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Ask HN: How do you decide a name for your product or side project?
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Re: Ask HN: How do you decide a name for your product or side project?
#2[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide a name for your product or side project?
#3We create external camera pods for aircraft, which themselves can't fly. So we name them after flightless birds.
Tomorrow I'll be flying 'Takahe':
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide a name for your product or side project?
#4• availability of related URL
• availability of a short name on twitter
• the name should describe the benefit of your product, not aspects of how it works. I made this mistake with my startup, which was originally named "Read The Rainbow" because it uses color gradients to make reading on-screen easier. But to someone who has never heard of our technology, hearing "rainbow" doesn't evince speed. We changed the name to "BeeLine Reader" to fix this and have gotten mostly positive feedback.
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide a name for your product or side project?
#5I normally find 2 discriptive words, concatenate them and repeat until I find an available .com (e.g. wishminer, for a tool that mines wishes).
The name should be easy to pronounce and spell. Often repeated vocals make the name more memorable. You can test the name by mentioning it to people before describing the app and ask what they'd expect. Then check a day later which name they remembered.
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide a name for your product or side project?
#6By setting aside the availability, it should be rememberable (for me it is either an animal or an object/person that represents the product/project).
Lately, I chose the name Sandglass for a message queue (https://github.com/celrenheit/sandglass). The reason is that this project depends on an ID generator that I named sandflake (in reference to twitter's snowflake).
So I chose the name sandglass because it is kind of like a glass with a lot of sandflakes flowing through it (like a message queue).
Another name I used was Lion for an http router but for no particular reasons :)
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide a name for your product or side project?
#7Assuming I can't just straight up think of and find an available .com in the exact name I'm after -
Take the subject - e.g. if I was starting a video hosting site I'd go with "vid", "video", "tube"
Chuck it in Impossibility [1] and see what combos bring out the best sounding results, repeat the same with Namemesh [2] and Namegrep [3]
Jot down all the viable options, sleep on it, register the one that still sounds appealing next day
[1] http://impossibility.org/ [2] https://www.namemesh.com/ [3] https://namegrep.com/
Full disclosure of course - I've not got any successful side projects out there yet. While I doubt it's the naming methodology.. it could be :)
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide a name for your product or side project?
#8I also suggest checking for trademarks as soon as you come up with something.
It's really disappointing to let a name "grow on you" only to realise it's taken when you're ready to launch..
I use the global brand database: http://www.wipo.int/branddb/en/
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide a name for your product or side project?
#9Assuming I can't just straight up think of and find an available .com in the exact name I'm after - Take the subject - e.g. if I was starting a video hosting site I'd go with "vid", "video", "tube" Chuck it in Impossibility [1] and see what combos bring out the best sounding results, repeat the same with Namemesh [2] and Namegrep [3] Jot down all the viable options, sleep on it, register the one that still sounds app…
Thanks I think the entire enlisted procedure will help me.
Re: Ask HN: How do you decide a name for your product or side project?
#10My projects so far are open source, and have taken two approaches for naming:
Either reuse a name of different context that kind of maps (eg a flexible, versatile framework/library called Bamboo)
Or literally just what it does: recently I’ve been working on projects called: Koalephant {Failover,Certificate,Proxy,PXC} Manager
Koalephant is the name of my company, the tools are management/sync helpers to setup failover, tls certificates, tcp and http proxying, and percona Xtradb cluster.