Finding how to name your startup is one of the first problems you will need to solve. While some argue that you should leave the struggling to find a name for a later stage and focus at first to just build your product, it is still a nice investment of time to spend some days figuring out the name of your product or startup. This will help you to design and brand your website/mobile app etc and make a better impression to potential investors.
There are two ways to name your Startup: The first is to find a name relevant to your product (e.g. www.booking.com ). The second one is to create a completely new name (e.g. www.trivago.com ). Nomatter which way you choose, here is an algorithm that may help you:
Here are some resources that can help you:
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– How to Generate Words (Randoms/Puns, New/etc) |
www.impossibility.org www.fakeword.com www.panabee.com www.wordoid.com www.domainhole.com |
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– How to Check if the Domain .com exists and if the Username/social handle in Fb/twitter/other sites exist: |
www.domai.nr |
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– How to Get Opinions on Two Names: |
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– How to Find Related Words: |
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– How to Invent a Word: |
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– Where to find the Top 100 Web Names/Sites in US: |
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– Where to Find 200 Prefixes/Suffixes For Domain Names |
http://www.dailyblogtips.com/200-prefixes-and-suffixes-for-domain-names/ |
Other Tips:
– Have a look here for a daily database of expired domain names.
– Download from here a useful 122pages guide on naming and branding
– Make sure your name is easy to spell: Avoid using words that can be misspelled (e.g. if you want to have the domain www.theyarerich.com a lot of people would spell it as www.theirrich.com or www.theyrrich.com etc). Find a list of the 100 most often misspelled English words here.
– Make sure the name is easy to write: Don’t put words such as “entrepreneurship” in the domain name…I’m still getting it wrong even if I’ve corrected myself 1000 times.
– Make sure it doesn’t have bad connotations by mistake
– Don’t put numbers inside the name: A lot of people will not know if they should write “1” or “one”. And the domain name will look very 2000’ish
– Don’t put hyphens inside the name: Hyphens confuse people and they look very 1990’ish
– Get a .com domain: It will probably rank higher with search engines and most people will put the “.com” domain after your name by default, instead of “.org”. Also think that many tablets’ virtual keyboards have the “.com” as a keyboard letter
– The less letters, the better
– If you want built-in SEO in your name, you have to use a search engine keyword analysis tool and examine what people are looking for. Then you can either try to get an EMD (exact match domain name) or a PMD (partial match domain). Built-in SEO used to be quite more important some years ago but now search engines have algorithms that focus more on the quality of the content of the web page to rank it high, rather than taking the EMD/PMD thing so much under consideration
Extra Tip on Logo
If you are rushing to get your website out, based on the new name you found but you don’t have the time/money to go into logo design yet, go to www.fiverr.com, give 5USD and get a quick logo as a temp one, until you get the real thing later on.
Or, you can try the following sites that create an instant logo for you:
http://www.hipsterlogogenerator.com/
http://www.squarespace.com/logo
Resources and Further Reading
To see how you can put some of the above into action, you can download this presentation from Slideshare, and finally, some interesting blogposts on the subject are:
http://mashable.com/2012/10/04/startup-naming/
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/10/the_new_rules_o.html (The new rules of Naming)
http://ultralightstartups.com/how-to/name-a-startup/
http://www.learndot.com/how-to-name-your-startup/
https://www.agileplannerapp.com/blog/building-agile-planner/how-to-name-your-startup
Feel free to contribute with more insight!