How to Name Your Company

The very first thing you need for your business is a name. This is a serious task. If you pick a good name, the power of your implicit marketing will benefit you for years to come — and if you pick a bad name, you’ll have to overcome that poor marketing until you get around to renaming your business, a large and annoying task indeed.

Before you dive into naming your business, let’s talk about what your business name needs to accomplish. Your business name needs to…

1. Effectively communicate to potential customers what your business does. When people hear your business name, they need to understand what it is you do.
2. Make your business sound competent and capable (in some industries, this means cool and hip, but not all of them). When people hear your business name, they need to feel suitably impressed.
3. Attract people to your business. When people hear your business name, you need your business name to be so appealing they feel the need to investigate further.

Not many people get picking a business name right. For instance, I named my first business Pufferfish Software. The explanation for the name was that, like a pufferfish, my business would appear large and successful but secretly be a small, remotely-run business.

That’s a cute little story, but reading it just now didn’t tell you anything about what we actually did. We made apps for autistic children. If our business name had been something like Helping Hands Apps, it would have been much easier to guess what we made.

So here’s how you do get it right.

1. Look at Other Business Names in Your Market

Unless you already have some kind of extreme fame or success upon which to build, you don’t want to reinvent the wheel. Consumers in your market already have expectations about what they are looking for and what it will look like, and if you deviate from those expectations too much, they will pass up your business simply because it is too confusing.

So take a look at other businesses in your market and see what kinds of names and branding they use. Pay particular attention to:

1. Repetitive ideas or phrases. For instance, Helping Hands Apps would be a good name for an app business that makes apps for autistic children because most companies that serve those with special needs have names that play on the concepts of helping others, assisting others, lifting others up, and similar ideas.
2. Number of words in the name. Some industries, like social media software, use exclusively made-up one-word company names, like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. If you wanted to start a social media company, you would want to come up with a name that is only one word.
3. Special characters or appendages. For instance, many legal firms use the character “&” in their business name. Many manufacturing businesses add “Inc.” to the end of their business name. If there are any conventions with respect to naming style in your market, you should stick to them unless you have a good reason not to.

2. Come Up With a List of Ideas

Now that you are educated as to what your market looks like and what your consumers are expecting, it’s time for you to come up with some actual business names.

While you’re brainstorming names, remember not to get too sentimental. It’s easy to get sentimental about a business name. Some people dream of starting a business and have a particular name in mind for it. But unless you have prior experience starting businesses or doing marketing work, chances are the name you came up with sucks.

The reality is that the best business name for your new business is probably not going to be the one you love the most. Much like romantic partners, we usually become the most infatuated with the business names which are the worst for us.

To prevent a dangerous infatuation, come up with a list of 10 to 20 business names that you like. In the next few steps, we’re going to analyze them all to see which one is the best.

3. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Medium Search Your Business Names

It will do you no good to come up with a clever business name if it’s already taken by someone else. Search every business name you brainstormed in every search engine you can think of, and see what comes up. Pay particular attention to the following things:

• Have any other people used the name you came up with?
• Are they large, established businesses, or small abandoned Facebook pages?
• Are the other search results related to your target market or something else entirely?

An abandoned Facebook page is not too big a deal, but if a particular name is already being used by an active and established business entity, you shouldn’t use it for several reasons, not the least of which being that they could sue you for copyright infringement.

With respect to other search results, it’s a bad sign if the other results are entirely unrelated to your market. This indicates that your potential customers are not using those search terms and that it will be difficult to attract their attention organically. Look for terms that your target customers are already searching for.

4. Test How Easy They Are to Say

Something no one tells you about founding your own business is that you will say your company name so many times that the words will turn to mere noise in your mouth.

I have said the phrase “Pufferfish Software” so many times in my life that sometimes I forget what they mean. If your company name is not easy to say, you’ll begin to stumble over your words and curse the day you ever chose such a stupid company name.

Choosing a name that is hard to say also has negative ramifications for your marketing. If you find your business name annoying to say, no doubt others will find it even more so, even to the point of forgetting your business name altogether. This is a marketing death knell.

Word-of-mouth marketing is the most powerful form of marketing, but you can’t take advantage of it if your customers’ mouths can’t even say the words properly.

Don’t make the same mistake I did. Put all your ideas through the simple test of saying them out loud. If it doesn’t come easily to you, skip it and move on to the next.

Let’s Look at Some Examples

I’m assuming my readers want to start trendy businesses like web and graphic design freelance companies, publishing houses, and consumer products companies. Let’s look at the names of some successful companies in these spaces:

• Teehan+Lax, a very successful web and graphic design company that eventually became part of the Facebook Design Team. Their company name is the last names of the two founders conjoined by a “+”. One of the advantages of using last names as your company name is you don’t need to worry whether it is cool, but Teehan+Lax built on that by using “+” instead of “&” or “and,” which would have been less cool. The primary disadvantage of using your last name is that you’ll create problems for yourself if your last name ever changes or if you ever become dissociated from the company down the road.
• Soylent, a company that makes food replacement shakes (and now snack bars). Their name is a marketing triple-whammy: the word “Soylent” doesn’t exist in any language so they do not have any branding competitors, the word “Soylent” is intriguing if you don’t know what it’s a reference to, and if you do know what it’s a reference to, the idea that a company called Soylent is making food shakes will simultaneously confuse and horrify you. When Soylent was founded, I was instantly intrigued by the curious name, and my mother was instantly — well, shall we say confused — by their name. Either way, we both checked them out. That’s marketing.
• Book In A Box, a company that helps people get their books ghostwritten and published. They are now called Scribe Writing, but they used the name Book In A Box for many years, which was a genius move. When you hear their company name, it’s pretty evident to their target market what it is they do. Now that they’re a prestigious and successful company, Scribe Writing is a much more dignified and classy name, perfect for the stage of maturity which their business is in.

Once You’ve Picked Your Business Name…

Buy the domain name, create the Twitter account, and open the Facebook page as soon as possible. You do not want to wait on this. If you do, someone else may come up with the same business name and take it before you do.

I know someone who is going through this right now, actually. He’s the inspiration for this article. He has been dreaming of starting a business for several years and has had a name in mind for it that entire time, but now that he is finally ready to do so, he found out his business name has already been taken by someone else. He has to decide on a new business name all over again.

I feel for him; I know how it feels to have your heart set on a particular name for something only to find you cannot have what you want. It doesn’t matter, of course, because a dream business by any other name smells just as sweet, but it’s a disappointment nonetheless.

Don’t be that guy. Once you know what you want to call your business, stake out your territory before someone else does.

In Conclusion

It really isn’t too hard to name a business. Here’s what you have to do:

1. Research other companies in your target market.
2. Come up with a list of potential business ideas.
3. Do research to see if other businesses are using these names.
4. Test these names for word-of-mouth marketing potential.

Once you’ve found a business name you like that passes all these tests, go buy the domain name and create the social media accounts as soon as possible.

Most importantly, don’t stress about it. You’ve got this.