how to pick company name.md

What’s in a Name? A Lot, Actually. Here’s How to Pick the Right One For Your Company

Arielle Jackson is Head of Brand and Product Marketing at First Round — for over 10 years, she’s helped hundreds of First Round founders on early positioning, brand identity, launch communications and marketing hiring. She started her career at Google, helping grow Gmail in its early days. At Square, she was one of the first marketers who led the launch of new hardware products. She then joined a seed-stage startup called Cover before it was snapped up by (then) Twitter.

Across all the companies she’s helped, naming is one of the trickiest challenges to solve. It’s hard to find a name, hard to know if you’ve found the right one and hard to know if it’s working. A lot of it is a gut feeling.

A bad name won’t kill a good company — but sometimes, it feels like it could.

I get why so many founders agonize over picking the right name. You want it to be memorable. You want it to have meaning for your company. You don’t want it to get roasted or outgrow it or regret the decision.

Some of this pressure comes from the fact that an excellent name can only help you, spreading word of mouth and making it easier to build your brand. Yet in many cases, great names don’t start great. Think about Disney, which was simply the founder’s last name: OK name, remarkable brand.

This should actually take some of the pressure off picking your name; you can’t foresee a decade or a century of brand equity.

Naming is one of the most common challenges founders bring to me, usually after they’ve toiled over it themselves, sometimes for months.

Incorporating your company: pick something you know will change

There’s a difference between the name you incorporate under and the one you use externally. When you’re first getting started, don’t put too much pressure on your incorporation name because it’s likely going to change. I’d say even plan for it to change.

If you need to act fast, just incorporate using a placeholder name.

My advice is to pick something so outlandish that it could never see the light of day.

You don’t want to get tied to a name because you had to file your incorporation docs on a tight deadline.

How to pick your actual name

The best time to do this is before launch. Once your name is out in the world, changing it only gets harder, not easier.

I’ve found a few inflection points to be good moments for naming:

Expect naming to take at least a month. This isn’t a single brainstorm or ChatGPT prompt.

Step one: positioning

I’ve gone in depth about positioning on The Review. Here’s a quick breakdown:

Step two: complete a naming brief

Once positioning is in a good place, it’s time to set the target on the name itself. It can be tempting to jump right into brainstorming, but without a brief, it feels a bit like throwing darts in a dark room.

A simple naming brief ensures the most basic parameters are clear, while also forcing participants to articulate their personal likes and dislikes. Answer the following questions:

1. What are you naming?

2. What are the names of related / competitor products?

3. Who’s the target audience?

4. What concept do you want to communicate?

5. Do you have a preference for descriptive, suggestive or fanciful names?

6. Pick five company names you really like (which don’t have to be in your specific space). What do you like about them?

7. Now the inverse. Pick five company names you really dislike. What do you dislike about them?

8. Are there any length considerations you need to be aware of?

9. What are the legal considerations?

10. Does the exact domain name need to be available?

11. What is your rough budget for domain acquisition?

12. Any additional details, requirements or inspiration we should be aware of?

Step three: have a namestorm

The best brainstorms combine structure and creativity. Without some structure, it’s easy for creative ideas to be untethered.

1. Take your positioning statement and break it into nouns and verbs.

2. After the warm up brainstorm based on your positioning statement, do a second brainstorm on ~8-10 relevant themes.

3. Read — a lot.

4. Gather every idea in a spreadsheet and make a shortlist.

5. Narrow it down to a top three.

Getting feedback on your contenders

Naming is obviously a qualitative exercise.

Talk to current users.

Talk to uninitiated users — people in your target audience who don’t know anything about the product yet.

Run a small memorability test.

Trademarks and legal clearance

Congrats, you have your top choice name.

  1. Start with a basic search.
  2. Do a comprehensive search.
  3. Understand the risks and your tolerance.
  4. Decide whether to file.
  5. Wait.

If you’ve incorporated as a different name

Domains

Get the name right, then solve for the domain.

It’s harder than ever to get a good .com domain — but it also matters less than ever.

Naming your product vs. naming your company

When it comes to naming products, most founders overcomplicate it.

If you’ve built equity in your company name, resist the urge to give your product an entirely different name.

If you’re still struggling with naming

If you don’t want to go through it, you can outsource to a specialized naming firm, or in some cases, your branding agency can take over. But keep in mind, it’ll cost you: full service naming usually starts around $25k but can go all the way up to six figures.

Really, my hope is that this essay might make it possible for more founders to DIY naming.