How the devil do you pick a company name?? (How did you pick yours?)

[Jeff Widman]

I'm trying to pick a name for my business, and it's like having my fingernails removed with a pair of rusty pliers!

Really, my problem is two-fold:
1) Find a name that's descriptive & unique/memorable. (ie, Facebook Marketing Business is very descriptive, but not memorable.)

2) Get the .com domain for that name.

#2 is proving VERY difficult...


So I'm curious--how did you pick your company name?

Do you still like it?

Did you negotiate with someone to purchase a .com domain, or simply find a name that was free??

[Dave Collins]

We picked the name based on what we were doing at that time.

Big mistake.

Today we work with *far* more non-shareware companies, but the name is established with a hard-earned reputation. Actually I don't think we work with any shareware companies at all nowadays. Constantly toying with a rename, and even have a company setup for that purpose. But...

Moral of the story: pick a name you can grow into.

[Jeff Widman]

How'd you come up with the original name?

And how did you pick the possible rename??

For my name, I've been waffling whether to have a Facebook specific name... eg, I focus solely on Facebook marketing, and the "Facebook" focus has kept me out of the murky world of "social media consultant"

(It's also made my pitch line far more tangible to people who've never heard of "social media" but use Facebook every day.)

A "facebook specific" name could be very powerful, but also very limiting.

[Dave Collins]

Hi Jeff,

Our business grew out of an old software site that I'd been running, where I'd been selling advertising. A long time ago. Ah the good old days...

I came across a lot of good software, and saw that most of it was desperately in need of marketing. I initially setup the promotional services as a side-service of the software site, and the demand more or less exploded.

As for the rename, I picked a more general option, without mentioning Shareware.

Regarding the Facebook specific name, I would advise against if possible. If Facebook fades away with time, your business model will adapt. But you don't want to be tied in to yesterday's fad.

You could always play it safe though, and allude to Facebook as opposed to blatantly naming it?

[Dave O'Flynn]

In 3 years you're extremely unlikely to be (solely) a Facebook marketing consultant.

Pick something pronounceable and easy to spell where the .com is available. I work for Atlassian. I can guarantee that almost anyone reading this from the Southern United States will mis-pronounce the name. I used to work for a company called Softection. Everyone needed that spelled out. Not good.

You can position yourself as "WhizBang: Facebook Marketing Consultants", and change the tag-line over time as your business evolves.

[Jeff Widman]

:-)
Excellent feedback

Right now, I offer clients more than Facebook... but I found that over-niching myself brings in more business... once they trust me, they'll often ask "do you know anyone who does X?"

I dropped the name I was looking at that was Facebook specific, and going after two that are more broad...

[Alexander Balabanov]

Well, the method I've used is some kind of brainstorming: I wrote a letter to a few of my friends where described what I'm going to create and asked them to generate ideas for naming.

After two days I had about 12 options which were more or less acceptable. Then I checked all of them for .com domain availability and selected the one.

So, my recommendation is to use other brains to get ideas you've possibly will not generate yourself.

[Neil Davidson]

We picked "Red Gate" because it wasn't specific to any particular technology / field. Also, it was 1999, back when (as now) most new web startups started with the letters X or Z and ended with a vowel. "Red Gate" sounded solid; like it had been around for a while.

[Peter Clark]

My company is called Broadersheet, its a news aggregator for the iPhone. My lessons from naming various products and companies:

Get the .com - of your company and product. not getx.com or xhq.com - its worth having a less great name with a .com than a greater name with a .net

Get a name that can be said when you're eating pizza or in a noisy bar.

We're british and it turns out Broadsheet (the type of newspaper) means very little to Americans. This doesn't matter. As long as it isn't offensive. There was a local design consultancy called "Generics" in the UK - in the US that has very negative connotations.

Generally people spend too long pondering names. Choose one, get the .com, live with it.

[Nigel AInscoe]

I wanted something that sounded solid so I took the first name of one and the last name of another of my sons friends and ended up with Jackson Delaney which works but maybe sounds a bit staid in this web2 world.

One thing to remember however is that the name doesn't really matter - Facebook only sounds good because you associate it with something. If people associate your business with quality software or service, that makes the name not the other way round. So call yourselves Kumquat or Zebo or whatever, it doesn't matter. Hey I even remember a pop group who called themselves The Beatles - imagine that ;-)

[Luke Pryor]

We hum'd and ha'd for ages trying to think of something that a) sounded cool but fairly generic and b) had the .com available.

In the end Jim realised that the first letters of our surnames spelled out the initialism BPM which had the "cool" connotation of also meaning beats-per-minute but also standing for the (then) emergent Business Process Management (even though that's not really what we do).

The second step was to run through all combinations of other words that we could tack onto the end for which the .com was available. Things like "software", "soft", "tech" etc. In the end we settled on Logic because a) all the domains were available b) it's fairly non-specific so doesn't even tie us into being labelled a software company and c) it didn't sound terrible.

In retrospect it seems quite sad to say that our main motivation was finding an available .com, but then we were boot-strapping the venture so couldn't throw a lot of cash at a domain squatter with a good one.

With regards to "Facebookifying" your name, bear in mind that if you're going to be plastering "Facebook" everywhere to show your connections you might like to make your own company (and therefore brand) stand out a bit by deliberately not looking the same. On a more legal note I think FB has some issues about people using the Face--- moniker in their apps so I'd check it out before sending the form off to Companies House.

Good luck with the business (and the name-hunt).

[Mark Dalgarno]

We were pretty clear that we were going to be a software consultancy so it made sense to have the word 'software' in the name.

We brainstormed various words like knowledge, insight etc. using a thesaurus and our imaginations. Many were already taken but 'acumen' was available, so 'Software Acumen'.

Next step was a domain name search. There was a softwareacumen.com in the US but it was a holding page and we figured that software-acumen.com would be fine so we then did a UK Companies House search and the name was available so we registered both the domain and the company name.

It's quite an unusal name which has its pros and cons but people usually remember us better due to its novelty. It can also cover a multitude of activities, which is good since the business focus has changed a few times since we started up.

We also run Software East events in the East of England and the naming process was similar although here we wanted a close association with a geographic area. There is a Cambridge Software so we avoided 'Software Cambridge' which would have been a natural choice.

http://is.gd/46jxS has some general advice on company naming and guidance on the law in the UK.

[Alan Hemmings]

- Is the business going to be predominantly a service company, or a product company?

Service company?
then the name must be descriptive, strong and you absolutely should have the .co.uk. ( dot com is not critical if you're servicing customers in the UK, as long as the .com is being used for something completely different and not likely to be sold.)

Be careful of double-barrel names. You may need to make sure that you have both the hyphenated and the non-hyphenated version of the name in .com, .net and .co.uk. Then consider if one of the words can be pluralised, or singled, in which case you'll need to get the variations and point those to your main domain.

So, Neil's example of Red Gate would mean that he'd ideally want to register and every year renew:

Red-gate.com
Red-gate.net
Red-gate.co.uk

Redgate.com
Redgate.net
Redgate.co.uk

Redgates.com
Redgates.net
Redgates.co.uk

Red-gates.com
Red-gates.net
Red-gates.co.uk

etc.

Just something to be aware of. Many cases this is not necessary.

You have to weigh up the cost to register (and anually renew) all the variations against the expected cost to negotiate or take action against someone using a variation in a way that makes you uncomfortable.

OR

Product company:
In this case, the name is not important. No one will care at all (at least initially) about who made the product, all they will care about is , "is the product darn good, and does it solve my problem". (In South Africa there's a saying, "Shweeeet!".)

If you've built a darn good product then you're going to be very rich long before you start worrying about how to brand the company that built the great product.

If you're a product company then it's all about the names of your brands. Each product is branded, and then you ask the same question, how the devil do you brand your products? Then, 100% you do need the dot com for your brand.

Almost forgot to answer "how do you choose a name, that's available as a .co.uk as wella s a .com domain? (Quite difficult)
Throw a brandstorming party and invite friends you trust to an evening of pizza and beer, and make sure you have internet access, whiteboard (or similar), good wine. The interaction of a group of creative and enthusiastic people who want to help you succeed can result in some pretty amazing names in half an hour to an hour. Don't do this on your own, you'll spend weeks registering lots of silly names, and in one hour with some mates you'll have THAT ONE name, and you'll know its right.