Last week our staff started on the first training video for our new accounting software. After clicking Record, there was an oops moment. We can’t explain how to use something if it doesn’t have a name.
A while back I mentioned the naming issues for the new app. Using Goldenseal in any form will be confusing. Anything with TurtleSoft also won’t fly. It needs to be a singular noun that can text-replace on existing website pages without sounding weird. Besides that, the name should be short and snappy. Easy to say and easy to spell. Sounds kinda like what the app does.
Also, the app name needs to survive filing with the US Patent & Trademark Office. Trademark is legal protection for names, logos and even colors. Registration takes at least a year. They publish a list of new names, then wait to hear from others who might already use something similar. What counts is first use, not first registration. It makes for some interesting lawsuits.
TurtleSoft had a bad experience with trademark. In 1992, we built a new estimating app, then paid a specialty lawyer for a trademark search. BidWorks was unused, so we launched with that, and filed to register the name. USPTO denied the application a year later. Another company registered BidWork slightly before ours, and it was too similar.
We redid all the manuals and marketing with BidMagic instead. The new name was wider than the old one, which threw printed pages out of whack. Not fun, but we couldn’t find anything skinnier. At least it survived registration.
Turtlesoft abandoned the BidMagic trademark in 2002. Another company registered it in 2006 and still uses it for their proposal/project management software. BidWork/BidWorks is also abandoned, and currently vacant.
Trademark registration is online these days, so it doesn’t require an IP lawyer any more. This week we searched the USPTO database for potential business software names. Almost everything we tried was available: either unused or abandoned. I think it’s because there are fewer medium-sized software companies these days. Less business software than in the heady days of the 1990s. Mobile devices have plenty of apps from small developers, but they have little reason to register trademarks.
Thanks to Covid, USPTO is 10 months behind on their paperwork. Anything filed now won’t finish until well into 2025. However, I think we can pick something decent that will survive the process. After brainstorming several hundred possible names, a few dozen seem good.
Should we get a new web address that matches the app name? That narrows the options down considerably. URL registration is cheap, which means many potential names have squatters that hope to sell for a few $K and up. Still, there are a half dozen names so far with open .com sites that we’d be happy to use.
This is probably the right time for us to rebrand completely. The new app won’t have much competition, especially on Mac. TurtleSoft will soon have growth potential, and we might as well prepare for that.
Dennis Kolva
Programming Director
TurtleSoft.com
