

Ask HN: How do you decide your company name? - pknerd

Hi
How do you people select your company name? We 2 friends are planning to work on a product related to achieving goals based on social activity. Now should the company name be a product name(eg:Google,Twitter),a local language (We are Pakistan based so could use some from local langs) or something else?<p>Please guide<p>Thanks
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dcpdx
Hey there. What I've done in the past is make a long list of words that could
be applied to what your company does, how it does it, who it's designed for,
etc. Grab a thesaurus and look up synonyms for words that are particularly
applicable. Then, start combining different words and see what you come up
with. Swap some vowels (a's for e's, o's for i's, etc.) and get creative.
Eventually, you'll come up with a list of names that are at least partially
relevant to what your company does and hopefully look and sound decent. You
may want to search for words in other languages as well (Latin is a good one)
for more variety. It takes a long time to come up with a great name that you
and your team like, that is at the same time not trademarked and also has a
domain available relatively cheap.

No matter how arbitrary a name sounds, it almost always has direct meaning for
the company. Google was originally called 'Googol', which is a very large
number (10 to the hundredth power) and was meant to convey how much
information Google indexed. Twitter is perfect because it implies that the
service is about short bursts of information (tweets) much like a bird
chirping (would the name Chirpr sound as good? Naw). You also have to think
about how the name sounds when it's spoken, and if people can easily remember
how to spell it when they go to type it in the address bar of their browser.

Guy Kawasaki wrote a decent article about naming companies a few years ago
which you can find here:
[http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/02/the_name_game.html#axzz1...](http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/02/the_name_game.html#axzz1QXrOUxT9)
. I can't agree with all of the points but there's some good stuff in there.
Whatever you do, don't compromise on a great name. If you're embarrassed to
tell people what your company is called, that's not a place you want to be in.
Take the time to do it right and you'll reap the rewards tenfold down the
road. Best of luck to you.

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gallerytungsten
A variation of this question (Why Naming Your Company Sucks) was posted
recently; here is my answer from that thread:

I love naming companies. Of course, I've done it a bunch of times, so it's a
familiar process. For someone who is suddenly out of their comfort zone, I can
understand the frustration. A few tips:

1\. Before thinking of names, get meta. What's the company about, what would a
"good" name connote, what are the ideas the name should express? Write down a
narrative of all the awesome things the name should convey. If you're diligent
in following this recommendation, all kinds of new ideas will emerge.

2\. Say any potential names aloud. Do they roll off the tongue, or are they
awkward tongue twisters?

3\. Do your domain lookups via the command line, not some web site. It's been
suggested that domain lookup sites snatch your queries and register them.
True? I don't know; but you can't go wrong using Whois in your shell of
choice.

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jackpirate
My current project is Blogumbus (check it out at: blogumbus.com). It's a type
of blog search engine with a graphical layout.

The most important thing to me was the availability of domain names. I wanted
a dot com, not a .ly .me .whatever else. My intended audience includes lots of
people who aren't necessarily the best with computers, and that audience still
thinks dot com is the only thing out there.

Now I'll tell you the story.

I knew I the product had to do with blogs, so I tried to brainstorm names that
had blog in it. Obvious things like combining two words, e.g. blogcloud or
blogstar, were all taken.

It suddenly occurred to me that I my product would help people "circumnavigate
the blog-o-sphere" while I was out sailing with my dad. This made me think of
bloggellan (from Magellan). This name had the unfortunate side effect of two
g's next to each other. So I brainstormed a bunch of other explorers and
settled on Blogumbus (for Columbus).

I'm not sure yet how good of a name it is, but it's at least tolerable.

~~~
revorad
Off-topic: Blogumbus looks interesting, but when I tried to search for
"shopping" I got an error saying search has been temporarily disabled. What
happened?

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Brewer
I have two things that I'm working on now and the names just sort of popped
into my head. They aren't based on anything and they aren't any sort of
wordplay, they just seemed to fit.

