How Beeswax founders, former Googlers, chose their startup’s name

Beeswax’s founders, from left, Shamim Samadi, Ari
Paparo, and Ram Rengaswamy.
Courtesy
of Beeswax

• Beeswax is an ad-tech startup in New York founded by three
  former Google executives.
• The founders of Beeswax said they chose their company’s name
  so it would stand out in a crowded industry.
• They deliberately avoided using the word “ad” in their name
  to distinguish them from their competition.

One of the most important factors to weigh when choosing
the name of a company is how memorable it will be to your
customers.

The founders of Beeswax kept that in mind.

Beeswax is a New York
ad-tech startup
founded by three former Google ad executives. The company
pioneered a new way for marketers to bid for ads online. Three
years after the startup’s launch, its
revenue was estimated at $25 million.

So what does beeswax have to do with advertising?

“I really liked the insect metaphors because our customers are
very hardworking and industrious, and they’re toiling away doing
their thing,” CEO Ari Paparo told Business Insider. “So we were
thinking about hives and ants and bees and it just evolved.”

The metaphor doesn’t stop there. The names of Beeswax’s products are
on-brand references like Buzz, Drone, Stinger, Pollinator, and
Waggle, the name of a dance bees use to communicate. The walls of
Beeswax’s Manhattan office are painted with hexagonal,
honeycomb-like designs.

“We’re doing something really different, we’re doing something
pretty bold. We want it to be memorable,” chief product officer
Shamim Samadi told Business Insider.

For the founders, choosing a unique name for their startup was
also a way to distinguish them from their competition. In New
York City alone, the crowded ad-tech industry includes companies
with names like AdRoll, AdHawk, ADstruc, adMarketplace, and xAd,
and Paparo said “it was the No. 1 requirement” that their name
didn’t have “ad” in it.

“Ad tech’s been around for a while, and we’re coming into the
market later than our competition. So we felt like we just had to
break through,” Paparo said. “If we had another name like
AdPotato, everyone would be like, ah, that sounds like those
other guys, ‘ad’ this, ‘ad’ that.”

“So definitely it was a conscious decision to try to do something
that would leverage up our awareness and our marketing.”

Samadi put it more bluntly.

“No one’s asked what our company name is twice,” he said.