The Art of Picking a Name that Sticks

How to call it? About balancing creativity 🗯, gut instinct ⚡️ and cool, independent reasoning 🤔 to find a short and memorable name with a catchy tag line: UnscrewMe – Find your taste in London ❤️.

Quickly after deciding to seriously start working on the project, I began thinking about names. While you could argue that it is more important to have a product, before you need to worry about a name, I wanted to give my new project a name first, before writing a single line of code. Maybe this is because the basic implementation is not really what makes the project interesting for me, it’s just a necessity.

Gathering ideas to generate the the long list

I started writing down ideas and I already had a list of possible names, but I was not yet fully satisfied with the options, when I decided one evening on the way home to stop quickly at Blandford Comptoir in Marylebone, eat a dessert, drink a glass of wine, and focus on coming up with a couple of new name ideas.

By the end of the evening, I had drunk more glasses and tasters of wine than I set out to – and expanded my list to 78 options. UnscrewMe was number 40 on that list – but of course, at that time I did not know yet which name I would choose.

I was happy with this comprehensive list, and the next day, I revisited my wine-fuelled inventions with a clear head and eliminated the ones that really did not sound too promising. Splitting ideation and evaluation into two clearly distinct steps paid off for me – I am sure I would never have seriously written down some of the options without the strong encouragement by various beautiful wines. However, scrutinising those ideas was equally essential to ensure making a sensible choice in the end.

Pruning the long list by ranking all names

Starting from the long list, I did not want to make things too complicated and settled with a simple yet flexible and somewhat vague “+/-” ranking system, throwing in something like “(+)” every now and then. At the end of this process, I cut the long list down to just 29 naming options that were rated positively or at least neutrally.

In parallel, I also structured the long list a bit and sorted the options into three different buckets. I was simply curious to understand better what kind of names I had come up with, and if I might have missed a trick in the process. The “generic names” added up to 25, the largest group was the “wine-specific names” at 47 and the “location-based names” came in at just six. I decided that I covered enough areas and felt that there is no reason to look any further. I also quite liked a few of the options.

Getting back to the rating system. Of the 29 non-negative ratings, I selected 13 names to go ahead with and do the basic background research.

Researching name ideas and deciding which make the short list

For any web service or app, having a short, memorable domain name helps people finding it – and crucially – coming back. This meant that names that had already been used by someone else who snapped up concise, compact domain names would have to be ruled out, no matter how good the name was. And even if the domain name was still available, if there was a UK company registered under the same name, it could lead to confusions or even legal disputes over the name, so that was another limitation I had to take into account.

After concluding my background checks, I had a list of five viable name ideas. As I basically already decided that one of these ideas will become the name for the project, I’ve already bought one or two domain names for four items on my short list, so even before I made a decision, I was sitting on nine domain names. Why? Well, it’s fairly inexpensive and it doesn’t hurt, I also have a history of buying domain names before I have a use for them. And sometimes, I never had a use for them. But from a business perspective, it is much better when I get a few domains I ever need today, than someone else registers the name I want tomorrow and I have to settle for a less memorable domain or go for the second-best name.

Soon after having established a short list of five names, I also began to write short, catchy tag lines or strap lines, or whatever you want to call them. Of the 23 ideas I wrote down, 16 were three or four words long – I really wanted to keep it short. I used the same simple rating system to arrive at a short list of six.

Asking for expert advice to get an independent judgement

Since he already knew about the overall idea, I sent the five name options together with the six tag line suggestions to my friend and colleague Ed, so he could provide some feedback. I did that without telling him my own ratings for these options. The point of this step was to get an independent, honest opinion without my bias.

I must admit that I did have my one or two favourites, and I secretly hoped Ed would confirm my own preference and choose one of those. However, he didn’t – and for good reasons. I was a bit annoyed or upset at first, but quickly gave in and realised that, of course, he was right. Luckily, writing is what he does for a living, so it made sense to rely on his expertise and not just trust my own gut instinct.

Reviewing my short list once again, I must admit: yes, his choice probably was indeed the best and most accessible option, especially taking into consideration what I want to do with it, who the audience might be and what the service is all about.

Learning from the process and choosing the best option

This selection process offered me a great lesson about listening to others, testing the water early, and taking feedback on board. In the end, a name can have a great impact on the success of a product or service, so having a name that is easy to understand and not too complex or playful was definitely the right thing to do.

That’s how it became UnscrewMe – Find your taste in London ❤️.

I haven’t totally given up on some of the other options on my short list and might find new projects and usages, but for this idea, UnscrewMe works best.

After developing the idea and deciding on a name, I needed to focus on the opportunity at hand more seriously. I wanted to be able to easily structure all the work around UnscrewMe in a single place and have a simple way to track progress – I will go into more details about this in the coming weeks on https://medium.com/unscrewme

(Once again, I wrote most of this article over coffee during the afternoon – but it took me quite a while to finish it. I started churning out the main text at Kaffeine in Eastcastle Street, before continuing about a week later at Curators Coffee Gallery, and another week later in the evening at Sourced Market near Barbican and the new branch of The Modern Pantry at Finsbury Square in the City. Finally, I wrote the summary over a tasty, yet unremarkable Picpoul de Pinet at Monty’s Deli to redeem my reward from their Kickstarter campaign.)