How did you name your company and why?

Baguette Engineering is the company behind our product CashNotify. We chose this name because:

1. Baguette is familiar worldwide, short, easy to pronounce.
2. It's easy to remember: "The 2 french guys who made the demo? What's their name again? Oh yeah, Baguette!".
3. We think it's funny.
4. This song in Flight of the Conchords https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5hrUGFhsXo

I don't think it matters though. We took the necessary time to setup the "right" legal structure, but putting this name on it was a very quick decision. We thought it would have little impact on our success. It's mostly used on invoices.

It's important to distinct commercial/product name or trade mark with company name. Generally company name doesn't matter. It could be whatever you find appropriate 123company is fine as any other. It will only appear in accountant docs, reports and receipts. One company could have several trademarks and product names, like cigarette names and tobacco companies. Or like Google that has many products like Google, Gmail etc. But the company name is Alphabet. What really matters is product name and it's logo.

When I think of a business name I keep the following questions on the side to help narrow down the options:

1. Does the name help people understand what this might be about?

2. Is it easy to remember / write for native and non-native english speakers.

3. Is the name still broad enough to allow me some flexibility (quite often you'll pivot a bit on your original idea).

It doesn't have to be a positive answer for all 3 but I feel like it needs to cover at least 2 of these points. In my case the goal was to build a "health platform" for product teams, using data to monitor and improve productivity. I had a broad range of words to work with (team, work, squad, people, pulse, health, data, analytics, productivity, doctor, assistant, growth...).

I settled for Squadlytics because it inferred that this was a product for teams rather than individuals (squad) and data was a prominent part of it (analytics). Truth to be told I really wanted Squadpulse or Teampulse but both options were taken.

I've seen some brand names being powerful while unrelated to the product but I'd recommend keeping some in it that tells what the product does (Mailchimp is cute while inferring that it's about emailing).

I was lucky enough to find an awesome unregistered domain, if you can believe it: Brandfountain.com. After searching every combo for weeks I was ready to give up and settle for something second rate. The name has been an inspiration to me ever since.

I took the initials of my consulting company, mangled them a bit, and realised it formed "CTX" - which is a common programmer-speak abbrev for "context", and also echoes the name of the first software product I ever worked on.

I procrastinated for weeks, then finally realised that until I have something approaching a product, it doesn't matter all that much, so just did it, and then started building seriously, and ended up with https://getctx.io

I don't think it's a great name, but I also don't think it's the thing that will make or break the business, so I'm content enough.