Naming your Startup
We were almost Slack.
Our first name was terrible. Curately. I was responsible for that. Fell for the trick of naming a company based on an available domain. Loosely it was based on curating people, ugh. I’d sold myself on it but my co-founders Lars and Yaron weren’t buying it. They were right.
The second name I was set on was Allocate. I’d already purchased Allocatehq.com. But no one really loved it.
Weeks went by and a long Basecamp thread landed us nowhere. After work one evening we met at Jimmy’s Corner, an old dive bar in Time Square, the type of place you go to solve life’s problems. Lars had put together a solid list based on googling the scheduling space that included:
float control
zero float
slack control
slackless
All terms you can find in project management wiki’s.
You read a lot when starting a business. The process of learning through experience doesn’t exist yet, so you read a lot. One rule I read about starting a business is to keep your branding and marketing message positive. So when it came to naming our business, that was the prerequisite.
‘Slack’ was discounted almost immediately. Slacking at work wasn’t an image we wanted to project. Lazy? Unproductive? We were going for the opposite.
And yet, there we had, over a beer, discounted the name of what would become the fastest growing SaaS business of all time.
You can fall into this trap all the time, discounting ideas based on rules you read. The best advice at an early stage of a company is to stick with truths. Things that won’t change in the next 10 years. When it comes to naming online businesses this means:
- Short names (no one wants to type a lot)
- Names that can be spelt without guidance (a name is not short if you need to spell it after saying it)
- A relatable .com and Twitter handle (if you’re a SaaS where the domain is the destination)
It’s common when starting out to tack on an extension to the domain, e.g. ‘hq’, ‘app’, or a short second word. But don’t be afraid to reach out to the owner of your desired brand name early on and make them an offer, it’ll be easier to negotiate than when you’re more established.
Over the next pint we zeroed in on ‘Zero Float’. Zero (again, a little negative right?) didn’t gel so I suggested we shoot for Float, and tack on Schedule so we can afford the domain. ‘Float Schedule’ was born. We had one more pint and moved on.
It was three years later before we were able to land Float.com and the name we are today. It was a big investment at the time, but we’re going to be around awhile and we want to be proud of our name and our domain.
It fits all the truths.
P.S. — If you wiki ‘Float’, both Float and Slack sit side by side. A little reminder for us that rules ain’t truths.
EDIT: Stewart Butterfield, Slack’s founder, recently shared the thread that lead to the naming of Slack. Despite Eric also having concerns about the negative connotations, it stuck:
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