How To Choose a Name for Your Business, Startup, Brand, Product

when you start a new business picking a name can be an agonizing process it actually kind of always is an agonizing process because it's so final changing the name of your company is a huge deal and if you get your company name right you make it easy for people to remember your name and to spread the word about your business but if you get it wrong folks will struggle to find you they'll struggle to understand what you do and they'll struggle to remember your name so they can tell other people about it your company name communicates so much about your company that if at all possible you really want to get it right the first time so in this video I'm going to guide you through selecting a memorable business name and I'm going to highlight common naming mistakes that you should steer clear of at all costs and if you stick around till the end I'm going to walk you through the exact process that a company I invested in used to find their domain name and this is the process I would use today if I were looking for a new company name I want to start with a disclaimer the reality is that there are plenty of poorly named products out there that still succeed so you can make a bad name work but it's like running against a headwind right you don't want to start your business in hard mode a couple examples that I can think of are eBay with a that capital B in the middle of the word Xerox with two x's and they're pronounced differently one pronounced like a Z1 pronounce like an x Microsoft it's just very not descriptive it was software for micro computers you know there Bill Gates and Paul Island's previous company was called trao Data with two dashes in it so that one didn't succeed but it's shows you how good they are at at naming companies even Google I would say is not a great name it's a misspelling of a large number it's supposed to be spelled g o g o l and they misspelled it and put GLE e and frankly it doesn't describe much about the company or what it is and these days I guess we use it as a verb but that's only because it's the best search engine out there and they definitely could have come up with a better name in the early days so why does a good name matter I mentioned it a little bit in the introduction but even though a good business can survive with a bad name you don't want to build your business on hard mode a memorable name will absolutely help you a bad name is unlikely to kill you but again it's running you know running Upstream so to speak memorable names make it easier for Word of Mouth to happen right your name is part of your brand people tend to trust a good name and to maybe look at eBay with a bit of a side eye remember the first time I used eBay I was like what is this website with the bad design that has a pig Latin name and it honestly it made me just not trust the site cuz it felt like it wasn't a legitimate business and so as you're looking for a name usually it's a process of elimination right it's often best done as brainstorming and then eliminating the things that don't fit and just slowly brainstorming 20 30 40 50 names and these days you can do that with chat GPT right do it pretty easily and then just narrowing down to your top three five or 10 and starting to ask for outside feedback now one question you might have is do you start with the domain or with the brand name right your url or your brand name I start with the brand name I want to come up with the best brand name possible best company name best product name best book title and then if I need to go buy a domain name I will if I can register it for eight bucks great I'm going to show you some hacks later in this video of how I think about adding prefixes or suffixes or going with not. com in case theom is just too expensive so now I'm going to dive into five mistakes that you should avoid when coming up with a name the first mistake is that your name lacks Clarity and so there's something called the crowded Bart test which is if you're in a crowded bar probably noisy probably distracting and a friend were to tell you the name of a product or company can you hear it understand it and remember it so one example of this is if I were yelling over a bunch of people in a bar and I said I wrote a book it's called the SAS Playbook It's A playbook for SAS companies the odds are you're going to hear it you're going to understand it and you're going to remember it but if I were to tell you that I have a podcast called startups for the rest of us which is kind of a long trick Tri name I I think that's a fail you know and frankly we named the podcast 14 years ago is before I knew a lot about naming so I think startups for the rest of us if I could go back I would rename it it's too long like just type the domain name type startups with the restof us. com every time I say it it's a tongue twister it's not the best name doesn't mean that we haven't succeeded right it doesn't mean that I haven't built a great show but I think the name does count against it another example of an unclear name comes from Matt pson he's a longtime microcom attendee and at his first microcom he had a ite he called analyst ratings Network and he kept saying it to people and no one had any idea what he was saying so he quickly went out after microcom and bought a different domain name and if I recall he paid a few thousand for it marketbeat.

com it's a great domain name and he's built this into a decam million dooll bootstrapped ARR business thing to remember is if you get too clever names are hard to describe or remember if you've ever seen that movie that thing you do the band's name is the Wonders and we can all think of how that is spelled they started with the o n e d r s and people call them the oers and they want they're trying to be clever they're trying to have a pun wonders but it it doesn't work mistake number two is having a name that is either too generic too common or it's too close to your competition so there's no differentiation so if you watched the American version of the office there is an episode where they have Alfredo's pizza and pizza by Alfredo and there's a bunch confusion between these two names and so realize if you're going to name your company something generic like website search engine optimization. com while that's an interesting exact match domain name that's not a brand that's just a description of what you do so something to consider it's not a hard and fast rule but I like to have names that are unique enough so that you can own the search box on Google right so this is the case for fictional madeup names I mean think of like Tiny Seed and Micron right those kind of describe they give you an idea or a feel for what they are but if you search for those names we ranked for them from day one right we didn't have to go beat out other gener more generic sites like imagine when slack and stripe first got started now those are actually really good names but they had Venture money behind them but if you searched for slack 10 years ago in Google you probably wouldn't have come up with the company you know and same with stripe you would have gotten a noun a Webster definition page or something like that and so being just a little clever and having either compound words like Laura rer did with paper bell she got paper bell. com and if you Google paper bell or search that anywhere you're going to come up with her company and Craig HT as well he's a Tiny Seed founder he has cast.

com and kastos is of course something he owns in the search results the third mistake I see are misspellings I'm not sure if you watched She-Hulk but there's a character named Madison and her tagline is my name is Madison with two n's and one y but it's not where you think and it's just this super confusing thing now that's not a brand name or a product name but you get the idea is the further you misspell something you have to explain that every time you say it out loud so imagine you were getting clever with your url shortener early bird. com URL y producer Ron came up with that it's terrible but but it's a good example like it's it's clever it's a URL but early bird except it's spelled URL Y and everyone's going to say why examples of this of companies that are big and successful but have misspelled names and I I think are probably to their detriment is lift with a y flicker with no e tumbler with no e and Fiverr with an extra r at the end something to think about is watch out for Google autocorrect right so when you type your potential name into a Google search bar do the results get autocorrected and consider that every customer searching for your brand may suffer the same doubt so I would much prefer a compound name of two things like Tiny Seed and micro com than having a misspelling because if I mention Tiny Seed on the podcast I don't have to tell you it spelled s e a d or SE cuz we were getting really clever it just gets annoying and people forget it the fourth mistake I see people making is having a brand name that is difficult to pronounce this is similar with misspellings if someone can't read it and pronounce it there will be confusion or everyone pronounces it two different ways like I've always thought you know the mol skine Molina mol skin notebooks I mean we all use them and Hemingway used them and all this but I think that's a bad name I think if they just removed the E and called it mol skin it would be so much better or if they said it is 100% pronounced mol skine because the E implies a harde you get the idea I don't like that name because different people pronounce it differently so if you show the name to five or 10 different people do they all pronounce it the same or are they unsure and if they're unsure it makes it harder for Word of Mouth like I said a couple examples of this and this is going to be in englishspeaking places that they're hard to pronounce but Huawei Huawei is a huge Electronics manufacturer and I would have no idea how to pronounce that if I hadn't heard Tom Merritt say it on Daily News Show often we have we have Reuters which I know these are big companies but today I would not pick that name this name that's on screen here that I'm not even going to attempt to pronounce the fifth and final mistake that people make is Pigeon ho holding themselves being too specific with their names so for example if you have a job board for lineman which is electricians and you had apprentice lineman jobs. com or lineman jobs.

com versus something a little more brandable and generic like amp jobs. com lineman jobs would have some obvious search traffic but it really limits what you can expand into it might be great for SEO but it's going to cause you headaches later if you need to Pivot so consider a fictitious job board called remote only jobs. com does that name unnecessarily a pigeon hole your business in terms of you maybe wanting to expand into non- remote jobs down the line what if you need to Pivot the business or expand the focus and you might be thinking yeah but if I follow all the above there's nothing left but that's not true as I said start with a brand name and I try to get the best name and then reverse engineer and figure out what's the best domain name I can get that works for this so you can add a prefix like get or hey or use or lets or you can add a suffix if you're an app like app so I had drip couldn't afford drip.

com it was six figures and I got get drip. com now the downside is people used to call the product get drip that was annoying it was a seven-letter domain name that I paid $8 a year for and so when you're first starting out adding a prefix or a suffix it's okay it's not ideal but it's okay another thing to think about is can you add a category descriptor like on this YouTube channel we often talk about a fictional CRM called bump and we went out and registered bump crm. com in fact I did this with Tiny Seed the first domain name for Tiny Seed that I registered for $8 on GoDaddy was Tiny Seed fund.

com right cuz we're an accelerator and a venture fund and then I went out and bought tiny seed. com because I wanted it and it was available for sale but I secured that one for $8 first so I had some negotiating leverage in addition especially if you're in the SAS space different top level domains can work. c.

a. evenl not as much anymore but these are all acceptable right think of customer. io that has built a decillion dooll ARR SAS customer.

io think of close. io I think they actually bought the now but I still call them close. io one of the final things I'll wrap with is don't use two or more of these suffix work around things so like get bump cm.

it's hot garbage right if you could get bump. versus bump crm. com you could get either one for a decent price i' I'd consider it like bump.

Co bump. a bump. io these are not bad domain names in fact one of the regrets I had with with drip was I registered getdrip.

com we built the company people called it get drip it was a success story in the end but it always bothered me and when the CEO of the company that was acquiring us started talking with us he told me he said hey I went and bought drip. co and drip. while they were acquiring us and he said if the acquisition doesn't go through I'll just sell them to you for what I bought him for which was a few thousand dollar and I think back in the days when I started drip that felt like a lot of money but by that time I really should have bought these domains they were not that hard to acquire and I think it was you know inexperience on my part in not buying them so in a second I'm going to tell you how one Tiny Seed founder decided on his domain name and thus his product name but before I do that as you know I run microcom and Tiny Seed and Tiny Seed is our startup accelerator for bootstrap SAS Founders and we run applic s twice a year we fund companies all around the world we funded 151 companies to date and applications for our next batch are opening soon head to tiny.