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UPDATE ON BELOW (changed from 1 to 3 stars): After a bunch of just saying "sorry, can we give some of your money back for you to remove your reviews" (I wasn't interested), the founder called me and offered to apply my previous payment to a "managed contest" to get me a better result. Ultimately, it did not work for me, but I really appreciated their willingness to do this, and so I improved my rating on this review. This is the email I sent my consultant this morning:

"Hi Grant, unfortunately, I just don't think the naming process is working for us. The alternatives developed so far are just not really close to what we will be enthusiastic about, and I am confident we will be able to develop a name we like internally (as difficult as it is), as we did previously. You may be right that the names are all "fine and usable" even though we don't "like" them, or it's just that the fact that we didn't think of them ourselves; nonetheless we DO want a name we genuinely like. I appreciate the effort very much, but I don't want you to invest any more time. I know you've helped many many customers successfully, I just don't think I'm a good customer. I'll change the reviews I wrote to acknowledge your efforts, which I do sincerely appreciate."

I followed the site's instructions, spending quite a bit of time specifying exactly what I needed, and I even paid extra to get "only their best tier one creatives". Then I was inundated with 500+ potential firm/domain names, 90% of which did not meet the basic required criteria the site had asked me to so carefully think about and articulate. I spent a ton of time giving feedback as the site told me to do, and in the end literally not one suggested name was even close to what we needed. I felt that most of what I was getting were "recycled pet names" the "creatives" had thought of and were trying to get someone to buy, rather than names developed for my business. In the end the experience was a waste of time and money. As a contrast, I used 99Designs for our logo and I was happy with the experience and gladly paid the contest winner 2x what I had offered to pay the squadhelp contest winner.

We were extrenely pleased with squadhelp. We had over 1000 entries submitted during the week for our company name and felt the creatives responded promptly to feedback and guidance so the suggestions were in line with our brief and what we were looking for. We are delighted with the name we have chosen and plan to use squadhelp for our logo design too. Only thing we would say is that we found the web page difficult to navigate initially. We figured it out over time but it wasn't intuitive.

Overall, it's been a great experience. We selected the second tier package that stats to expect over 300+ entries and we received 2,300+. While we appreciate the participation, we were a little overwhelmed. Perhaps updating the descriptions might be helpful. The comment feature and receive comments seemed a little difficult to navigate. It took some digging to find a few answers about the next steps in the contest. I was unsure if we had to select a winner before time expired but was able to find an answer fairly easy with the chat feature. This has been a helpful solution to crowd-source an idea. It helped us question our brand as we're just starting out. Plus, the cost seemed to be a big benefit for a small startup. There seems to be a lot of support resources like trademark or audience testing. This is something we may take advantage of in the future. Overall I think SquadHelp has brought some great solutions at a fair price. There may be some user experience aspects to look into to make this a truly flawless experience. Thank you.