The ritual of startup naming

In my one note, I literally do have 30+ ideas and have few dozen domains registered. Sometimes i go in extreme length as registering 5 TLDs (.com, .net, .org, .io, .app) and I look into social handles. There is always a dead profile with 4 followers created 7 years ago with my exact desired name and its plural.

Now I have to hybrid a word or snip few characters to make it sound new, memorable, short & relevant. I hope many of you are aware of the famous incubation center called Aviato in Silicon Valley, Startup investor Erlic Bachman does a special ritual in desert when it is about startup naming. He fuses various metaphors and keywords and creates names that makes no or absolute sense.

Sometimes, You can just name anything and associate your way of business into it. Nobody can guess what is YCombinator and A16Z are.. Unless they read their homepage. And everyone can guess what DropBox & Booking.com , Telegram  could be if they are in tech space.

What would be your first guess by hearing the names GoDaddy, Docker, Confluera, RobinHood, Zerodha ? They just name something and make it as a brand by deriving a new definition for the word itself. That word becomes synonyms of the service/product. An ideal example is Xerox., A company name became the “functionality” of copier and all of lineup of the products that does it.

Even if you look alike your competition and there are no room for an unique name.. Remember the hitman agent 47 , Even though there are 46 predecerers and hundreds following him., Even though they all look alike his value proposition and presence are unique. In contrast the legacy of Bond.. James Bond is an example that when a brand delivers well, It has its own market and all of its products are expected to be in same elevated level of excellence. The brand James Bond itself have its own qualities and standards regardless of the protagonist actor.

So, The rule of thumb is.. If you are going after a generic terms to name your startup then make it relevant to your core business or value. If not cook a new name and work hard to set a standard to make it to synonym your vertical. End of the day the value you delivers to your customers will fuel your brand in either negative or positive way. So, I prefer to focus on the process and quality than an idealized name. So, Next time you get a spark for a cool idea, Register just one variant of domain name and work hard to get it delivered to end users and dont just get rest at the level of dopamine delivered by just registering a domain name.