Action steps
- Generate a few names for your product.
- Test them with other people and pick the best.
Requirements
Uniqueness. Google your name. Google your name + category. What comes up? Ideally, there should not be any well known direct match. It is ok to have a similar brand in completely unrelated category.
There is food giant Nestle and a brand for gas stations Neste. Law firm Goodwin & Procter is unrelated to Procter & Gamble consumer goods company. M•A•C is a cosmetics brand, MAC is the operator of airports in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, while Mac OS is operating system for Apple Macintosh computers.
Associations. It is more important to avoid unwanted associations than to have a direct association with your market or product idea. Ask friends, what do they think of when they hear your name. If you do not like it, change the name.
Umbrella brand. It is great, if your name can be used as umbrella to all your future projects.
Initially, it was only Virgin Record Shop, now there hundreds of businesses under Virgin brand. However, you can always can up with an umbrella brand later.
Length. These days length is less important. There are a lot of great products with long names. Harley-Davidson, Procter & Gamble, Lollapalooza Festival,
Domain name. Having an unregistered .com domain is not important. Register .io or .co instead. Or add a secondary word to your name like “tryX”, “getX” or “Xapp”.
Ease of spelling. This is less important than most people believe. There are a lot of hard to spell brands: Berkeley and Berklee, Mercedes-Benz, Luis Vuitton, Thomson Reuters, Moët Chandon.
Linguistics. Is your name more like a noun, verb or adjective? Does it sound like a word from your local language? How people will use it in a normal conversation? Try to put your name in different sentences like “I am so happy to use X to solve some problem Y” or “I really recommend to use X for this”. Does it sound natural?
Descriptiveness. It is really hard to describe your product well in one or two words. Actually, even if you can, it is better to use some other name. Nobody names restaurant “Restaurant”. SocialNetwork.com is way worse than Facebook.com. Non-descriptive is also helpful when you change the product without changing the brand name.
Constructing a name
Typically you start naming process by writing down a lot of words that are related to your field or having similar emotions or associations. Then you use one of the following constructing techniques.
Two words. It can be a commonly used word combination like Hotel Tonight or an original one like Pizza Hut.
Facebook, MasterCard, General Motors, TechCrunch, Survey Monkey, MailChimp, British Airways, BuzzFeed.
One word. In this case you use the brand word + category in your communication. E.g. payment processor Stripe.
Sprint, Windows, Blackberry, Apple, Oracle, Amazon, Square, Medium, Curiosity (Mars rover).
One synthetic word. Typically, you use a common root with some suffixes/prefixes or combine two words with some modifications. You can also omit or change a few letters.
Google (from googol, the large number of the digit 1 followed by hundred zeroes), Dwolla (dollar + wallet), Cisco (from San Francisco), adidas (From Adolf Dassler), Fedex (Federal Express), svbtle (from subtle), Exec (from executive), Reddit (read/edit).
Proper names. Many brands are based on surnames or geographic terms.
Toyota (from Sakichi Toyoda, founder of Toyota Industries), Ralph Lauren, Harley-Davidson (founder team included one Harley and three Davidsons!), Huffington Post (from co-founder Arianna Huffington), Khan Academy.
Name fast
Have a temporary name for your product on day one. Call it something. Then you can start pre-selling it to potential customers. Do not delay naming and selling.
Do not spend to much time and energy on naming. You can always change it later. Set a firm deadline and go with the best option you have at that time. Actually, that’s how Apple Computer was named.
In any case, you initial name is likely to change.
Google was BackRub, PayPal name was created when Confinity Inc. and X.com merged into a new company.
This article is a part of Earlydays, an open guide for first-time entrepreneurs.
Written by Yury Lifshits — yury@yury.name — @yurylifshits
