New sites I’ve seen this week, in order of appearance:
Oink.com – The latest output from Kevin Rose’s latest venture Milk.com.
Review: Amazingly good concept, I love it. Rate the things inside, not just the places. It basically increases the granularity of the business reviews model. It’s like Trip Advisor 2.0, but there is a problem.
That name.
Oink.com is probably the worst start-up domain name I’ve seen this side of color and we should all know better by now. Meaningless, passionless, and floppy. It lacks impact, it lacks emphasis. And it’s central to the entire brand. I’d change it immediately before this becomes the next color.com.
Looking at the historical record, it does seem like Kevin Rose has a history of choosing bad domain names (pownce?), but he can quickly make up for that here with a quick flip on that brand to something better.
Let me say it again in case you missed it, I think the core concept and code is amazing. Really disruptive and shows massive potential, but that domain name needs to go. And if not go, then stick a pig character with it to give it something resembling impact. And change the color of the logo too while you’re in the zone.
It’s a fun product, the logo color scheme should show that, big bold colors, and a piggy character and it might stand a chance. I’d hate to see this one fail too because Kevin and his team at Milk have some real talent to play with. Copy Hipmunk for branding advice.
Tubecatchup.com – An awesome new YouTube subscription/feed aggregator using Twitter Bootstrap just showed up on a Show HN post over on ycombinators old hacker news site. Looks great, good domain name – tubecatchup, but low impact concept, niche market and no monetization strategy I can think of. Good luck to the guy although the domain does sound like Tube Ketchup! I guess that makes it more memorable.
Memrise.com – Learning Chinese and mandarin characters taken to a whole new level using mnemonics curated by a ex-UK Oxford University professor and world memory champion. I picked up close to 573 Chinese characters in a 12 hour period with about 60% recall (that’s pretty good given the speed of processing I was going at). Try memrise, and totally free too.
Post in the comments if you’d like your start-up dissected.
What do you have to lose?
