It's a little hard to judge this article when the most important information (the before and after of the name) has been changed in the pursuit of anonymity.

Maybe it's about scvngr? http://www.scvngr.com/ Just a guess. :)

I thought that at first too, but they have press going back to 2009 under the name scvngr: http://techcrunch.com/2009/08/13/scvngr-lets-you-build-aweso...

Hmmm, got a point there. Can't think of another related location based service though.

We had a similar experience about a month ago. We rebranded (with help from HN http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2560805) from Sfalma (greek word for error) to BugSense and our sigups increased by x4.

Could the change in numbers be attributable to going from a generic English word to something more unique and discoverable (if you'll pardon my pun)

I'll go one step further about what you said and guess that a search with a generic English name in a search engine will return 1000s of results with your application at the bottom of page 100.

With a unique name you are now on page one at the top of the results. Probably also valid for search in app stores.

However for this to work you need first to hear the name somewhere and it needs to be easy to remember.

This would be a great theory, except there wasn't a jump in web traffic from the name change, only conversions/purchases.

My theory would be that choosing a non-existing word for the name instantly created a brand, whereas before it had just been an anonymous app with a name that referred to what it did.

I'm guessing it's that or the old name left a bad taste in peoples' mouths and the new one is a meme-centric buzzword-y type thing.

Perhaps with the long generic word name, the site was perceived more as a 'website' while the shortened unique one is now perceived as a 'web app'.

I wonder if the new name listed better in the AppStore/Market for some reason?

Maybe it was closer to some other popular app and picked up traffic from that?

Without the real names it's kind of difficult to imagine trying to replicate this.

Am I the only one who thinks someone around here should know about a site with 15k monthly signups and a iPhone and Android app?

(On the other hand I never really got twitter, -a cheap version of teambox that for most people is just a more convenient way of receiving spam : )

Hmm this is quite weird. Maybe the new name made it feel more like a 'cool web app' which made more people sign up. Can't make much of this without the actual name etc though.

Perhaps the act of rebranding itself resulted in more users? One might be reminded of a service or reassured that a service is active by a rebranding.

From article: "Following our recent article titled -’how i doubled the price of my software product – and sold ten times as many copies‘ we received emails from numerous developers with similar stories to share regarding their own startups, and today we are sharing one of those tales. The developer who’s application we are covering wishes to remain anonymous: please understand that this anonymity is what allows us to share specific user signup, traffic and revenue statistics in these articles that the developers wouldn’t otherwise be comfortable sharing – the anonymity is a worthwhile sacrifice in our opinion- but let us know your thoughts in the comments below. For the purposes of this story, the developer will be known as ‘Steve’ and the product name, ‘Discover’ (at least originally!)."

Is there real value in unknown data?

Is it anonymity or intellectual property, safety or paranoia?

There could be more reasons: probably, or possibly?

did they already have those users on the web app and just the mobile app download increased after the name change?

article is confusing.