brand, domain-name, freelancing, sell, enterpriseI registered a second level domain with the .com extension and I want to use the site I’ll create as a gallery for some graphic and artistic works, a kind of general portfolio for some of my artistic stuff which may be commercialized somehow (logos, pictures, web design works…). I also want to provide the name of my website to some agencies which are focused on freelancing artists, so the name of my website has to be easy to remember. I want it to be the first step for launching a sort of personal “brand” in the future, so it is a business-oriented project and it may become a small enterprise.
The name I chose is meaningless but it’s very very similar to that of a very famous director: the pronunciation is the same, it only misses the final letter in the written form.
In my opinion it’s a very cool name, easy to remember, it gives the idea of some artistic and weird at the same time.
Now my doubt is: what does it have to do with my website and upcoming activity? It may be a cool name for a weird photography gallery somehow but… it has nothing to do with selling graphic design, which will be the main content I want to focus on.
Given that XYZ is my website name and XYZO is the name of the famous person I was inspired by, when I google XYZ I get —» “Showing results for XYZO Search instead for XYZ”
So given that I want to ask:
may a random nonsense name, possibly similar to an existing one, be a good choice for a one-person enterprise or activity which is focused on showing and selling specific products, even when such name is apparently unrelated to those?
It’s entirely possible, but it requires more time & money educating the public.
I say it’s possible because “Vine” doesn’t mean “6-second videos”, “Google” doesn’t mean “to search”, “Amazon” was just a rainforest, and “StackExchange” is nonsense. But over time these things all came to have very clear meanings worldwide.
Per your comment:
given that XYZ is my website name and XYZO is the name of the famous person I was inspired by, when I google XYZ I get —» “Showing results for XYZO Search instead for XYZ”
Speaking for myself I’d rule out using such a domain for that reason alone. At least in your early days, and possibly later, you’ll have an uphill battle to get any type of search visibility. Not to mention typos when your users or journalists write about your site, hindering you further.
Not saying it’s impossible - I bootstrapped a prior business that clients regularly misspelt (including the domain) a few years back. But don’t make your life as a founder harder than it already will be.
As others have described, by itself your name will not determine the success nor failure of your venture. There are many paths to a great name, and for every naming rule one could list you can find a successful startup that broke it.
Nothing wrong with borrowing terminology from a completely unrelated field. That is probably a far better option that a nonsensical name that is perhaps too close to a real name. My startup actually took this route and feedback from advisors and customers is that it works extremely well for us.
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