7 Tips for Naming your Product

How to make sure your next product has the right name.

Naming companies and products is both hard and important. Here are my 7 top tips on how to do it. By the end of this article you should be able to come up with unicorn-worthy names in minutes!

Tip 1: Brevity

As Steve Blank says in his book Don’t Make Me Think: omit words. The same goes for company and product names.

This study found that companies with shorter names were worth 4% more on average than their longer named counterparts.

Shorter names fare better.

Tip 2: People like familiarity

In the same study companies with names containing dictionary words had a 6% higher valuation than those without. We like the familiar.

Cognitive Lode, a great resource summarising consumer psychology research, refers to this as the ‘Speak-Easy Effect’: “Words that are easier to say are more trustworthy and valuable.”

When trust is important for your product (e.g. banking, health), then this is an important lesson. Mint.com knew this (see Tip 5).

Tip 3: Avoid Acronyms

Don’t use acronyms. Whilst its true that there are some very successful organisations known by their acronyms (e.g. IBM, HSBC, HP, GE), they are successful in spite of their poor naming, not because of it.

The reason their names become acronyms is because they failed on brevity to start with. Luckily, we have the luxury of not making this mistake.

Tip 4: Road test early

Type your name into Google and see what happens. This will give you a good indication of whether your name is:

1. Unique — no other company has this name (at least in your category).
2. Searchable — it’s not a commonly used word.

Tip 5: Choose the right domain name

Of course all the above is useless if you don’t have a good domain. Here’s what to look for:

1. It should match your company name exactly (it can be tempting to add a prefix or suffix such as get, go, hello, hq etc).
2. If you’re going global, .com is generally best, particularly if it’s for mainstream consumers.
3. You can use .io if you’re targeting techies. Don’t use this for mass market.
4. If you’re a service business such as a marketing agency or consultancy then .co is all the rage. Again, avoid for mass market consumer products (people always say “.uk?” when I tell them my .co email address).
5. Using local extensions like .co.uk will impact your visibility outside of that country, so don’t use these if you’re planning on world domination.

You’re probably thinking, “that’s easier said than done”, and you’d be right.

You don’t necessarily need a good domain on day one. Just look at this list from Buffer of the domains these well known companies launched with:

• Square was squareup.com
• DropBox was getdropbox.com
• Facebook was thefacebook.com
• Instagram was instagr.am
• Twitter was twttr.com
• Foursquare was playfoursquare.com
• Basecamp is basecamphq.com
• Pocket is getpocket.com
• Bitly was/is bit.ly
• Delicious was del.icio.us
• Freckle is letsfreckle.com

Mint is another great example of this. Founder Aaron Patzer originally bought mymint.com for $3k, before negotiating the purchase of Mint.com in exchange for equity at a later date.

Mint was by no means the first company to enter the personal finance management market, but Patzer cites the name and domain purchase as one of the key factors in his company’s success over competition like Geezeo and Wasabe.

Paul Graham has a different take. He says “the problem with not having the .com of your name is that it signals weakness”, and suggests you should change your name immediately to secure a .com.

He also notes “100% of the top 20 Y Combinator companies by valuation have the .com of their name.”

I think the warning is that all those companies above were lucky enough to secure their name.com further down the line (no doubt for a price), but there are no guarantees, so you may as well spend a bit of extra time up front finding an available .com name that does the job.

Tip 6: Closing the deal

If you’ve thought of a good name, the domain you’re after for it will almost certainly have been taken already. Your options are to find an alternative, or buy the domain from the existing owner.

Godaddy etc are good for doing your initial domain search, as they will give you suggested alternatives if your domain isn’t available. If you don’t come up trumps then it’s off to the auction sites.

If someone already holds the domain you want, you can do a whois lookup to see information about the existing owner. This can help you when you’re deciding how much to offer.

When you bid for a domain, don’t give too much away. The more information they know about you, the better negotiating position you put them in.

Don’t say: “we would like to buy X.com for a project we’re working on called X for my business called Y”.

Do say: “I have shortlisted this domain for a project I am working on”.

For really good domains you should expect to part with a few grand at least.

Tip 7: Watch out for Trademarks

Before pushing the button on any domain purchases, you should check whether anyone has registered a trademark for that company name.

Each country has its own trademark register. I use tmview to search over 40 registers in one go. Handy.

If you don’t feel comfortable doing this yourself, these guys (no affiliation) can do a search for you, and also help you register your name when the time comes.

And that’s it. Also check out this article that has a useful framework for assessing names. Please share any good resources you use for naming in the comments.

Happy naming!