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Ask HN: How do you come up with a Brand or Project Name?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you come up with a Brand or Project Name?

#11

Post by ThomPete »

Great names are built not found. Don't worry too much about getting the right name.

Don't be afraid to call your company one thing but have a slightly different URL.

A lot of people make the mistake of thinking that domain names needs to be easy to type but the reality is that most of us click on links to get to a company url we don't actually type it in (and even if you do Google is perfectly fine helping you find the right url)

Re: Ask HN: How do you come up with a Brand or Project Name?

#12

Post by shaftway »

I use acronyms, portmanteaus, and other plays on words to name things. Sometimes backronyms. I can't point to some of my recent ones, as they're still in progress.

While I was at NYMEX I built a system called NEON (Nymex Electronic Order Network). Followup projects followed the noble elements theme, sometimes with a forced backronym.

One project involved multi-lingual communication, so I tooke "chat", which is "cat" in french, then translated that to Japanese (Neko).

Basically just have fun with it, and don't stress.

Re: Ask HN: How do you come up with a Brand or Project Name?

#13

Post by jcahill84 »

My first stop is almost always the thesaurus, from there I usually move on to combinations of two words or two synonyms of what I'm trying to build. My current project is a scheduled API monitoring tool, and I came up with the word "Schezzle" to represent what it is. A 90s rap influenced spin on the word "schedule." I think the trick is to find something that's easy to say and that can be communicated to other by word-of-mouth without having to spell it.

Re: Ask HN: How do you come up with a Brand or Project Name?

#16

Post by panorama »

I have the same wish: A service that provides a large list of available, short, human-esque .com domain names. I wouldn't mind paying and spending hours combing over it to find ones I liked. Someone did this a few years ago and I snagged a couple neat ones including a 5 letter .com.

Anyway as for actual advice, I've built more than a handful of projects and startups at this point. The recurring theme in every project was that I'd start with something completely nonsensical to use as the name. If your cofounder likes grilled cheese sandwiches, call your project GCS or grilled cheese or whatever, including your github repo. Getting the domain has never been step 1 in anything I've ever built including my current business.

There's weeks worth of work to do before the .com is needed. In the meantime what I do is keep an Evernote of words and phrases that pertain to the industry or what my service will likely do. While we had several product hypotheses, our business model was 95% likely to end up doing some form of data sifting on behalf of customers. So I would think about words that have to do with searching or finding things and kept a log of them:

- Hound (as in the dog)

- Seek/Seeker

- Scout

- Scope

- Vision

Along with general words I liked from a linguistic standpoint: "Labs", "IQ", "Mighty", etc.

When I looked for an available .com, I mixed combinations in my word list: "ScoutIQ", "MightyScope", "HoundLabs", etc. until I found one that I liked and was available: MightyScout - and I reserved it immediately.

But to this day our Slack channel, Github repo, etc. still use the original, nonsense name :)

Re: Ask HN: How do you come up with a Brand or Project Name?

#18

Post by chaz »

I found a good name for A piece of advice that worked for me: don't get stuck on the name. It's hard and it takes time (and sometimes money). Pick any temporary name for $10 and keep building instead. You can always change it later. Many companies and projects have changed their name as they became successful. It feels like it's important in the beginning but it usually isn't.

Re: Ask HN: How do you come up with a Brand or Project Name?

#19

Post by telebone_man »

FWIW, you can take parties to a sort of court (I use that word lightly) that can assist you in obtaining a domain taken by a squatter.

It's been a few years, but google ICANN and I'm sure you'll find something.

If I remember correctly, you submit a petition suggesting things like.. you either have a trademark or that you're a recognised business and then a committee make a decision based on that.

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