Names with stories: The story behind Airbase.com — Smart Branding

Thejo Kote, Founder & CEO of Airbase, talks about his brand, what are the characteristics of an effective brand name, and why you should treat your domain name as an intangible asset.

When did you start thinking about your brand name and how did you settle on Airbase?

When it comes to naming companies, my approach and philosophy generally is that first and foremost — brand names matter. If you have a crazy hard-to-remember, hard-to-pronounce brand name — that doesn’t help, right? Especially if you’re building a B2B software company, and especially in the area where we are building a company where you’re handling people’s money (and it’s a lot of money) — your brand name needs to be a priority.

So with that in mind, it’s always important that you have a good brand name that people can have confidence in. When it comes to the specific name I think of one of the mistakes that most founders and entrepreneurs make, which I made in my previous companies, is that you come up with the name and you fall in love with it and then you find out that you can’t get the dot com domain.

When it comes to the specific name I think of one of the mistakes that most founders and entrepreneurs make, which I made in my previous companies, is that you come up with the name and you fall in love with it and then you find out that you can’t get the dot com domain.

You can get the right domain and try to make all kinds of compromises around getting the combinations and then it doesn’t work out and you’ve just wasted a significant amount of time.

My lesson is to always say don’t fall in love with the name. First, start by looking at what domains are available. That’s the approach I took when I started looking for a name and brand for this company that I wanted to create that is now Airbase.

There are tools out there that you can use to find out which domains are going to become available soon because they’re expiring and I did that for a couple of weeks. I would start looking at this tool to see when domains we’re going to become available and that met my criteria for a good brand and name.

Continue reading the whole interview at SmartBranding.com