What's in a Name?

This question is precisely what beleaguered my co-founder, Govin, and I on and off over the course of a few weeks. After all, we may be 'stuck' with it for many years.

Earlier on in my co-founding journey (i.e. a few weeks ago), I'd promised here to reveal our final choice for a company and brand name, along with the story of how we went about evaluating options and finally choosing one.

We had a working title, thanks to Govin's previous scoping of the idea. He'd chosen 'Zonder' as it was different and had a meaning (albeit not a great one) in Dutch, his partner's and baby's native language. It means 'without'. While we hope our end-customers will be 'without' a number of things like suffering and hassles, I was holding out for something more aspirational.

Truth be told, as a marketer, I wasn't ready to relegate us to last in the line up, which is usually what happens when third parties want to be diplomatic and promote logos in alphabetical order. I also thought it sounded like something from The Jetsons, a cartoon series from the '70s which followed a futuristic family. So maybe not as serious as I'd have liked.

So, we set off on a process to find the right name for our business, providing virtual personalised care for chronic disease patients, at scale. And what a process it was. It's not enough to find options that capture the positive attributes you hope to convey; you also have to screen for what it lacks as well as any negative connotations.

Ideation

We started with an ideation session to get up on a white board as many words as we could that conveyed what we hoped to provide with our service. We were prolific! A main category was words that meant someone to guide you on your journey, like a shepherd. This list included no less than:

Chaperone

Companion

Guide

Guru

Savant

Marshal

Sage

Magi

Regent

Counselor

Aide

Navigator

Copilot

Wayfinder

Coach

Trainer

Ranger

Concierge

Maestro

Doorman (I never claimed they were all good.)

Crone (For some reason, no one but me got excited about that one.)

Master

Escort

Guard

Keeper

Carer

Oracle

Minder

as well as names of famous helpers like Friday, Doc Watson, Hermione, Artaban and Esther. Nope, it turns out characters are contentious.

We also explored names that resonated with fine health, including: Fit, Tip-Top, Fine Fettle, Kilter, Balance and Tickety Boo (love that expression!), and one of our favourites, Hale Health. Plus we considered names that hinted at something being fixed or prevented, like Stitch, Ounce, Prevention.

My overall fave was one that hinted at access to something better: Green Door Health.

Lots of avenues.... you get the idea.

Evaluation

It wouldn't be enough to simply pick the best-loved name. We also had to vet the shortlist against availability. This entails spending a fair bit of time on a domain checker site to ensure that a sensible iteration of the TLD (top level domain ie .com, .co, .health) would be available at a reasonable price. I shouldn't be surprised, but it didn't take long for the sharks, er arbitrageurs, to snap up the new TLDs like .health and .care with no intention to use them but rather hold them for ransom for any company who would like to use them.

Like the US Government, I don't pay ransom. So our shortlist narrowed a bit.

Equally importantly, we also searched on the US Patent Office site under the trade class into which we fall. (Fun side note, medical services shares a product class with beauty/cosmetics, veterinary services and dog grooming. So I have a perfectly legitimate excuse to include the cute dog pic above.) Hale Health among others fell by the wayside as there is a live registration by that name in the relevant category, while Fettle is taken by a cannabis dispensary (future acquisition?).

Feedback

Over a weekend, we put our shortlist of 5 names out to a vote by close friends and family. My posse came out of the voting booth with a clear winner plus a couple distant runner-ups. We then put out a Whatsapp poll to our cohort with the final 4 names. The results were an upset! To me, that is.

Drum roll, please.... Our cohort uncontrovertibly opted for the name Zonder. At the end of the day, the overarching reason is they're used to it. To be fair, it was a runner-up in my F&F poll with that same reason given. It gives me confidence that the name fits. People will accept it, remember it and use it. As someone helpfully pointed out, it makes a good verb, too.

We are now incorporated, and I proudly present to you Zonder Health.

Next Up

Naming has actually been a teeny tiny part of what we've been working on. We're mostly preoccupied with organising a pilot with our first primary care practice at the same time as we make decisions and prepare the multitude of strategy and admin documents required to pitch for a bit of funding and a place on the accelerator phase of the Zinc programme. Plus the actual pitch. Yikes.

Highlight: Mock Investment Committee pitch getting feedback on our pitch and help in rounding out some important components.

Lowlight: Spending the entire weekend filling out strategy and admin documents. For the foreseeable, I will have a very scaled-back social life. Prospective founders, be warned.

You can jump over to my colleagues' newsletters to see to which degree they're managing to enjoy themselves at crunch time:

• Marjo Palanee
• Natalia Baltazar
• Josh Piddock
• Air Aware Labs here
• Guy Naor
• Veronika Bridgman
• Pavandeep Rai
• Lisa Rickers