How To Name Your Company
Coming up with App or Company names is a tough job, the first thing you think of is always taken, terrible, or massively pretentious.
You can struggle for days, and then one day you’ll be watching Below Deck, and BANG, something will jump out at you and you have it. But what if you don’t watch Netflix, what if that magic never happens, is there a simple process to work through and force ideas? The answer of course, as Captain Sandy would say, is “yes”.
1. The first thing to do is ‘nutshell’ the company’s offering in a short punchy sentence, quite generic, something like ‘House plant water scheduler’, ‘House plant feeder’, ‘Plant water reminder’. Write around 10 of these and start to identify which words are consistently popping up.
2. Then use One Look which is a reverse dictionary, so you can put definitions in and it’ll spit out words, there’ll be 100’s of these, feed the phrases in, work through the list and then write down anything that stands out.
3. Once you have about 30 words you like the sound of, go to Related Words and feed the words in. Again this will take those and give you related words to that word, so now you start to get a bit deeper into the kinds of names that might work. You can also use Thesaurus, in the same way, to put words in and see what comes out. This really mixes the pot and gives you things you might not have thought of.
4. Your name should be easy to read, easy to say (I’m looking at you Balenciaga), and timeless. It needs to have the same energy you want to reflect in your brand, most importantly and it has to be something you’re comfortable with and you love.
5. Armed with a list of 5 strong options, run these through The Companies House for registering the name, and then UK Reg to check the domain. Don’t panic if it’s taken there’s always there’s a way to extend or reduce the name to make it unique. The process can take anything up to 2 – 3 days, however sometimes you might get desperate, and only then should you break out Random Words Generator to see if that sparks anything. Obviously, it’s random and can take ages for anything relevant to come up, but when it does it’s beyond exciting.
This post was written by our Inner Circle Member, Ben. If you’re in need of any branding help, do be sure to book in a a 30 minute discovery call.
