Sometimes, 'boring' is best

Some people assume that Big Revolution’s work with tech companies is all about making them seem ‘sexier,’ but that’s not always the case. Communicating clearly to a target audience is the number one challenge I find myself tackling.

Big Revolution has worked with some agtech (agriculture tech) businesses this year, so a Wall Street Journal profile of a startup in that space caught my eye this week.

I was interested in how this startup was trying to build an 'Amazon for agricultural supplies’ but how big incumbent companies wanted to destroy it for trying to break up the traditional, lucrative way 'big-ag’ works.

But what interested me most was the startup’s name: Farmers Business Network. What a drab, ordinary name. Brilliantly drab and ordinary. Coming out of Silicon Valley, the temptation must have been to use a much more 'startuppy’ name: Farmerly, fa.rm.it… something like that. But no, they went for something that sounds like a chamber of commerce for agriculture that could have been founded in the 1800s.

And that’s a good thing. Want to gain farmers’ trust? Some trendy startup name probably isn’t the way to do it.

A similar case study: a couple of years ago while mentoring an accelerator cohort, I came across a company that was selling its software into incredibly boring, old-fashioned businesses. They chose a similarly boring, old-fashioned name that made them sound like a software company from the 1980s. I asked them why three founders in their mid-20s had picked such a drab name, and they said it was deliberately chosen to appeal to their customers.

And as a journalist, I’d have struggled to write convince anyone to read a profile of a company called something like 'Toilets Direct.’ Yet when I spoke to investors, they’d often be most excited about such 'reassuringly boring’ businesses.

Not everything 'disruptive’ has to fit a stereotype of what disruption looks like. It’s not always about flashy interfaces and bold, ground-breaking branding. Sometimes, to shake up a market —even in tech — it makes sense to camouflage yourself as something that market expects.

Image credit: Charles Deluvio on Unsplash