Page 65 - The 7 Day Startup: You Don’t Learn Until You Launch - PDFDrive.com

Let’s look at a useful framework for choosing an “acceptable” business name.
This is the highest level you need to strive for at this stage in your business.
Having the perfect worldwide brand can come later, but we want to avoid having
a terrible name.

The irony is that a terrible name is often the result of overthinking it.

Come up With a Few Options

The most sensible way to approach your business name is to come up with a few
options. From there you can use some logic to pick the best one.

There are many ways you might go about doing this. Here are some naming
tricks to get started:

A place. Apple was named after an apple farm. Adobe was named after a
creek that ran behind the founder’s house.
Combine two words to create a new one. Aldi is a combination of
“Albrecht” (name of the founders) and “discount.” Intel combined
“Integrated Electronics.” Groupon combined “Group Coupon.”
Use an acronym for your service. IBM stood for “International Business
Machines.”
Look for industry terms. In our case, “WP” is commonly used for
companies in the WordPress space.
Use the dictionary. Jack Dorsey liked the name Twitch so he looked at
words around it in the dictionary and found the word “Twitter.”
Extend a related word. I put “inform” into wordoid.com to come up with
Informly.
Outsource it. crowdSPRING.com12 is one site that will get others to come
up with business names for you. The one-day turnaround might be an issue
here, so forums or social media might work better, or you can ask your
friends.

The more time you spend looking at names, the weirder it gets. IKEA was
named after the first two letters of the founder’s name (Ingvar Kamprad13) and