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“Startup Names” by Paul Graham (2006)

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Re: “Startup Names” by Paul Graham (2006)

#41

I'm not sure a name has that much of an impact on a business's success. I posted this comment in another thread recently: The word "Target" doesn't really carry any signal about what that company actually does. Ask yourself, in Target's infancy, did the name hurt or help them? I'd guess it had very little to do with their eventual outcome.

Target wasn't actually a startup though - it was an offshoot of Dayton's department store (that name being a relic from the era when it was much more common to name one's business after oneself). As I understand it, the main criterion for choosing a name was it had to be sufficiently distinct from "Dayton's" so as to avoid tarnishing that brand by association with the new lower-cost subsidiary.

Re: “Startup Names” by Paul Graham (2006)

#46

A while back I created a startup name generator by fusing tech and culinary terms together. I also set it up to check if the .com is available. It gets a decent amount of traffic and a few domains purchased every once in a while. Check it out: http://montanaflynn.me/lab/startup-name-generator/

That is pretty cool.

Re: “Startup Names” by Paul Graham (2006)

#50
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to agree with you, do you know of any software projects to programmatically determine syllables?

http://www.nltk.org/

Couldn't find anything that says it officially supports counting of syllables but stackoverflow provided this possible solution:

  from nltk.corpus import cmudict
  d = cmudict.dict()
  def nsyl(word):
    return [len(list(y for y in x if y[-1].isdigit())) for x in d[word.lower()]]
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