Naming Your Startup

Naming your startup is probably one of the most important things your startup needs to do for branding and marketing. For the last couple months our team has tried to come up with a good name for our dating startup. We've gone through hundreds of names and all of them are either taken or we don't "love it". We haven't decided on a name yet, but I wanted to share some of our thoughts on making that decision. 

Simplicity and Pronunciation

If you're looking at doing any viral marketing you need a name that is short, simple, and easy to pronounce. When you imagine your users telling their friends about your website, you want to be sure that your startup's name will be remembered and spelled correctly when they get home. 

Branding and Marketing

Be creative. Your startup's name is one of the best branding and marketing tools you can have. You can use your name to describe what your website does as well as attract new users with a creative name (think of websites like FeedBurner and Disqus). 

Get the .com

Names such as del.icio.us are "cool" but not practical. Users won't want to type that into the address bar. If you have a great name, but the .com domain is taken, don't settle with a .net or any other domain. Users automatically think and add .com to a name. If they remembered your site's name that should be enough to get them to the website, they shouldn't have to remember the extension as well. 

Love it

Make sure you love your name, once you launch it gets much harder to change your name. But don't spend all your energy on naming your startup, having a name means nothing if you don't have a product to go along with it.