This post was ment to be full of links to a couple of interesting posts that appeared lately on the blogosphere on naming a new-born startup. After a bit of thought I decided to extend it a bit with the following fragment:

Two years ago, while in an internship in an R&D+consulting IT firm in the suburbs of Paris, I was eagerly messenging a couple of college friends home, on the subject of starting our own company. I’ll tell you more about this adventure on some other occasion, but for now I’ll stick with the naming game.

Our chats became email-based, somewhere on a private Yahoo Group. I wish I had read at that time some of the posts I’ll link below. I didn’t, neither did my friends. We passed through a lot of variants, ranging from names like Exclusix, Xoatl, KSoft, QSoft,DSoft, MSoft… (see a pattern here? :D), Future Soft, Random Soft, No Soft and many more.

In the end we stuck with 5 variants on the name K2 and various suffixes like Soft, IT, Consulting, etc; me made a poll and, the six of us, voted for it. In my opinion the best name didn’t win. It wasn’t even in the poll list.

Although I had no idea what this name should have been, I learnt a lesson: never let a “focus group” vote for important issues such as branding ideas. Actually, if the group has more than 2 founders, don’t try to get a name based on voting. I’d suggest putting in a hat all the suggestions, then random picking half of them, throwing out the most hated one; repeat until you get a single name standing. People make better decisions when chosing what they DON’T like instead of what they do.

Our biggest mistake was that we didn’t Google it. We would have found the name extremely popular, thus making the “stand from the crowd” part very difficult. You should always Google a name. See Seth Godin’s post about this (linked below)

So… now let’s get to the long-awaited links:

• Guy Kawasaki had a post in february with tips on naming a company ; I’ll name a few of them: Begin with letters early in the alphabet; Embody verb potential; Embody logic;
• Dennis Forbes is a blogger who took the time to parse the 3.5 GB database of about 50 millions .com domains; his findigs? interesting… : all 3-letters/digits domain name combinations have been taken; most common nouns or names have been taken, combinations of two-three are still to be found. And many more, over here…
• again, Guy found an interesting blog of a company dedicated to naming companies and brands. A cool ressource of links and tips on chosing a good startup name.
• Probably the hottest entrepeneurs of the moment, the guys from 37signals (a catchy name with a meaning), have been writing, starting back in 1999, a manifesto of their phylosophy on webdesign, usability and business in general; a recommended read. Snippets of genius: the spoof eNormicon website on branding and company identity, and the Size does matter page.
• also refered by Kawasaki’s post mentioned above, a nice history of big companies names

Update:

• a bit older(5 months in the blogosphere is a HUUGE amount of time) but still incredibly interesting is Seth Godin’s post on The new rules of naming . Probably the best tip? Find a name that came up with close to zero Google matches.

My two cents, tips and tricks:

• one can notice companies that are big today MADE their name mean something instead of chosing a meaningful name from the start. Don’t get stuck in keywords.
• in case you didn’t know it, most domain name registrars give you the possibility of automatically generationg combinations of words entered. For instance nameboy(no affiliation here; I actually would advise you to use some external tool for this- Paul Graham named his company with a program)
• if ever in doubt, there’s plenty of name generators online. I wouldn’t suggest to use them blindly. Not even the Web2.0 generator.
• don’t pick a “too official name”: you don’t want to become the “corporate” type even before you become a startup. Who would have thought that Firefox, Redhat or, hell, even Apple would become such powerful brands, while companies named Intergalactic Digital Research or with bland names ending in Consulting, Solutions, Import Export or Consolidated were doomed to oblivion?

• Paul Graham has, on his blog, a couple of very interesting thoughts on this subject, most of them matching the ones I wrote above. Anyone interested in this subject  should give its mini-essay a look.