“Startup Names” by Paul Graham (2006)

I know this comment doesn't contribute much to the conversation here, but your comment made me laugh way too hard to not let you know. Sorry your startup failed.

The plan is to overcome that by first building a billion dollar company behind forkedcow.

So, looking at the "nominology" article, and considering our name ( "Fogbeam Labs", with domain name fogbeam.com), I'd rank our name like this

EVOC - neutral. Fogbeam is evocative of something to do with light and illumination, so if we were a LED bulb manufacturer or something, it would be good. But we're using it as a metaphor, since we're a software company focusing on knowledge management, integration and collaboration. I think our tagline/slogan plays ties it together though "Cut through the information fog".

BREV - I think we're good here.

GREP - Yep.

GOOG - Very much. There are very few other references to the phrase "fogbeam" and the few there are relate to something obviously different - bulbs for auto fog lamps, etc.

PRON - Yep.

SPEL - Yep.

VERB - Fail. I don't think anybody will ever say "Go fogbeam that" to anybody else. :-(

For the most part, we get a lot of positive comments on the name when we introduce ourselves to people, so all in all, that's one decision that has worked out well. I don't think our name is so special that it will cause us to succeed all on it's own (could any name do that?) but I think it's more than good enough to not be an impediment.

What do you guys think?

This article raises some refreshing points on the startup naming process.

It can be quite tough - and I ran into the naming problem many times over the years. Over 100,000,000 com domains are registered, iirc. It reached the point where I would spend days trying to come up with something that was a) good and b) available.

Frankly, I ended up feeling that finding a good name for a new project of mine was quite unlikely to happen. Which lead me the idea that the only way I'd be able to find usable (let alone high quality) names was by making a tool to help make it easier.

So I built Namebird - http://shobia.com/namebird

For it, I came up with a variety of probability based algorithims to generate names that are catchy and memorable. It works pretty nicely, imo. And, in making it, it has been able to help me find a large amount of domain names that would be good for startups.

Perhaps some here might find it of value.