namingHaving worked full time as a developer and freelance designer, the time has been arriving for a while to start up my own business. However, I’m having trouble coming up with a name. I want something that will really last.
I’ve brainstormed many names, mapped out my values and vision for the business but what I come up with really doesn’t seem to cut it. I need more angles for coming up with names. Companies like Google and Apple both have names that are nothing to do with their products, but they are great names. How can I come up with such a great name?
Naming a business is often a distraction for getting your startup off the ground. Your main objective to drive adoption of your product (or service) and that requires that you have a product that some market segment would like to use. Regardless of the name, your focus should be testing that users would part with money (or time) for it. Once you've established some level of traction, a business name can potentially help you scale, but really it's just a name that people know to call your company or product.
The big key to remember is that you can change the name (and logo) once you've got enough traction to make it worth scaling your marketing effort beyond just finding the first early adopters. So the first rule is not to let naming take much of your attention in the early days of your business and do not worry at all about finding a name that will last long. You'll have to pivot several times as you discover what product will sell and what kind of buyers or users it attracts.
Apple and Google are only great names because they became great companies. There is nothing inherent in those names that make them great. So just focus on the company, and whatever name you pick will eventually either change or become great because your company becomes great.
Having said all that, here are a few basics to getting some kind of name so you can move on.
focus on something you can get a website for, so that means more than 5 letters (unless you're willing to buy a domain from someone else). Internic's whois (http://www.internic.net/whois.html) is a good place to test a domain name to see if it's available.
fanciful names (rather than existing words) are much better to avoid trademark issues so avoid dictionary words. Portmanteau words can work but adjust them a bit to make them less obvious and more evocative than descriptive. For instance, Apple could be very hard to get a trademark on (even if it weren't an existing company) if your business was related to the food industry. Instead just pick something pronounceable and reasonably short (but not too short). There are several websites to generate brand names and you can easily find those sites through a Google search (try "brand name generator"). Most of the ones these sites generate are not particularly great names, but they can get you started. Just go with something reasonably useful, adjust it a bit if you like, make sure you can get the website, and move on.
You can get a quick and inexpensive logo for your name from several design sites on the internet (such as Fiverr; there are many others). Often I'll pay the $5 (or whatever) and then use that logo either as it is, or adjust it to fit my sense of aesthetics (I'm a reasonably handy amateur graphic designer, but it doesn't have to be that great). I know I'll change it later if the business takes off.
So just pick something (set a limit of no say more than 2-4 hours if even that to search and decide) and move on. It may help you to think of your first company or brand name as a temporary code word to use until you attract enough customers to make it worthwhile to re-look at it when you're ready to scale your marketing (say after a 100 or more customers). Many successful companies have names that you probably wouldn't have picked if you just saw the name without any other context.
Above all, don't let perfect be the enemy of good.
Good luck!
If you want a word like apple or google, that doesn’t have anything to do with what you’re doing I suggest you look into lists of different types of things. For example list of fruits or list of mathematical expressions (in google’s case), and pick a word you like.
If you have no idea what lists there are check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lists_of_lists
Whatever you settle with just remember that there is no correlation between the name of the company and its success. So if you’re worried that you might pick a bad name just make sure that the one you pick is a name that you are comfortable with using.
If you want to find easily a premium domain name, you should try a premium domain name marketplace like https://www.oneclickname.com/ You will make no compromise on your domain name and avoid weeks of brainstorming.
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