How 12 Founders Named their Startups

braintreepayments.com

6 points·klynch··7 comments

I am running through the name game right now with my cofounders. I joined 3 months after they had incorporated with equal share, however this led me to inherit their name and website. It took me 4 months to get them to change their website (actually it was only until a client told them it was ridiculous that they relented). Now 8 months in of discussing changing the name, I finally convinced them and they started bouncing around ideas. Most equally bad. I finally just set a deadline (3 pm today) for us to pick one. I will update in an hour with more info on our process and the outcome...

When naming an application I tried doing some wordplay and consider its domain availability. Like my current app, I'm dealing with texts, like web articles. And I'm extracting important sentences in it to serve as its preview. Preview of movies are called teaser. That's why I named my app TextTeaser (and TextTeaser.com as its domain). It's a preview for web articles.

I can't say this enough.

Great names are made not found.

Can you elaborate on this?

The point is that it's the company that makes the name not the name that makes the company.

So don't spend too much time finding the right name.

I elaborated on this a while back.

http://000fff.org/whats-in-a-name-tips-for-naming-your-start...

Good observations and I couldn't agree more with this line: "great names are the byproduct of great products not the other way round."

It's still important to be thoughtful about the name, but it's definitely not worth spending lots of $$$ or dwelling on for weeks.

- I liked the thought process behind "Parse.ly" name selection. - "Unfuddle" is not obvious to me.

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