One of the first questions a new business owner must answer is “What should I name the company?” or “What should I call my product?” In a cluttered market space it is important for your name to be memorable.

It is worth spending some time on, but don’t bang your head on the wall for weeks trying to get it perfect. Pick something that feels right and run with it. I’ll lay out a few of the ideas that worked for us. You can apply these concepts to company names, product names or service names.

There are several reasons to get a name right:

• You don’t want to have to explain the name after every meeting with a potential client.
• How do you spell that?
• You don’t want to pigeonhole yourself in to a niche or segment. Example: you don’t want to call yourself “Matt’s Tractors” if you plan to eventually expand beyond tractors to sell ATVs or side by side vehicles.
• You don’t want to have a city, state, region in your name and then move the business away from that area.
• You don’t want an offensive name in another language or culture.
• Plain words don’t stand out in a crowd.

Step 1.

Brain dump a list of names. Quantity and diversity is the key here. We focused on three questions:

1. Words that describe your product category?
2. Words that describe the difference between your product versus your competition’s?
3. Words that describe the benefits of using your product?

This can take hours of time. We came up with a list of 200 words for FreshCrop.

Step 2.

After getting a list of words together you want to start thinking about constraints or attributes.

• One to two words are best.
• Easy to spell.
• Has strong consonents…b, c, d, g, k, p, q, t
• Mashups usually look bad.
• Ameri, soft, corp, tech have been overdone.
• Don’t be so obscure as to have questions raised constantly about meaning and spelling.

From the list of words and constraints start putting together a list of names that you like.  15-20 works the best.

Step 3.

This is where the decision maker steps in and takes charge. Collect a list of your top 5 or top 10 names and say them aloud, talk the ideas out with friends or customers. Once you get it down to your favorite name, give it a few hours or sleep on it. At some point it will just feel right and you’ll know you found the perfect name! Once you find that name it just resonates. After a few hours or a day you grow to love it and it seems like that was the obvious choice all along.

The process gets easier with subsequent products. SoldFresh.com, The Farm blog all play off of the FreshCrop name. Congratulations on your new name!

Sometimes a product and company are the same thing. Web SaS or software as services are an example. MediaRECOVER software was the same as our initial company name MediaRECOVER, LLC. This is fine, but again be careful about painting yourself in to a corner.

Step 4.

Search for a matching domain name. Finding .com is important. Your customers will assume it is a .com and you don’t want to miss the action with a .net or .biz name. That perfect domain name is increasingly elusive with the domain name land grab going on and sometimes you run in to domain squatters. If the name feels right, sometimes you just have to pony up. If you don’t have the resources I’d suggest getting creative and adding HQ, Co, Inc, etc on to your name to buy the domain outright.

The naming process seems daunting when you first start. You’ll start seeing ideas for names coming from conversations, other products, things you read, TV…from all directions. Going through the steps and putting effort in to the process will pay off. This is an investment you won’t regret.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 7th, 2010 at 11:23 amand is filed under Products. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.