— March 27, 2010 —
By Tobin Harris
Picking a name for your new company is difficult. It seems like an inconvenience when you’re worrying about winning clients and paying bills.
Of course, picking a name is seriously worth getting right. It can make a big difference in the short term, and the long term.
What Can Go Wrong?
Before I launched Engine Room, I had Socena. This is a name I picked because it looked good on paper. Seriously, I liked the shape of the letters on the page. As a bonus, Socena doesn’t sound offensive, and at the time it had a .com domain name I could buy.
Unfortunately, Socena was a stupid name for a few reasons:
- It didn’t mean anything. Really. It calls up very few connotations - good or bad.
- It didn’t have any positive connection to the business of developing software.
- No-one could pronounce it. They kept pronouncing it Sock-eena rather than So-sceena.
I chose Socena simply because I needed a limited company when I started my contracting career. All companies need a name, so I rushed to find one.
Rushing your company name is an easy thing to do when you don’t really know why you need a good name. You’re future might be one huge question mark. What kind of services will you offer? Will you be a consultant, or a small business? Will you even need to use your company when dealing with clients?
In my case, all I knew was that I would be developing software for some purpose. So, a name seemed unimportant.
Even with all this uncertainty, I could have done a LOT better with my name.
Suggestions
If you’re about to pick your own company name, try the following…
1. Pick a name that means something positive to your customers; Engine Room is pretty good; it creates positive mental imagery: work, technical, keeping things running and productivity.
2. You want your customers to talk about you, and recommend your products and services. Having a strong name will make this easier for them - no embarrassing pronunciations or connotations.
3. Pick a name that you will be really proud of. Imagine introducing your company to your perfect client. How they might respond to that name? What you would say if you had to explain to them why you picked that name?
4. Your name doesn’t have to be clever or deep, you just need to be able to have a story behind it that isn’t sucky!
5. Don’t worry too much about having a unique name. If there’s a name you really like and you find out someone else already has it, then it might not be a show stopper. It’s more acceptable if they’re in a different industry, country or county!
6. You don’t have to be fashionable. Right now lots of companies use the “pick random number with a random noun” approach (such as 22bits, phase1 and 99times). This approach is fine, but there are a lot of people doing this right now. Feel free to do something different, it might be cool in a few years time.
7. Check the .com (or co.uk). This one is obvious, but it’s good if you can buy the domain name. But…
8. It doesn’t have to be the exact domain name. There are tons of domain names that might be close to your company name. Our company - engineroomapps.com - is an example of this. We couldn’t buy engineroom.com as it was taken. A good example of a close-match domain name that works well is www.madebysofa.com.
That’s all for now. I hope this helps you pick a great name for your company.
