Naming as a constraint

Time: 15 to 20 minutes Module: 2, Coach Lin

In 2009 two Irish brothers, Patrick and John Collison, were calling their company /dev/payments. They had two paying customers and a domain that nobody could say out loud.

A friend told them: "Nobody is going to type a slash on a billboard." They sat in a coffee shop in Palo Alto and wrote down twenty candidates. They picked Stripe because a stripe is the small magnetic line on the back of every credit card, and because you could say it in one breath. The slash was gone. The product was the same. The customer was the same.

Within a year Stripe had two thousand customers. The slash, in hindsight, had been holding the company back.

You're about to learn why.