I announced last week that we were officially changing our name to Save22.
Thanks to SGentrepreneurs & E27, the launch email that I sent to our users is now shared with the world. In terms of user response, it was probably the second biggest user response I’ve received for an email, only behind what the outrage over our decision in Singapore to stop smokers from adding products.
I told the story of why we had to change the name lobangclub, but why Save22?
The name change did not happen on a whim, the story described in my name change email to our users was the straw that broke the camel’s back. We’ve been contemplating a name change for over a year already. We never found a name that we really liked and most importantly, the .com domain was available. It is a fact of life these days that almost all good .com domains are taken already by domain squatters.
I took a page out of Willis Wee‘s book when he rebranded Penn Olson to TechinAsia and emailed a few people who’s opinions I trust about possible names.
Here was the original shortlist;
save22.com
priceboy.com
pricehq.com
savebot.com
saveguru.com
savehq.com
pricegirl.com
say99.com
spend123.com
steal123.com
We had a vote internally within our team, and there was also a vote amongst the list I sent the email to.
One interesting phenomenon was that the voting distribution was pretty flat with no outstanding vote getter. Save22 however was not amongst the leading vote getters. Neither did it have the most support internally amongst team members.
So why did I choose that name?
1) It had to be short, I wanted a name that was shorter than lobangclub, which at 10 characters was on the verge of being too long.
2) I wanted something that could be brandable beyond just the obvious, that’s why I chose the word save as a root instead of the more literal “price”
3) I wanted something cross-cultural and cross-language, something that a non-english speaker and an everyman in an Asian metropolis could remember and pronounce.
4) it had to be affordable, some names were costing upwards of 5-6 digits US and for us that was not an option.
5) I wanted a name that could grow with the company, what if Amazon.com was name Bookshop.com? or Facebook was named HarvardConnect?
Save22 satisfied all these criteria but the one thing that pushed it over the edge was that it also symbolised the company spirit.
The other famous 22 in the English language is the phrase Catch 22, a catch 22 is “a problematic situation for which the only solution is denied by a circumstance inherent in the problem or by a rule”.
As a company, Save22 is attempting to solve the catch 22 problem of price transparency and product availability in South East Asia. Why is it that given the low cost of labor, rent, etc… in this region that it is often cheaper and more convenient to buy from the U.S than locally?
Save22 is a constant reminder to us of the challenges we face and the mountaintop we must conquer in order to achieve our mission.
