Naming a Company or Product is Terrible- My Five Rules

In the early 80’s, when I was a teenager, I saw a lot of kids forming bands. However, I noticed that 99% of them spent all their time trying to name the band rather than make any music. I vowed to not fall into this trap if I had to name something.

Of course, I did fall into this trap when I was part of groups naming four software products and our company (Opex Analytics). Frustrating weeks and countless hours were spent. This time felt so unproductive.

If you find yourself needing to name a product or company, here five rules that may save you some time and allow you to get back to building the business.

Rule #1: You and I can come up with great names while the names from other people on our team are mediocre, at best.

Unfortunately, this has a related rule.

Rule #2: The other people on the team think their names are great while mine and yours are mediocre, at best.

These two rules explain the problem.

And, it gets worse as you have more people. If you have just two people, each name has one vote for it and one against it. If you have three people, each name has one vote for it and two against it.

If naming were a logical process, you might think that letting seven other people vote on the three names would help. This doesn’t help. What happens is that the new seven people think that the current list is mediocre, at best. But, they helpfully add names they think are better. So, now you have 10 names on the list, each with just one vote for it and nine against it.

Rule #3: Even if the team can reluctantly agree to one of the names, the URL won’t be available.

People ask how we came up with Opex Analytics as the name. I think we liked 25 names much better, but the right URL wasn’t available. This was maddening.

At this point we were about three frustrating weeks in. And, it was just two co-founders coming up with a name— me and Ganesh. I was mentally done with the process. I told Ganesh I was calling the lawyer first thing in the morning (I know, childish) to make one of the names we both hated our official name.

That night, his wife, Madhura, came up with Opex Analytics. That would do. We both liked it. This leads to the next rule.

Rule #4: Get a good third-party to help.

I like the company A Hundred Monkeys. Their process is meant to avoid the problems in the first three rules. They suggest a very small team to decide, they interview people to get a good flavor of what the company or product is all about, they check URLs, and they have a process to take care of the problems with Rules #1 and #2.

You would think after the fiasco of naming Opex Analytics that we would have learned. Nope. We had a software product to name. And, we tried to do it ourselves. We made Rules #1 and #2 worse by asking lots of people for suggestions.

Then, we discovered A Hundred Monkeys and the process was pleasant. I think we liked the names they came up with both because they were good names (really, what did we know about naming a product) and the emotion was gone because it was a third party.

The product name that came out of this was Enframe.

Now, you might not like the name Enframe, so there is one more really important rule:

Rule #5: The name matters much less than you think.

At Opex Analytics, we loved the name Enframe (see Rule #1). When LLamasoft bought us, they liked another name better (see Rule #2). Since they bought us, they could change the name.

They changed it to OpenX. I thought people would care. But, really, no one cared. The customers didn’t care. The sales team didn’t care. Our software engineers just started calling it OpenX and went on with their work. No one cared. And, they all seemed to like the new name just as much as they liked the old name. It was a non-event. It didn’t matter.

People just want to know what a thing is called.

If you think about the all the names of the products and companies you interact with, you realize that many of those names are weird and bad. But, that never really crosses your mind— that is just what they are called.

So, find a way to quickly and painlessly converge on a name. If you can spend the money, use a 3rd party (see Rule #4). If you can’t spend the money, realize that everyone will need to compromise to get past Rules #1 and #2— this is a good skill anyway since building a product or business requires lots of cooperation and compromises.??