A methodology for naming your startup company
The task of selecting your company’s name is one of the early, tricky decisions you need to make about your company. The name selected will inadvertently compete with millions of other inputs for the people’s attention, so you better have something catchy, simple and bold.
We all desire to have a nice and recognisable name, but the process involved in naming a business, is not really simple and straightforward. Most of the time it feels like waiting to have an epiphany. That’s why we would like to share the methodology applied to name Saveboost. There was no waiting for the inspiration to come, but hard work!
This framework that me and Jochen Doppelhammer used and hopefully is useful for you and can shed some light to anybody struggling to name their own product or service. We know there are naming specialists and we don’t pretend to be one. If you are in trouble, get help from great creative agencies.
The process contains 5 phases:
- Define the value proposition
- Define the target audience
- Brainstorm and grow the list
- Check availability
- Decide with data
1. Value proposition
Value proposition is a very difficult place to start, but the truth is; if you don’t know what you are offering, then how can you perfectly judge your naming ideas?
The objective is not to write the perfect value proposition yet, but to check if the names you are proposing fit with it.
For Saveboost, we used this phrase:
“Start early, save small, but continuously and invest smart to achieve financial independence in the future.”
From the value proposition, you should define simple naming verticals that are related to your concept and can describe what you are building. Try to keep it under 10 (we couldn’t).
Some of our verticals were:
- Grow,
- Safe,
- Automatic,
- Money,
- Smart,
- Save,
- Habit,
- Finance,
- etc.
As you can notice, all words suggests that we were looking to create a service that makes easy to be saving money. You should have a similar pattern with your concepts.
2. Target audience
Who should be using your service and committing your startup’s name to memory?
We realized that one of the most important concepts of managing money is understanding the impact of compound interest (for the good and the bad). This means reinvesting the earned interest, instead of paying it out and consequently making the total balance grows in an increasing rate. This idea is very powerful when applied for long periods, let’s say for 20–30 years.
Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it … he who doesn’t … pays it.
Albert Einstein
Having this in mind, and after conducting several interviews, we arrived at the simple conclusion that the more time you have to make your money grow, the best for you. And who has 30 years to grow their money? The answer — Young people!
That’s how we decided to build a product for a young adults in the age of 25–34 years old. We wanted Saveboost to be a tool for the not so wealthy generation, and to help them improve their financial situation.
In order to continue to the next phase, you must define who is your target audience. Who should use your product?
Define: Age, gender, Where does this person live and do?
3. Brainstorm and grow the list
Having the value proposition, the verticals and the audience in place, go to Thesaurus and look for synonyms and other related words for each vertical.
This part was quite fun for us as we got to learn the origin of some words and even discovered a couple of hidden meanings. Did you know, for example, that Cache means “storing treasures in a hidden place”? Yes, we considered naming our company Cache as everybody wants to store their money in a safe place. We however, discarded it because of its pronunciation in different languages and the common association with computers.
After considering a long list of words (mostly synonyms) we started applying simpler methods to extract more possible names. They include:
3.1. Same sound, different spelling (Homonyms)
This first is a very simple method. We tried creating a new word that maintains the same sound, but written with different letters. Bonus point 🏅 if you can combine concepts. For example: Fink = Finance + Think
The risk is creating something that people would not remember how to write down later, like “Kash”. Or some would they rather write “Qash”?
3.2. Combine words
This is a very common and effective technique. Take 2 or more words that explain what your product is about and combine them to make a new word.
face + book = Facebook
voice + mod (modification)= Voicemod
Buck (money) + bloom (grow) = Buckbloom
3.3. Prefix or Suffix
We had a list of suffixes and prefixes, and played with a small app that generated random combinations with all these words. We wanted to find the not so obvious combinations.
Some prefixes we tried:
-ure
-ify
-ity
-ink
-ist
-est
-ing
-matic
We got hundreds of bad names returned as results from this method, so we needed a good eye to catch the very few good results, such as “Savify”.
4. Select and check availability
After applying this three simple methods, you can generate easily more than 500 potential names for your startup. It’s time to select your favorites and check if they are available.
You don’t need to make the final decision yet. You just need to reduce your list of 500 to 50. In our case we quickly highlighted the ones that caught our attention and others that we thought might sound very interesting.
With the top 50 in place, it was then time to check if they had been taken and used somewhere else. This step can be frustrating, as you can discover that some of your favorite options are currently in use.
4.1 Website domain
We used Domize to check top level domains available. Having a .com would be great, but we could accept a different domain as well.
4.2. Social media accounts.
We considered this as much as important as the domain.
Check if your name is taken in:
4.3. Urban dictionary
Check if your name doesn’t have a bad meaning in the real world or just if another word could work as well.
I’m sure you didn’t know “cent” could be used to insult someone.
4.4. Pronunciation
How does your name sound in other languages? Could it be confusing for foreigners or locals?
Use Google translate to speak your company name in different languages.
4.5. Copyright
Check existing trademarks, patents or any potential legal impediment for your name.
5. Deciding with data
After we discarded the names that weren’t available, we tested our results with Google and Facebook ads.
The idea is very simple and effective. It involves creating various identical ads with your naming options as the only variation. It’s important to target the audience you previously defined. Let those ads run for several days and track the CTR and CPC.
For us, after running various experiments, Saveboost was the best performing one. Besides the data performance, we liked how it sounded and our live interviews also were positive about it. This gave us the confidence that we were going in the right track.
Conclusion
Selecting a brand name is not necessarily a pure creative exercise. In fact, various methodology could be applied in this process as there is no straight cut approach to it.
This framework worked for us, but some adjustments must be made depending on your own business model. You should add and follow steps that are relevant for what you are building, steps that cater for the exact needs of your brand and business.
In our case we are building Saveboost, a B2C financial product to help people save money easily.
In summary:
Define the value proposition
- Define the target audience
- Brainstorm and grow the list
- Check availability
- Decide with data
Check more about Saveboost in our website and follow us on Medium.
Thank you!
