A quick guide to naming your startup

Benjamin is a TIA Star Contributor and publishes exclusive, high-value content that serves the Asian tech community. Read more from TIA Star Contributors here.

Many companies from our hardware accelerator, Hax, rebrand—sometimes more than half of a given cohort. I’ve seen first-hand how frustrating and time-consuming this could be. So, after writing my startup PR guide, here is another quick guide on branding  and, more specifically, naming.

Below are resources and practical naming tactics I’ve built over several years. The aim of this is to help founders with productive brainstorming and avoid opinion wars. I believe the exercise is useful beyond getting a name, as it will help clarify your vision, mission, values, positioning, and message.

Naming matters, but is a mere consequence of your positioning. Make sure of that first! And yes, creativity and culture help, but you can largely compensate with good research.

Let’s get started!

What’s in a (good) name?

We’ll have to disagree with Juliet. Names matter a lot.

Before diving too deep, it’s good to provide some baseline of what a good name does. This will help direct your creative and research efforts.

Ideally, the name of your company helps your business in the following ways:

• Short and easy to spell, pronounce, and remember
• Distinctive
• Helps your target market understand what you do
• Inspiring/evocative or descriptive
• Available for trademark

In most cases, it’s better to have a name that stands out. Your prospects will love it and your non-customers will dislike or ignore it. It rarely helps to be in the “average” zone, trying to please everyone.

Judging names

In a way, what you think doesn’t matter as much as how your customers react. These sources have been selected from years of practice to shortcut your learning curve:

• Igor Naming Guide :  An excellent evaluation method for names (two key tables with detailed criteria). It helps structure discussions.
• Market Sophistication Talk + Article : Helps you understand how competitors communicate, guides your marketing/messaging, and clarifies your positioning.
• Positioning: The foundational book on the topic by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Here is a short review on Slideshare. In short, the book says you’re always part of a category. Understand and define the subcategory you lead.

Again, what truly matters is how your name is perceived/recognized/memorized, not if you like it or if it’s clever.

Finding names

Q&A