Growing Carrots: How I chose a brand name that drives 100K sessions/month

Good day, hackers,

Today I’ll tell you how I chose a name for my product Singing Carrots, the brand that helped me to grow organic traffic to my website from 103 unique monthly sessions in March 2020 to 105 000 monthly sessions in Jan 2022.

❓ Why I needed a new name

Around Christmas time of 2019 I was attending a student concert of my vocal school in one of the little family held theatres of Amsterdam. The audience consisted of singing students and I naturally mingled around, chatting with people and diverting the conversations towards my project - a website that helped you to find a song to sing. A lot of people heard about my project before and the question that was popping up again and again was “Yeah, your app, it’s awesome! How was it called again?”

It was called “Song To Sing”, and in my mind was ideally reflecting what it does. I was also hoping that relevant words in the name could boost me in search results. Nobody seemed to be able to memorise that name. There were confusions with word order, plural/singular usage and .com domain was taken so I actually was hosted on songtosing.net. The thought that I have to do something about it was planted in my brain.

🧘 If you keep searching the world gives you answers

Around a month later I was browsing through the web and ran across Folding Burritos, a product development blog by Daniel Zacarias. I’ve read this article on prioritization techniques and went to lunch with my fellow Product Owners from Booking.com where I was working at that time. We’ve got our meals and I started sharing with my peers the content of the article. What struck me was the unusual fact that I memorised the name of some random blog from the internet. Ironically, it seems that Daniel decided to rebrand. He probably has his reasons.

Nevertheless at that moment I was so impressed with the effect that the naming had on me that I decided to deconstruct the principle behind it and to come up with something similar for my product.

“How does it work?” - I asked myself.

• It’s funny and unusual. It’s even ridiculous in a way. At least in the context of product management.
• It’s yummy. Most of us love burritos, so it brings positive emotions.
• It makes sense! The folding analogy works just perfectly.

That day I started putting name ideas into my notes. The name was supposed to follow the Folding Burritos pattern. On top of that I came up with a few extra requirements:

• Available and cheap .com domain
• Spelling that can not be mistaken or confused
• If you google for the name you should find close to nothing

Over the next few months whenever I got an inspiration moment I would note an idea. My list was full of “whistling potatoes”, “shower karaokes” and “pizza notes”. As you can see, inspired by burritos I was leaning towards food :)

Until one day I ran across some article on the internet that was talking about the etymology of the word “carol” and the fact that in some rare British dialects a word “carrot” can be used to replace it for fun. That was my “eureka” moment.

🧮 We are data people

I quickly purchased the domain, but before migrating the website and updating the branding I wanted to do one last validation. I’ve started telling my friends that I’m renaming the website to Singing Carrots. After talking to roughly 20 people I paused and waited for a week to see if they memorised the name. When the week passed I messaged all these people to check if they still remembered. Every single one did!

singingcarrots.com went live on the 26th April 2020 and has been growing happily ever since!

😶‍🌫️ How about you?

• How did you choose a name for your product?
• Did you have to rebrand? Why? How did the rebranding go?

🦃 P.S.

Thanks to @IndieJames who encouraged me to share about my indie hacker journey. I’ll try to share more small experiences and learnings if I find enough time to write :)

Today was just perfect: my working laptop broke, and while waiting for the replacement I learned how to use Google Docs from my iPad.