Naming a startup is no joke. Some of the pressure comes from trying to get a name that resounds with your audience, expresses what the business is about and at the same time, search engine optimized.
However, it shouldn’t take an all-night brainstorming session to find a name. It certainly should not be the source of founders’ wranglings either.
Why? Nobody really cares.
The truth is, there are so many rules to naming a startup. One popular one is the OMC rule. OMC is a mnemonic for “Obviously Meaningful to Customers”. What the rule says is clear – any name a startup chooses must have a meaning, and that meaning must be obvious and, as implied, be connected to the startup’s business. The only snag is that, some of the biggest companies around these days rarely have names that mean something, talk less of one which has a direct connection to the business. Think, Uber, iROKOtv, Paga, Yahoo, Activa, Intel, Firefox, BlackBerry and Apple.
Some of these are fancy neologisms and some are simply words – with meaning – but without direct connection to a business. Apples and Blackberries are fruits, what’s that got to do with mobile phones?
There are, of course, those, who are OMC-compliant. My favourite is AirBnB. But at the end of the day, there will be a category of people who will come out and ask; “what dumb name did you guys choose anyway? It doesn’t even mean anything” or “It’s simply unimaginative”.
I’m pretty sure people told similar things to Jerry Yang and David Filo when they were launching Yahoo in 1995, or Steve Jobs in the early days of Apple.
According to Seth Godin; “everyone has an opinion about your name, especially about your logo. Ignore them. They don’t know what it’s going to mean.”
Not to discount the fact that names convey some intrinsic value of your company, but usually the name is what the company makes of it. This is not a permission to name your company an offensive or racially insensitive term.
Mind yourself.
Instead of obsessing over what to name your startup, channel that effort to the product itself.
How do you choose your name then? A hack suggested by Seth Godin – in the Startup School Podcast series – is to “take two english words and put them together,” see if it sounds good and you are golden. The only rule is that the name should be easy to remember.
I don’t like that Google’s new product is called Who’s Down, but does the product work? Yes. Will I use? Totes. On the final analysis, that’s what matters.
Photo Credit: AstroSamantha via Compfight cc
