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How I Choose My Company Name
By Ellen Thompson
Oct 5, 2006, 12:03
The process of researching and selecting a company name for your new business is not unlike the steps you go through when you’re naming a new baby. While fun and exciting, distilling your list down to the one perfect name can be more difficult and emotionally draining than you think.
I’ve named at least a dozen businesses (and one baby!). I have chosen both great names and lousy names. At this point, I’m a veteran and avoid critical mistakes. To help you do the same, I’m going to walk you though the process my team used to name our latest venture, Cart & Horse , which develops and manages an online, regional Yellow Pages style directory.
Before we began our latest “company name game,” we carefully defined the purpose of our business. We wanted to develop a company that would help people performing web searches connect with local businesses. In the process, we were creating a site that provided local merchants with an affordable, local, online advertising vehicle.
Over the years, we have developed a list of criteria that any successful company name must meet. We generally run web-based businesses, so first and foremost we look for a domain name that has no dashes and will be available as a .com name as well
There are some businesses where this rule doesn’t apply, but in my experience we have lost a lot of traffic whenever we have ignored this rule. I can’t begin to count how many potential customers we lost because they either visited or emailed 4walls.com instead of our online apartment guide, 4walls.net.
Further, the business name must be available for use, free and clear. If someone in a similar business has trademarked the name or registered it to do business in your state, keep looking. This is another mistake we made. “Know It All”, the name of our computer skills testing company, was trademarked by someone who did mainframe technology training. We were able to continue using the business name but our rights were limited; the owner of the trademark may have been able to prohibit us from using the name at all.
With these guidelines in mind, we begin the brainstorming process to name our new business. Rather than just adopting a completely random process, we organized our brainstorming in the following way:
1. Names that clearly stated what we do. In this case, obvious choices like YellowPages.com were not available, so we stretched and came up with BlackBookOnline.com, LittleBlackBook.com, etc.
2. Names that were “made up” but still alluded to what the site did. For instances, respages.com alludes to resident pages. Google.com is an example of this kind of name – google.com was derived from googol, which means a very large number, specifically 1 with 100 zeros after it.
3. Names that are completely made up. Drug companies often use made up names for drugs – for instance Viagra.
4. Names derived from abstract concatenations. These are names that consist of a concatenation of words or parts of words. Friendster.com and roomandboard.com are examples of concatenations.
Cartandhorse.com was actually the last name we came up with. I liked it right away. After all, we were advertising local businesses, the ones you used to get to with your horse drawn buggy. The domain name was available and it was available for us to brand – there were no businesses with conflicting names. We were a little concerned about the length (12 characters is on the border of being a long name) and whether or not the name was memorable enough. Then we thought, if Crate & Barrel had become synonymous with home furnishing, then Cart & Horse had a fighting chance, too.
I circulated the name so my partners and key advisors could consider it. Remarkably, everyone liked the name and so our search was done.
That’s how we came up with the name for our online business directory, www.cartandhorse.com . This is the same process I use every time I need to think up a new company name: define your business, brainstorm potential names, select a potential name, make sure the .com domain name is available, make sure there are no conflicting trademarks or state business registrations then bounce the company name off of partners, advisors and other key stakeholders. Shake, stir and repeat if necessary!
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