The 219th blog post on how to name your startup
I have bumped into a lot of articles recently that try to give advice on how to name your startup. All of them look at successful ventures like Google and Airbnb and try to find a secret formula that will work for any new company or brand. Let it end with -fy! Let it have 8 letters! Let it be a modified version of an existing word! Put together two words: Facebook did it and became one of the biggest companies in the world!
This is as stupid as creating a formula that comes up with the core idea of your startup. Create a product that is round! Create a service that helps cooking in any way! Develop any hardware for Virtual Reality! These advices would probably generate some success stories and a significantly higher number of failures, just like the secret formula to find the name.
I realised that most startup founders believe the product idea will give them 90% of the success, all the rest is just an exercise: among others, branding and marketing are not so sexy, it's what those big, ugly old-school corporations do. "We are a startup, we don't do branding! We do product-market fit!"
The thing is that people make decisions based on intuition, emotional drivers and have so many biases that a whole field of science has been trying to understand this procedure for decades. But now let's just take one thing that's proven: framing matters. The way you word a question will influence the answer. The way you call your brand will have a significant impact on your conversion rates.
So there is no secret formula. Your brand name should try to create a frame for your customers that is more likely to pull them in. All the rest depends on your actual product or service, the people you want to talk to, the state of mind in which they meet your brand name and so on. If you have the means, go to a branding agency or any professional with branding experience: talk about the product, the brand, the consumer, try to dig deep in the decision making process of people, check your competition. This way, and with a bit of luck, you will have a much better chance of finding a good solution.
There are exceptions, of course. And there is always a big enough media budget that can sell any name you want. But it doesn't mean you should throw your money (or your VC's money) out of the window communicating with a name that is not good enough. A good name alone won't make you successful but a bad name can make you poor.