A name covers many things: feelings, emotions, expressions, unconscious prejudices, personal history. It’s an identity – it gives some meaning and importance. In top alpha marketing and brands, I think quite a bit about naming. As an enterprising studio, we co-find and launch five to 10 new software startups each year.
It is my team’s responsibility to create and create brands for all the new companies we start with, from naming and domain acquisitions to brand identity and websites. In the last five years, we have named more than 30 software startups in High Alpha. Soon the idea of naming as a first-time parent took on a whole new meaning and significance in my life. Although I help naming new organizations for a living, I now fully understand the paralysis that often comes in the face of the task of deciding on someone’s name or what is particularly important to you.
For this reason, I have always tried to adopt a purposeful, realistic approach to naming a company with our CEO and other startups. Naming is an incredibly difficult and numerical process. It is full of dependencies and personal preferences and, above all, most founders have zero (or very little) experience in naming. The truth is that business names come in a bell curve – you have a small number of foreigners who actively contribute to your success and a small number of foreigners who actively hinder your ability to succeed, although the vast majority of influences on your business fall somewhere in the middle. The truth is that business names come in a bell curve – you have a small number of foreigners who actively contribute to your success and a small number of foreigners who actively hinder your ability to succeed, although the vast majority of influences on your business fall somewhere in the middle.
So, how can a founder name their child effectively in the beginning and not choose a name that will harm them? I am sharing my own criteria and lessons on how to name your startup, how to evaluate a company name, and how to create a good company name. As a founder, one of the first criteria to look at is privacy and URL availability. Nowadays, you will be hard pressed to find a name where .com is still available.
