Ask HN: How did you choose a name for your business? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How did you choose a name for your business?

9 pointsthrowaway_yc6 comments

Do you have an advice on how to come up with a good name? Any tips you could share on how do you come up with a product name?

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I named our product "Orca Scan", as it lets companies build a custom barcode scanner using smartphones (https://orcascan.com).

This was my third attempt at business (2 failures), I was a sole founder and knew it was going to be hard, so I needed a name that would motivate me through the inevitable tough times, time away from family etc.

I arrived at "Orca" as it's the first letter of my children's names, in age order [O]wen, [R]hys, [C]aitlin and [A]na.

I then simply needed to add another word that would make it unique (i.e. available as a domain and unused in the app stores); as this is a barcode scanner app, "Scan" was a no brainer.

I've spent ~5 years on this project (from side project to business) and almost changed the name a few times, as it somehow never felt "serious" enough. That was until I was on a call one day with a customer and they used it as a verb "Hey Billy, make sure you Orca that pallet", at that point I realised, regardless of what you call it, it probably only feels right once you've built the product and business around it.

We named our product https://Spike.sh, an incident management product with alerts. Our server "spiked" is commonly used so we thought it made a lot of sense that we will alert every time it does.

It also fits into our target audience better. Allows us to foray into horizontal products too.

There are two types of commonly used names. One is a combination of two words such as Datadog and others are single worded like Spike, Stripe, Slack

Single worded domains are neat and are quite sticky in my opinion. I recommend it. We also live in a world of increasing adoption of rare tlds. Magic.link, reflect.run and plenty more. I believe people are leveraging it pretty well. We share our .sh tld with shell extensions, which is pretty cool.

For single words - stick to 6 or less characters and explore tlds other than .com

For double words - ensure at least one word is super relatable and one of the words is short. Peter Parker (pp) -> Datadog (DD) helps in remembering and using it more.

My friend was into domain names and offered it to me. I thought it was funny and accepted it. Then, I realized the name has the letters "HTML" in it, in the correct order, sort of like HoTMaiL.com back in the day. Then I knew it was meant to be ))

I created a script to search for 3 letter domains in 2010, and got one available that sounds nice, so I built my business around that name. Nowadays I do domain/app search before naming projects that I intend to publish.

My actual business name is fairly generic, so the LLC can be repurposed if necessary. I make my branding unique and fun.

use a memorable name, like google, or a name with good meaning. google was a super abstract word when it was first conceived and stuck in your mind. amazon is more on the good meaning side, because the amazon has incredible amounts of diversity within it and so does the company.

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