Startup Spark

Everything You Need To Know About Naming a Startup

by Ben Yoskovitz on December 6th, 2006

One of the first things people do when they’re starting a new business is pick a name. It’s a pretty important step, because it ends up defining a lot about the business.

In the Web 2.0 age we’re getting a lot of whacky names that don’t mean very much. People hope the names are snappy and catchy enough that they take on a life of their own. Some are real words (that still don’t tell us anything about what the company does), but most are just a mashup of letters into something “funky”, or they’re using a word in a foreign language to sound cool.

In a recent Times Online article, they point out rather humorously:

“When Microsoft announced that it would be taking on the iPod with something called Zune, did its branding team realize that the word translated into French slang for genitalia and a Hebrew term meaning getting laid?”

My guess is “no.”

Here are some examples:

• Renkoo
• Pando
• Kajeet
• Zopa

(Notice how they’re all 2 syllables?)

For all I know these names are hugely successful for these companies (and in no way am I insulting the sites/products themselves, cause I don’t know them well at all), but to me those names are whacky. They don’t tell me anything about the company whatsoever. They don’t give me a reason to check them out, except for the fact that they sound silly and I’m not 100% sure how to pronounce them all.

Some have said that all the good domain names and English names are taken, which results in companies morphing words from other languages.

So How Should You Name Your Startup?

I prefer names that:

• Tell me fairly obviously what the company does.
• Can be easily pronounced.
• Can be used for the purposes of branding but don’t require a long explanation.

A lot of Web 2.0 companies seem to put their explanation/purpose in the tagline, but they’re doing themselves a disservice. If the tagline isn’t associated with the name in every place imaginable, people won’t get it.

Recently, I’ve been faced with the naming issue, and a friend of mine sent me a PDF version of Building the Perfect Beast: The Igor Naming Guide to Creating Product and Company Names (you can download the PDF at that link.

It strikes me as somewhat ironic that the company who produced this document is called Igor, and they’re a naming and branding agency. When I opened the PDF and saw that it was the “Igor Naming Guide” I assumed Igor was a person. Anyway…

The guide starts off strongly:

Great names are a powerful force in the branding, marketing and advertising campaigns of the companies they work for. They differentiate you from competitors, make an emotional connection with your audience, and help to build a brand that ignites the passions of your customers.

That’s no small feat.

Igor (the company, not the hunchback) proposes 6 steps to finding a great name. I want to highlight a few of those steps.

1. Competitive Analysis. This is an obvious one. Figure out what others in your space are doing with their names. In the Web 2.0 world all the names will either be radically different or very much the same (depending on the market.) I wonder if a Web 2.0 company could be insanely successful with the most boring name possible. Everyone is Wipoo or Wapoo or Wipee or Pippee and you could be “Bob’s Hardware Store.” No wait, “Bob’s Hardware Store 2.0.” Sweet.

Finding a boring domain name will probably be a challenge though.

Igor recommends quantifying the tone and strength of competitive names. That’s a good idea. Bring up a handy dandy Excel or Google spreadsheet and rank all the names in there.

2. Positioning. Again, this isn’t rocket science. If you want your business to succeed it’s going to need strong, unique positioning. Oftentimes deciding on positioning isn’t that hard (although I don’t consider, “We’ll be exactly like X company but better!” to be good positioning) but it still might not lead to the promised land of an awesome name.

Nevertheless it’s a critical exercise. Igor hits the nail on the head:

The best positioning finds a way to reinvigorate or change the conversation that an industry has
been having with its consumers.

3. Name and Brand Development I’m not going to repeat everything in the Igor document, but in this section they’re talking about the different types of names and their relative pros and cons.

The guide slams “Functional / Descriptive Product & Company Names” which are those that describe what the company does. They say that functional / descriptive company names wash out the brand. For me, it depends on the name. Sure, the examples they give are very bad, but there’s gotta be a middle ground.

Perhaps that middle ground is with “Experiential Names”, which they say, “…offer a direct connection to something real, to a part of direct human experience. They rise above descriptive names because their message is more about the experience than the task.”

No surprise, the naming guide pushes types of names that could require Igor’s services (that’s OK, they’re trying to make money just like the rest of us.)

One such type is “Evocative Names”. The guide says:

One important way that evocative names differ from others is that they evoke the positioning of a company or product, rather than describing a function or a direct experience.

Looks good on paper, but then look at these examples:

From the airline sector:

• Trans World Airlines = functional
• United = experiential
• Virgin = positioning (Evocative)

From the computer industry:

• Digital Equipment = functional
• Gateway = experiential
• Apple = positioning (Evocative)

Without going for the obvious “virgin + positioning” joke, I’m not sure how Virgin and Apple really evoke their company’s positioning. Today, both have such huge name/brand recognition that their names do evoke their positioning, but they poured huge amounts of money into accomplishing that feat. For a startup that’s simply not possible.

Ultimately there’s a lot more to Igor’s Naming Guide than I’ve described here. And if you’re in the process of naming a startup or plan to in the near future it’s something you should pour over very carefully.

What Startup Names Do You Like? What Works? What Doesn’t? Comment here!

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POSTED IN: Starting a Business, Web 2.0