
Ask YC: Coming up with a name - andrewfong
Pretty sure this has been asked before, but how did y'all come up with your startup name?
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pchristensen
For each name you want to try, follow these guidelines: 1) say it out loud to
ten people and ask them to spell it

2) keep talking to them for about a minute, then ask them if they remember it

3) write it down for ten people and ask them to pronounce it

If you get less than 90% right on #1 or 3, your name will get lost in
translation and people won't be able to find it even if they want to (or,
you'll have to make a lot more impressions before people start remembering
you). If you get bad results (probably won't be as high because of peoples'
memories) on #2, your name it probably to long to remember or not
differentiated enough.

Rules to Remember:

1) Easy to spell correctly if heard

2) Easy to say if read

3) short = easy

4) real words = easy (but usually conflicts with #3 because of availability)

5) Don't be blatantly about your business, but related and give hints (Xobni
and Auctomatic are good examples of doing this right - much better than
emailsocialnetwork.com or auctiontools.com)

6) Getting a domain name that doesn't follow these should be considered a
marketing expense, because you'll have to make more impressions in order to
get planted in people's consciousness.

Here's my take on some YC company names

Loopt - probably lost some people who thought it was looped, but only 5
letters and one syllable so it's easy

Weebly - weird word but hard to get wrong, good name

Xobni - like Loopt, probably lost some people looking for Zobny, Zobni, but
the "inbox" thing makes it easy to remember

Wufoo - probably the hardest one (on this list) to get right, but being short
is a virtue

Auctomatic, octopart - longer names that are made of real words are easier to
remember and spell

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dhouston
we:

1\. picked a list of 50-60 words/prefixes/suffixes we liked

2\. wrote a python script to generate permutations, and then

3\. ran dig -f on the text file to see which weren't taken

4\. scraped buydomains search results to see which ones were easily for sale.

absolutely everything else was a waste of time, although we're also working
with a naming agency and that might be promising (but expensive).

amusingly, domains that were occupied by squatters or companies like
buydomains were easier to deal with -- at least they're rational and the
conversation, though annoying, is straightforward (arrive at a #.)

domains that are occupied but unused (and don't have a 'for sale' sign hanging
up) are generally hopeless. if you get a response, you'll generally get some
whacko who either won't sell it, or who will only sell for millions of dollars
or something. you'll probably not believe me, and will learn this the hard way
(just as pg told us months ago :))

ok enough bad news -- some links that might help:

<http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/02/the_name_game.html>

[http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/223/The-Startup-
Na...](http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/223/The-Startup-Name-
Game.aspx)

[http://foundread.com/2007/08/20/3-rules-for-naming-your-
star...](http://foundread.com/2007/08/20/3-rules-for-naming-your-startup/)

and last and best (a 100+ page guide)

[http://www.igorinternational.com/process/igor-naming-
guide.p...](http://www.igorinternational.com/process/igor-naming-guide.pdf)

hope this helps -- it's a struggle :)

~~~
danielha
Data Mattress FTW

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nreece
<http://instantdomainsearch.com/> works best for domain brainstorming!

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cduan
They may not be exactly helpful, but they're relevant:

[http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/the-dr-seuss-
jumbl...](http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/the-dr-seuss-jumble-
naming-web-sites/)

[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2007/11...](http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2007/11/27/AR2007112702321.html)

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danielha
Make sure to pick a name that can be pronounced two different ways. It's
better when the prevailing pronunciation is the one you don't use.

Doubles the startup excitement!

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rms
hivgene.com was available and directly related to the first iteration of our
startup.

More recently, we were looking for names for something of an expanded version
of the startup and my cofounder and we sat plugging away at
instantdomainsearch.com and IMing each other available names as we found them.
This got us xygene.com. I couldn't have asked for anything better.

I think we're just really, really lucky with domain names.

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Kaizyn
I suggest you run a randomized test using Google keyword ads. Try different
names taking you to some page and see which ones get the highest click
through. Ian Ayres used this technique to find the title for his last book.
Seems like a cheap and effective way to do it to me.

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samwise
The name of you compnay and the name of the domain do NOT have to be the same.
It does help, however.

Pick a name that fits your company and then a suitable domain, if your compnay
works then buy the exact domain,

ie. XYZ domain XYZLLC.com or XYandZ.com and so on.

~~~
dhouston
speaking as someone who tried this route, don't bother. if you have a product
named xyz, people expect it to be at xyz.com.

otherwise, you will lose the traffic that assumes xyz.com is your domain.

and not just from random visitors but important contacts like investors, who
assumed we were at dropbox.com. even people who knew well that we were at
getdropbox.com would routinely fire off emails to dropbox.com by accident.

the process sucks, but we're changing our name after wasting a lot of time
hoping we could secure dropbox.com and going back and forth with the owner.

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sadiq
I highly recommend <http://www.pickydomains.com/>

Cheap and it worked like a charm, some really great suggestions.

(Admittedly, you're looking for a name but sometimes that and a domain are
interdependent)

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davidppp
Has anyone tried taking an analytical approach to finding a name? This is an
approach I am currently trying - registering a lot of domain names and then
using Google adwords to find out what name most people click on. Have no idea
how well it works yet, but it seems much better than relying on your 'gut' to
choose a name. Here's the approach:

1\. Find some available domain names that are, at the very least, easy to
pronounce and spell. Easier said than done of course, but I still think it's
possible to find some good stuff. For example, this website -
<http://www.5letter.com/domain-names/> \- allows you to search through all
available domain names that are exactly 5 letters long. There are some
surprises there.

2\. Register as many domain names as budget allows. If it sounds good and its
available, grab it.

3\. Throw together a website with a bit of info about your product and a box
for people to enter their email address to find out when you're launching. I'm
sure you have seen these kinds of sites before. The whole point of doing this
is to make sure people have something to look at when they click your ads, and
you might get to collect a few email addresses to notify when you DO actually
launch.

4\. Go to Google adwords and set up an account (<http://adwords.google.com>).
Create an ad that explains something about your product. Clone this ad for
each of your domain names - ensuring that the ad title contains ONLY the text
in each of names to test. For example, if your domain name is XYZ.com then put
XYZ in the title. The point of this is that all your ads will be identical
EXCEPT for the title, which contains a potential product name.

Make sure all the ads point to the website created at step 3. Choose keywords
that people in your target market will be most likely to search. Make sure
your budget is high enough to ensure a reasonable statistical sample for each
ad. You need enough, in my opinion, to collect at least 100 clicks per ad.
Google can handle all of the ad rotation for you, though there's no guarantee
that impressions will be equal for all ads.

5\. (I'm currently at this step). Launch all of the ads. Wait for a couple of
weeks or for however it long it takes to get a statistically reasonable number
of clicks and impressions. Once you're happy with the numbers, look at the
click/impression ratio for each ad. Basically, the ad with the highest ratio
of clicks to impressions "wins", and the name in the ad title is your product
name. If there's no clear cut winner, the idea is to cut all the losers and
re-run the top 2 (or 3 or whatever it is) until a clear winner is found.

A couple of things about this method:

a. The method costs a bit and can take up a bit of time. I've spent about $300
so far, and some of the ads still haven't got enough impressions yet after two
weeks.

b. You obviously don't need to actually register all of the domain names, but
I still think it's a good idea just in case you miss out on a good one. You
don't need to create the website either, but I think it's a good idea if
you're serious.

c. I'd imagine this process might work well for product names in general.

d. There's a chance you'll get to a sort of local maxima with your choice of
names. No idea how to resolve this, short of coming up with as many different
ideas as possible.

e. Probably won't work too well for products aimed at hardcore geeks, as they
don't tend to click ads or block them altogether.

~~~
yubrew
Adwords is good for testing out headlines and copy, but are you seeing much
variation based solely on changing domain names?

~~~
davidppp
Yeah - so far there are about 3 clear leaders (30-40% higher than the others).
I probably need to run the ads for another two weeks before I know for sure,
though.

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iamelgringo
Find out what domain name you can get first, and go from there.

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joshwa
bustaname.com

