Why Naming Your Company Sucks | Hacker News Reader

Why Naming Your Company Sucks

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How about generating a few hundred random words with Markov chains until you find something you like?

http://www.fourteenminutes.com/fun/words/

I think it's good to have a combination. But to find a good name you need some aesthetic appreciation.

I love naming companies. Of course, I've done it a bunch of times, so it's a familiar process. For someone who is suddenly out of their comfort zone, I can understand the frustration. A few tips:

1. Before thinking of names, get meta. What's the company about, what would a "good" name connote, what are the ideas the name should express? Write down a narrative of all the awesome things the name should convey. If you're diligent in following this recommendation, all kinds of new ideas will emerge.

2. Say any potential names aloud. Do they roll off the tongue, or are they awkward tongue twisters?

3. Do your domain lookups via the command line, not some web site. It's been suggested that domain lookup sites snatch your queries and register them. True? I don't know; but you can't go wrong using Whois in your shell of choice.

I'm having this problem now, could we connect offline? Your thinking could bring me some clarity.

You could use a domain name generator for ideas, something like this: http://impossibility.org/

baconyaks.com! In some spaces, people really don't care what the company is called.

The more random the name, the more likely you are to be safe from trademarks, as well.

Here's a tip: use the most obvious, phonetic (mis)spelling or you'll spend the next X years spelling it out to every yahoo who needs your address.

Eg. 'segway' not 'segue'

> Here's a tip: use the most obvious, phonetic (mis)spelling or you'll spend the next X years spelling it out to every yahoo who needs your address.

This is a great point. Making a "phonetically accessible" name is important, especially so you can direct them to your site via word-of-mouth.

http://wordoid.com is a fun name generator if you want pronounceable words.

Wordoid is very useful. Even if you don't find a name that works, it gives you lots of ideas.

Seems to be down right now..?

I empathize with you. It took my team hours just to figure out a name for our company. In fact, I think naming is one of the most challenging parts for startups.

And the name is?

Hours isn't bad. We deliberated on names for days to find the perfect one. In the end, we fell in love with a bastardized pronunciation of a foreign word.

I personally like using foreign words for inspiration because it's a good combination of a real world to you and a mostly meaningless word to your first market.

http://nametoolkit.com - We use several of the mentioned approaches to provide domain suggestions.

- The "freshfunk" method of applying prefixes and suffixes, which we call wordmixer (works well for one-word names).

- Vowel/syllable replacement (phoneme)

- Thesaurus (works best with word pairs)

- domain hacks

- ngrams (word pairs taken from a large corpus sorted by frequency descending)

The article is a little over-the-top on a few points. But this obviously stems from the authors own difficulties in choosing a name. While your mileage may vary if for examples you're choosing name in English, based upon a common phrase or word you're going to be hard pressed to get the first name that pops into your head.

I found it more disappointing that someone felt the need to "review" the blog post in the comment stream for us. Even if you disagree with the post it would be far nicer if you pointed in a nicer way and the fact that it 'landed on HN' should indicate that the communicated is interested in the content.

Can anyone explain why there would be hostility against this particular author? It seems a bit out of place in this community.

After a long time deciding what to name our company, we finally chose 2 consonants, they could mean anything you chose.

We however spend much more time naming our products and web services.

There are two things that need to happen: 1) create a good idea for a name that fits what you're offering to your visitors/customers 2) Check to see if that name is available.

I built this domain name suggestion tool that does both of these instantly: http://domainjig.com

In case you're wondering, it absolutely DOES NOT hijack or steal your ideas and register your domain name behind your back.

Anyone else think it's actually a good idea to name your company the same as your product?

In my case I gave up on the "company" name and instead printed business cards with the product name on them. That's all that any of our users know anyway.

Seriously, do you think most Basecamp users have any idea who 37 Signals is? Maybe they know Highrise and Campfire, but they probably think, "Yeah, those are made by that Basecamp company."

It's a key strategic decision around the concept of 'Positioning' - do you want to be positioned in the marketplace around your Product (Sprite, Fanta etc) or your Company (McDonalds). Neither is better or worse, but it is a decision to consider.

Remarkably, my grandmother calls McDonalds "Big Mac" ("as in, Jacob used to work at Big Mac"), which is proof you can have a plan and make a decision but you can't completely control how your customers view you.

Naming your company is easy. Just do the following!

- append -ly, -able, -r, -up, -in, -on - remove all vowels - substitute k for c unless it ends in -ck in which case just remove the c... or the k - take the last two letters and put them into the doma.in - prepend with get- or the- - use a sound

And, if all those fail, just buy the domain you want with .net instead of .com and buy the .com after you've raised some cash. ;P

Naming a band is the most dangerous part of a new band. I have had bands nearly break up over it. Naming a startup is no easier.

Every hackathon or startup weekend I do I make sure people know about http://namechk.com so they can check all the possible places you may want to use a name. I am not connected with them at all, I just find it makes the discussion on naming things go so much faster and smoother.

Domain name: $25

Trademark search: $350

Invariably coming up with a better name six months later: priceless.

(I assume that doesn't only happen to me every time.)

Why trademark search is so expensive? E.g. I can search trademarks here for free http://tess2.uspto.gov/? That's US market only of course.

Is there a reason to pay for a trademark search instead of using the USPTO website's free trademark search? Or do you only pay for that after you've already done the US search yourself?

USPTO states that their trademark database is NOT a superset of the state-level registrations and common law marks: http://tess2.uspto.gov/

At the least, you also need to check each of the 50 state-level PTDLs. USPTO has a list by state: http://www.uspto.gov/products/library/ptdl/locations/index.j...

The other theoretical benefit of a professional search is that they are expected to research similar marks as well, taking advantage of their legal expertise to determine how similar is too similar. (I emphasize 'theoretical'.)

Domain sitting in particular throws a wrench in what's already a consuming enough process. I'm hesitant to admit how much time I've spent thinking about names (versus time spent thinking about core features, supplementary details, future plans, etc).

Thanks for all the comments. And I'm glad to have this naming exercise behind me. I'm writing another post about the process and will give you details on tools I used.

You could try to go backwards - check out a list of expiring domains and see if any match your market ;)

http://www.namejet.com/

Totally agree. Here was our process: http://startup-stella.com/?p=116

If name is taken up or trademarked, why not call it - TheXXX then when you've become a billion dollar company, name it the way you want: XXX.

If it doesn't become a billion dollar company, then the name does not matter.

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