How to Kill a Baby Star Business

Start-up strategy is usually about picking a very narrow niche target market, angle or differentiator and then excelling so well in that area that you own that area. In such cases, competition loses its will to directly get into that area.

Tweetlater was one such, superbly positioned service allowing Twitter users to set up scheduled tweets. The name was clear. The agenda was clear. The strategy and direction was as sharp as a butcher's knife.

More recently, they've changed their name to "Social Oomph." I'm guessing that the founders conversation before making the decision went something like this:
Founder 1 - "Man, TweetLater is such a super-hit. We've got a sub-10,000 Alexa rank and thousands of users. Wonder how we can monetize all this traffic and reputation ..."

Founder 2 - "The problem with our company is that Twitter can easily allow this feature of scheduling tweets. If they do so, we will lose our relevance. Also, scheduling tweets appears to be getting a bad name because of all the spammer-type people out there misusing this service."

Founder 1 - "I know what we should do! Let's broaden the offering to include all social networks. Our name is too narrowly focused. Let's change it to reflect our broader vision!"

Founder 2 - "That's a neat idea. Who knows? Maybe we'll be more important than Twitter someday by allowing users to connect to Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed and more! Let's call it SocialOomph!"

And so they go and change their name from Tweet Later to something that's nebulous, ambiguous and with no meaning to the average user.

Maybe I'm completely wrong on this one. I hope that I'm completely wrong on this one. But I can't see the new name working as well as the old name. More importantly, a name or a tag line frames the company's future thinking ... this name is likely to take this company down a dark-hole with no easy path out.