be AshevilleCabinRentals.com? It's probably already taken. We could talk about domains too.

So anyways, restrictive isn't probably one of the most common scratches that I encounter personally, which is that people do want to sometimes expand their business, grow their business, but their name only makes sense for a specific geo. And to be clear, I'm not against putting the geo in the name. I'm not saying you should never do that, but just realize what you're signing up for. And you may be signing up for something that's a little bit more permanent, maybe than you anticipated when you started the business, which could have been a year ago. It could have been 10 years ago. It could have been 20 years ago, depending on how things were set up.

So I think that is one example of many that is in the smile and scratch test that we'll go through in the next few minutes that I see most commonly in the vacation rental industry is just that idea that whatever you have to think ahead a little bit. And that is why naming is so hard to be fair, because you don't want to call yourself maybe something generic Carolina rentals or something like that, because it just doesn't feel like it really has any uniqueness to you. So that's, I think, just these types of things come up regularly. So maybe you could walk through quickly, do you want to do what you want to do for a smile or scratch, like the reasons to pick a name or the reasons to not pick a name, potentially, what do you want to do? Let's do smiles. Let's

do smile. We'll do the five qualities of a super sticky name. The first one is suggestive, a hint at what your brand is. It is, I think you don't want to talk about, especially in our space, maybe not talking about food, maybe not making it food relevant. You want to make sure that people have some idea that we're talking about the lodging industry or the short-term rental industry or the vacation rental industry, hospitality, something like that. So building that in somehow memorable, you want people to remember you so that, again, when we talk about all the SEO stuff and the branding stuff, that they can come back and get back to your business and get back to you as opposed to get back to someone else who maybe has a similar

name there. Imagery. It aids in the memory through visuals. So if you can build some type of imagery into that name, I think in our space, that's something that we do a reasonably good job at because I think it's not just the branding of the businesses themselves, but we have to talk about branding on the individual properties too. So something that I see a lot of imagery built into some of the branding on the individual, the short-term rentals there. So I think that's something that we do maybe better than average there. Legs lends itself to the theme. So is it going to have longevity there? Are you going to be able to make it last forever? Are you going to be able to grow and expand with that business? That's certainly

something that you want to make sure that you're on theme there and emotional you want people to be moved by your name you want it to do something where you want it to be something that people are i think that plays into memorable as well is that if you have an emotionally driven name it's going to probably be something that is going to be memorable that is going to live with people for a while and that they are going to be able to go back and figure out what what're talking about, what your whole premise is behind your business. But it is when you're looking at, I know you've done these branding exercises with actual partners and customers. What are you focusing on when you're looking at the smile test there? Are there any of those five that you maybe value more than others

or prioritize? Yeah, that's a good point. I think memorable for me is probably the one that sticks out where I just tend to dislike the generic, so to speak, or a word or a name that they've heard before. So again, the idea of calling a company minnesotacavins.com or something like that. Again, my SEO brain might like that a little bit, right? Like part of me goes, oh, we're going to rank a little bit better. We're an exact match domain name. Look at all the exact match anchor texts we're going to get. There's a 20% of me that makes a lot of sense. But the other 80% that's done a lot of other marketing channels for a long time realizes that those things are just forgettable. Like when you stay with a property manager or host or something, and there's nothing that really sticks out to you about it. It doesn't feel unique. It doesn't feel

like it was made to service like the industry or to service guests or owners or whatever the case may be. I feel like it just washes over you a little bit. I feel like someone in our space that does a good job of this. It's a made up word too. We'll talk about these elements in a second when we get to scratch. But I think Cassiola is one of those names that sticks out to me as a very memorable name. Because you hear it, it's easy to pronounce. It doesn't, you would, maybe it's a little bit trickier to spell. That's my only small little kind of mark against it if I was going to give a mark against it.

But it's more memorable. Like hearing the word Cassiola sticks out more to me than hearing some other names. Vicasa, I'll give Vicasa credit. That's a good name, I think, as far as it's simple, easy to say, you would remember that name. If you had stayed in one one time, you might say, Oh, yeah, Vicasa, you might get to that kind of conclusion a little bit quickly. I feel like if you went into a room of people, right, and you said every you said three different company names to people, then you let them mix up for 10 minutes and talk about something else. And then you ask them, pull them all out one by one and ask them which names they remember i feel like that's what you're after what would someone remember

after they heard it one time or two times and then they had a conversation with someone else for 10 minutes about the weather and then you came back to them and asked them what was the name i told you a minute ago i think they do this by the way when you do a cognitive test because they like tell you remember three words then they talk to you about a bunch of other stuff for a while and then they say where are the three words that you need you asked to remember and i've only done one of those in my life but i remember doing that test specifically so that's what you're after i think something like that kind of sticks with you a little bit and that that is a lot of this is super subjective by the way like these

are guardrails to help you but i may say vicasa i think is a good name and a business something else we won't dive into that right now but the name itself is good someone else may say no i don't like that name i don't know what that means vicasa is a sp word. Why would we use V and Vicasa together? That doesn't make any sense. So this is the hardest part about branding, honestly, is that even when you take down a list of 100 or 200 ideas and you whittle it down to 10 or 20, there's always someone in the room that hates whatever you like and vice versa. So it makes it really challenging to get to the right outcome. But to answer your question, memorable is probably the one that sticks out the most to me. Emotional, I think it's hard to do in our industry. I think like you were saying at the property level, I think there's lots of copy

opportunities that we have in our industry to be emotional. Talk about the storytelling on the art hospitality show that I do. We talk about grandma's last vacation, baby's first vacation. That to me is an emotional concept that you can leverage into marketing. But I don't know if you can wrap that up in a name, to be honest with you. I think that's a little bit trickier personally to get there. So I don't know if I see that one quite as much. But again, going back to scratch what we're going to get here in a second, if it is boring and lame, it doesn't feel emotional. Again, if it's minnesotacabins.com, myrtlebeachvacationrentals.com, these sorts of things, they don't feel that emotional. They just feel like their description

of what is an obvious state of things. I think there's better ways to leverage emotion than use your brand to complement what you're doing with marketing, advertising, media, storytelling around your brand marketing to then attach it to your brand. Then people have that association. When they think awesome vacations, they think this area, they think this property manager because of you. So yeah, I think you did a good job of highlighting the smiles. What's the one that sticks out to you? What do you think the one is that maybe people are missing? Or what's the one that you think we do a decent job of in our industry? I think memorable as well. I think we do a reasonably good job of imagery, and I think that depends on the market that you're in.

But that's also, I think the people in urban markets do paint a pretty good picture of being in an urban market. And the more traditional, whether you're in the Smoky Mountains, whether you're in a beach market, something like that, we do a pretty good job of providing that imagery there. I think that because a lot of these businesses are started from the ground up, there usually is some type of emotional spang to it a little bit there where now it may not carry on. there where now it may not carry on. You may have the cool cabins that starts with a small little portfolio and then grows and maybe isn't such cool cabins anymore. But I do. I think that generally speaking, and that's my new buzzword. This is the problem with going back and listening

is that I say generally speaking way too much. I got to figure out a new phrase there. But generally speaking, yeah, I think that's something that we do paint that imagery. And I think it is, it's important in painting that imagery, because that's what's beginning that dreaming phase of the trip planning process is you got to have that dream of, okay, this name is, or it's, let's use condo world. Ooh, it's condo world. It's not just, it's not just little individual condo buildings. It's the whole world of condos in front of us there. That's something that honestly hit me when you were talking about that, that memory about

Cassiola is that it's painting a larger picture, presenting a larger image of what that business is all huge business. But I do, I think that's something where where we i think we paint the imagery pretty well because i do i think without that guests you can't bring guests in without them being able to picture or understand the experience that they're about to have there so yeah let's hop but i'll say let's hop it over to scratch test you want to go through your seven deal breakers here sure so i like that the and i to me speaking, the scratch test is more useful than the smile test. Because I generally operate better where I'm told what not to do than told what to do.

I don't know, because then I can figure out my creativity around what I'm told not to do and then lean into what to do. And I feel like have a better outcome. So anyways, I digress. But for me, scratch is more functional when we're doing this brainstorming practice of coming up with a name than smile. So it's good to have those little hints of look for these sort of triggers. This might be a green flag, but I find it's easier to exclude based on red flags. That's just my own personal feelings and bias on this sort of thing. So the Scratch test, seven deal breakers that would preclude you potentially or exclude you from picking a specific name. Number one, spelling challenge looks like a typo. So I feel like we see this somewhat regularly in our space. People

drop the vowels or they drop random characters or letters out of a name. And I don't know if I should be saying these names because maybe that upset people. But, and I love the people behind this brand, by the way. So it's not a reflection of the people behind this brand, but Brandy and what they did over with their rebrand. Yeah, with Romy, I struggled with that one a little bit.

Sorry, because I was like, I feel like people could say it R-O-A-M-Y or R-O-A-M-I. And I was like, if you're going to do that name, I think what I suggested at the time to Brandy and her team was like, get both domain names, like try to get Romy.com and Romy.com with a Y, like both iterations, because I feel like you're going to end up with people both ways. Now, perhaps I'm wrong. And maybe that hasn't ended up being a problem or issue for, I don't know. I haven't spoken to her about that since. But I think that is something that comes to mind where a brand in our space that is a great brand, and I like a lot of what they've done from a design aesthetic standpoint. But that name is one where someone said,

where do you stay? I stayed in a Roe v. Property. I could easily see someone going R-O-A-M-Y, not R-O-A-M-I. So to me, that's one of those examples of spelling challenge. So not to pick on her, but it comes to mind for me as an example in our space of one that I would have a little bit more hesitation towards going towards that direction, unless I could secure for sure, both.com domain names, or I was sure that no one, there wasn't a business built on Ruby with a Y that I would ever get confused with and stuff like that. And I guess that kind of comes into that spelling challenge idea too, is this idea that if that, if there's no one else using the other version of that spelling, you can pick it up and then you can own both almost in

some respect. I think you're fine. It protects you from the downside of it. But what I think this is coming in our space too, I've seen this happen. Again, Mark Simpson, someone I have a ton of respect for, but if you search for Boostly on Google, you don't always find Boostly his business. You find there's like a cell phone company called Boostly as well. So that's a little bit of a tricky one for me where I feel like you might be in a little bit of a tougher spot just finding people, finding the brand and finding the business.

And obviously he's done very well. And the business that's using that name as well as obviously in a completely different industry. I think it's like mobile phone stuff. It's not related to vacation rental website design, which is what he does at a very high level, obviously. But that's one where, again, I would have a little bit more trouble. We'll talk about that in a second. But yeah, Spelling Challenge is the number one scratch.

And those are just examples that come to mind for me on Spelling Challenge for me specifically. I would say for anything, I think any anytime that, and it happens, certainly there are some international property managers who own the business and are from other countries. That's great. But at the same time, if you're going to bring that spelling from, I can think of a handful of property managers who have a house, more a german spelling h-a-u-s and that's something where it is i as someone who took three or four years of german in high school went over there for a little three weeks sabbatical or whatever that's i know that's how

it's spelled but the average person may do h-a-u-h-o-u-a-u geez h-o-U-S-E and might not find your business. So I think that's something where anytime you're bringing in another language into it, just think about that. Just have that as a consideration that is everybody going to know that guest house in this case is spelled G-U-E-S-T-H-A-U-S. Again, great to do it and love having all the diversity of different countries and property managers in the space, but just something you want to consider about when you're doing the branding there.

Yeah, we're not trying to pick on people, but like I know that with her marketing, this might be our lowest read episode ever. We're getting ourselves in trouble today, but it's fun. But yeah, I think these are things to consider. And I think that's a good call out for sure. Because certainly, again, unless you're securing both, or you're just reinforcing that brand over and over again. I think, can you beat a scratch?

Can you be a deal breaker? For sure. There's always things you can do potentially to beat one of these deal breakers. But it might take more effort. So I think that's the question you're writing. Is the brand so strong that you're willing to overcome whatever problem there might be? We can talk about.com in a second because that'll be something that I would pick out a little. Let's go to number two. So first spelling challenge looks like a typo or is challenging. I call this, I think in the book, she says radio test of memory

service correctly. So it's, I gave the example of you tell that to someone in conversation, but the radio would be the same thing. If I ran a radio ad for one of these brands, would they be able to properly navigate to the domain name without me spelling it out like you were saying a second ago? Probably not in some cases. That would be my argument. All right. Number one, resembles competitors' names. Now, you and I, before we hit record, talked about I can't imagine this would make its way to Airbnb's legal team.

That seems unlikely. But if it did, we know what you're doing, which is that any sort of B&B-related brand name, unfortunately, is certainly getting attacked, if you will, or to like certainly cease and desist it by Airbnb, which I find a little ridiculous. By the way, we have a mutual client who I know had to rebrand and had to spend a lot of time, effort, energy and money rebranding. And I felt bad for him because there was nothing he was doing on his website that indicated that or that would confuse anyone booking with him that he was Airbnb. He was a completely separate brand. Sure, he did share the BNB part of his name with Airbnb, so to speak. But I'm like, B&B was a generic term that people used

long before Airbnb ever showed up to reference bed and breakfast. The original Airbnb domain was airbedandbreakfast.com. So it's a little disappointing that they're using their, I'm sure, very high powered, slick back hair, New York City lawyers to go after these small vacational companies that are using B&B, unless they're intentionally trying to confuse the guest on the other side. Oh, I'm called if I was like, if I bought like Airbnb, Myrtle Beach.com, and then tried to pretend I was Airbnb, and I'm deceiving people 100%, they should come down on me with the force of 1000 bricks, you know what I mean? But I don't like it all the fact that they're saying that anybody, if it was Paul BNB.com, and it was a completely different logo, completely different everything. But no,

I can't be Paul BNB.com. Don't like that at all. I think it's different. There's someone on YouTube had to rechange his channel name because it had Airbnb in the channel name and they made him change that. Sean Rakadish, I think is his name. So that in my mind is legit because you had Airbnb in your channel name. That's their copyright is Airbnb. But I don't like at all that they're going after people just using the term B&B specifically, just the B&B part. I find that a little distasteful from Airbnb. But whatever. I'm sure they have a bunch of high-powered lawyers, again, that said to do this, and that's why.

But anyways, copycat in our space, I think, is stay away from B&B. I think you're just going to find yourself in trouble and eventually in the crosshairs of Airbnb, unfortunately. And what they were threatening to, by the way, from my understanding for this client that we share together, was not just, hey, we're going to go after you with our lawyers. It was also like, we're going to delist you from our platform, which this particular property manager gets a lot of bookings from Airbnb. It wasn't even a conversation that he was willing to entertain. And he said, of course, I'll change the name because that would have really crippled his business.

He gets some direct as well. We've been working together for some time, but direct for him is still the minority of his bookings. It's not the majority. So, yeah, it's frustrating. I don't think they have any additional copycat stories there, but that would- No, I was going to say that's, I didn't realize that was the weight that they were putting on of delisting all the other, because some lawyer is going to come at us for the name. Okay. But you're going to take away revenue and take the rentals off the system. That's definitely got a little more weight there. It is. I think the copycat, I think you need to be intentional

with finding that name of, if you're going to be very general with it, Seaside Vacations is the one I got because we've worked with three or four or five of them. Just be intentional with what you're thinking about there and make sure that- They'll know each other, which is the funniest part. They all call each other, oh yeah, I got the wrong one down here. I love that. They all think it's funny now, but it does make it harder, let's be honest, right? It is. So I think when you're doing that, just, yeah, take a look at what's out there. Certainly do that search.

But if there is someone who, I don't care if they're in another market, that is going to impact you down the road. Whether or not you want to expand to that market or not, you're going to lose some brand awareness because people aren't going to know whether it's your brand or your brand while consisting of the same name there. So that's the intentionality of anything we're doing with the naming and branding is I think most important when we're trying to figure out whether or not we're copying someone else. Yeah. And like going back to your example from earlier, Condo World, like you wouldn't

want to be like Condo worldwide or something, right? That would be a local competitor, maybe a regional competitor like that. And then enter a market and say, oh yeah, I'm condo worldwide. I'm not condo world. It's like a coming to America where he's there.

McDonald's where McDonald's, I don't know if you've seen that coming to America. Great film. Check that out. So copycat, that'll get you in some trouble again, specifically on that one. But yeah,

you could think of any copycat, right? If you're resembling a competitor's name, don't do that. You're just going to find yourself, I think, confusing, not the good way. Or yeah, like copycat, unfortunately, I think this was all unintentional. The seven seaside vacations that are in our industry. Many of them wonderful people, by the way, but it does cause confusion. It does cause confusion where people are going to the wrong website. They're heading to the wrong different maybe brand website. I've seen that happen before. I've seen emails get delivered to the wrong person. I've seen phone calls, stories about phone calls going to the wrong website, they're heading to the wrong different maybe brand website. I've seen that happen before. I've seen emails get delivered to the wrong person. I've seen phone calls, stories about phone calls going to the wrong seaside vacations because there's so many of them. So tricky one. I feel like whoever owns.com is maybe the king of that heap, which is

I believe the one in the Outer Banks of memory serves correctly. But it is Yeah, that that does make it a little bit trickier. Alright, so I cheated earlier, I already did this one, which is restrictive limits for future growth. I think the most obvious example in our world would be, again, the examples I gave earlier with geo locking, right, Myrtle Beach destinations calm or something like that. Hey, if you're gonna be there forever, and you're never ever going to go anywhere else, maybe that's fine. But I think generally speaking, you're going to find yourself in a little bit of a tougher spot down the road. If you ever do try to venture out a little bit, you find yourself very restricted to just one area, talk to a property manager right now who

is considering it and is even entertaining the idea of keeping their current brand in place and then building sub-brands or another brand that would basically be like a parent company or the parent brand that they could eventually absorb into. The example I can reference here, I did some work with them before the VTRIPS acquisition, Carolina Retreats, I think was a really solid example of restrictive where he had Top Soul Realty, Mike Carrington, he had these other brands that were managed by Carolina Retreats, which was this larger brand that sat over the top but then he did have these little individual brands that kind of had to sit where they were like topsoil realty and those types of companies because of the fact that they were restrictive he couldn't take topsoil realty

and go down to curry beach and go down to no other beaches in wilmington area because he was restricted to that one based on the brand name and then he had to make the awkward decision of potentially killing his brand value that he had built up because he acquired that company from someone who'd been running it, I think, since the 80s, if memory serves properly. So it's, do I kill that brand? I don't really want to do that because then all the people that come and look for this brand are not going to see it anymore. So he was in a pickle and that's where the whole secondary brand kind of came into play. And obviously, VTRIPS has since acquired that company. And my understanding is they do, they are keeping most of those local brands in place. So you could argue they're trying to think of this. I don't know. I

don't know if this is their thinking. I don't have any inside information on this one. But you could argue, I think that's what they're trying to do is we have a brand in this one market that people know and trust. They've known and trusted this brand for a long time. Let's keep it in place. But it is managed by VTRIPS. You'll see logos now on the bottom where it's like, X name of company, Carolina Retreats or something like that. But it would be like the bottom managed by VTRIPS or something of that effect. so we'll see how that ends up for the long term and that's how it thinks this one's kind of again a little bit subjective in my mind but annoying seems forced frustrates customers is what what alexander writes about in the book i don't know if i have a great

example of this one to be honest with you this is just more of a feel thing does it feel annoying to say or explain or articulate or something like that i could see like a very long name falling into the annoying bucket for me but maybe you have some examples of annoying i don't know if i have any great examples so maybe not no i like i'm wearing it right now when resorts and lodges would go to before travel before resorts and lodges had rebranded as travel net we would go to vacation rental conferences and once it's and property managers would come up to the sales team and say we're not a resort or a lodge. So what are you going to do for us? Yeah, we do it for everybody there. But I think you bring up a good point of it's the explanation. It's the fact if you have

to explain the name over and you're just that's work you can avoid. Hopefully, you're maybe going to get questions regardless. But but I do think that's half the battle is if your frontline people are answering more questions about your name, as opposed to the product you're offering, you may have a problem with the brand and the name and how you're going to do that. So yeah, that's my clearest example of I always hated sending stuff to those. We try to put resortsandlodges.com on the bottom of the thing because we didn't want you focusing on that on top. Because it's, I'm not a resort. I'm not a lodge.

What can you do for me? I'll move forward, track to TNS. They figured out some stuff there. Yeah. I think that any time that you have to explain your name, and I think that's the examples that Alexander does a really good job of saying. All these people have to explain themselves. Don't have to explain your name it should be straightforward enough that if that's part of your niche that you want people to ask about your name okay understandable but no you shouldn't or salespeople should not spend more

time explaining your name than your product yeah yeah all right so fun little side story here so when i launched build up it wasn't build, it is now called BuildUp Bookings. It was originally called 91 Digital, which is a horrible name, but I just didn't have a name basically. And I knew it was a placeholder. I knew that wasn't going to be what it was forever. So at one point I decided, all right, I'm all in on like the vocational industry. I'm going to name this company something that's more accurate to what we're doing.

And it was actually before I read this book. I actually don't even think this book was out when I did this. I actually pulled out my document. I did this September 25th of 2017, just for context, I started doing this work in 2016. So it didn't take me too long to get here at the towards the end of 2016. By the end of middle of 2017. I knew I was going to go down this path. So anyways, I have a bunch of names that I came up with here, some of which I won't share because I could see we're using these in some context down the road, potentially. But one of the names I had because I was inspired by Brennan Dunn, who runs a freelancing information website called, I think it's doubleyourfreelancing.com,

or maybe double, I forget exactly what it was. But I came up with the idea of play off that and do double, like the bookings.com or doubleyourbookings.com was going to be like my play on it there. But I was like, I know I'm gonna have to explain this endlessly when a client doesn't double their bookings. You know what I mean? I like the idea. Like we have done that many times to be clear. Obviously, if the denominator is low, that makes it easier. If you're only getting 10 bookings, if I get you 20 soon, you're like, yeah, you just doubled my bookings. But if someone's already doing like 10 million a year, like we've had some clients that are really large, I'm not going to double their bookings, let's be honest, unless they acquire a bunch of companies

or something like that. So I almost intuitively figured out my scratch on that one myself, double your bookings or doubleyourbookings.com, because I was like, I'm not going to be able to double everybody's bookings. I want to that would be great if I could, but I don't know if I can. And I'm like, that's gonna be annoying. So anyways, that's the only example I can think of. And my own personal experience of why I went was going to go down the path and then I decided not to because I was like, I don't think I can hear to that. So anyways, all right, tame in my mind falls into what we've already just talked about a little bit with in our world. I think it's that really generic kind of name or something like that but i will say that some people certainly i saw one the other day where it was like it was just like big house rentals or something like

that which just felt a little so that does come up a little bit i think where people just have something and it's or we see this one quite a bit like diamond like diamond vacation homes.com or luxury lux rentals miami.com or something like that. Those kind of like geo plus like luxury, diamond, premium. It almost feels like a phone book trick, like A++ rentals, that kind of thing. So I don't know. Again, tame and annoying feel similar to me, which is it's somewhat subjective.

Like you may call it tame, I may not, but those kind of come to mind together to me. I know we're coming up against the time wise here, so we got two more to get through. The second to last one, the sixth one here on the scratch list, curse of knowledge. So it only makes sense if you're an insider, if you know what that word means or something like that, then I could see that happening. So in my mind, these are like some of the funds in our space, I feel like have words that are

curse of knowledge where you have to understand the fund terminology or the money terminology or something like that to make it make sense. So I don't see this as a huge issue. We could go back to the B&B comments from a few minutes ago on again, if you don't know what Airbnb was or didn't know what a B&B was, and then I'm saying, hey, you're staying at this property. It's managed by Conrad B&B or something like that. I could see someone being like, what does that mean? I don't really understand it. But for the most part, I don't think that's a huge issue in our space because most people pick words that are, we're used to stay, or like you were saying earlier, house or rental or vacation. These are pretty common words. So I feel like that's not quite as bad. Hard to pronounce is the final part of the

scratch test. So again, I think we hit this earlier with spelling challenge. But when you're dropping vowels and dropping a bunch of letters out, not only is it hard to spell, but it also can be hard to pronounce. And I think those things together can make for a bad situation. I feel like Kasago has this a little bit to be honest with you. Kasago, like there's different, I don't think it's hard to pronounce, but it's like people will have different interpretations of that one. But I think Steve said before that he doesn't really care too much. It doesn't really seem to matter. It's not much, but that's the only one that comes off the dome

that I could think of that's not hard to pronounce, but just like hard to agree on how to pronounce it maybe is the way to think about it. Admittedly, when I started at Venturi, I said it many, I pronounced the name of the company very many different ways, probably in the same hall with some partners and it's just like I'm just learning as we go here and they it's something that even Brian Riggs you know I had to say I'll see it was when I heard him on

on some of his initial demos I think he slipped into multiple saying so so it is I think anytime that you have to focus on that pronunciation and I think anytime you're creating a new, like you're not just putting together two established words, you're creating something out of thin air, for lack of a better word there, you're going to struggle with that. You're defining what that pronunciation is going to be. So you have to make sure that it's as clear as it can be.

But yeah, that's, I think we definitely ran down that train and maybe still struggle with that when we get on your You're Vintory? Vintory? Vintory. Yeah, I've always said Vintory. I don't know. Maybe because I heard Brooke say it to me one time early on when we first chatted.

So I just like copied Brooke. I'm like, if you said that, I'm just going to say what you're saying. Victory, Vintory. Yeah, victory. Yeah. Yeah. Those aren't too bad. But again, something to think about as you're going through this process.

All right. So my final one here before we wrap up, because I know we're at time here today, Paul, and I appreciate you recording with me. This was a fun one before I head out on vacation. I think this is our almost last recording. So you're hearing this in the future if you're listening to this right now, but I digress. Domain name availability. So I touched on it earlier, but it's so critical, so important in my mind to have this domain name availability. Again, I don't know what it falls under here, if it's a reason to pick it, because you can actually obtain the domain name or reason to

not pick it if you can't get the.com domain name. But boy, your efforts and your marketing and everything you do is going to be a lot easier with a.com domain name. Not because of SEO. A lot of people think I made that comment because of SEO. Not really. We had a.net that we worked on for years in Steamboat before they sold to Vakasa. Got it to number one for a lot of competitive Steamboat related keywords. I wish it was.com. It just wasn't. Someone else had it. But don't discount that. So many people want to go cheap. They're starting the company. They want to go bottom dollar. They wouldn't pay a thousand bucks for a domain name. Here's what I say to people. If someone else were to compete with you and they were to go acquire that.com domain name, and then someone very intelligent,

very hardworking were to have that.com domain name and compete with you, what would you do? Once people hear that thought and they let that marinate in their head a little bit, they go fudge. I definitely can't skip getting this.com domain name because if my competitor got it, I would be in deep trouble, so to speak. .com domain name, you need it. I think it is. The premium, those premium domains, when you have to pay a little premium for the domain,

yeah, it's tough, but it's tough to pony up that money. But the long-term upfront cost, I guarantee will pay itself off over the time that, again, whether it's a year, whether it's five years, whether it's 10 years, you want to have that domain. The some point we'll talk about the twins.com being the only MLB team for the first 20 years that didn't have twins.com. MLB had 29 different domains,

but there are two twins, two twin brothers just squatting on twins.com since the late nineties. So yeah, that's, it's, it's annoying. It confuses people and it's going to cause you to lose bookings 100 of the time when especially when it's going to a parking page or something they just think

it's out of date it's not in business now if someone else owns it that may again get into is my business different and stuff like that that's a different conversation but you certainly don't want your competitor to have it you don't want it to be a parking page or something like that it's going to cost you you can negotiate domain names by the way a lot of people see a 10 000 price tag and they think if you list for 10, you'll probably take seven or eight like usually. But yeah, if you think about it, Paul, in terms of the context over the cost of 10 years, I think you'll find the cost to be a lot more reasonable. So anyway, I digress. I could keep going because it's a topic I have some thoughts on, but I think that puts us in a good spot. So thank you, Paul,

for recording with us. I was talking to a client just before this and he said he didn't know how to actually do a review. He said he wanted to leave us a review. He didn't know how. What I'm saying now is if you don't know how to leave us a review, if you made it this far, you liked the episode, you want to leave us a review, but you don't know how, email me and I'll walk you through it. Maybe I'll do a little video for you. We'll have some fun with it. We can leave a review. But if you want to leave a review, it's the first time you've ever heard me ask that. Go to Spotify, iTunes, or those kinds of platforms where we get the most downloads. Head over there, click leave a review, and we appreciate that quite a bit. So that's all

I got for today. Thanks so much, Paul. We will catch you on the next episode. Appreciate it. Bye-bye.