79 product name ideas for indie hackers

Originally posted on https://blog.clickport.io/79-start-up-name-ideas/

Naming is hard.

As someone who writes code, I know this well. But naming a product or startup is peak difficult. At least, it was for me.

Common indie hacker wisdom is that your product name doesn't matter, at least in the early stages. I disagree. When you pick a name that you hate, or that other people hate, you begin to hate your product and lose motivation. Spending a little bit of time upfront to choose a reasonable name is worth it.

Check out the original blog post for all 79 name ideas I had for my new project: Clickport: https://blog.clickport.io/79-start-up-name-ideas/. You are most welcome to "steal" one! If you hit it big, remember me!

How to name a startup

I'm the furthest thing from an expert on naming, branding and marketing. I've only ever named one other product before. Who cares. This is how I went about it.

What are you building?

First, I wanted to clearly define what it was I was building. This is critical. Without a clear, one-sentence description of the product and a clear target audience, my chances of landing on a great name were slim.

My product idea: a Slack app for internal tools. My primary audience: developers. My secondary audience: customer support staff, sales, customer success, etc.

So, I'm looking for a semi-technical name. Something that doesn't make developers cringe, but doesn't intimidate less technical folks.

Brainstorm

True brainstorming means writing down any idea that comes to mind. So, that's what I did. The following is a picture of my first brainstorm:

You can probably see that there's a theme here. I was hung up on using "tool", "script" and "run" in the name. "Descriptive naming" is the term given to names of this nature. These names try to describe the product in the name itself. This isn't a bad route. For indie hackers, I'd propose it's better to have a very descriptive name than a name that means nothing to your customer. Your marketing budget isn't big enough to "teach" people what your name means and.

Initially, I decided on "Runtime" as the name. But after starting to build the product, I quickly realized this was a terrible name; "runtime" is a computing term that has real meaning in a programming context. Remember: I didn't want to make developers cringe, and "Runtime" would surely do that. So I needed to change.

Tools for brainstorming

I've spent hours in wordhippo.com. Personally, it was the most intuitive thesaurus for this exercise. I ran every relevant word I could think of through here.

At this point, I had discovered "suggestive naming". I liked this better than descriptive naming. Names in this category retain an element of descriptiveness but tend to be ambiguous enough to sound "cooler" (at least to me).

I started thinking of what I wanted people to feel when they used my product. Words like "success", "summit", "powerful" and "easy" came to mind.

The following 2 pictures are my second and third brainstorms.

Phone a friend

At this point, I'm about 2 weeks into building my idea and having some early customer conversations, and I was getting frustrated that I hadn't had a good name. I decided to phone a friend:

I LOVED Clickflow. But it was taken.

Normally, this wouldn't be an issue for me, but Clickflow already has an established brand in a tangentially-related space: design. SEO would be hard, and I felt that the cross-over in target audience was high enough that it could be an issue for me down the road.

But I liked the "click" idea. So I came up with some more names using "Click" as the prefix.

In the picture, you can see a little hack I found in a blog post I read. You leave a blank space for your name, followed by a one-sentence description of your product. Then, you read the sentence out loud, substituting in each name idea. This was very helpful. Again: if it's annoying to read this sentence, it's going to be even more annoying after 100 customer conversations.

I eventually narrowed it down to "Clickstack", "Clickdeck" and "Clickport". My branding friend had this to say about "Clickdeck":

And so that left "Clickstack" or "Clickport". Both the domains were available, so it was pretty much a flip of a coin. "Clickport" won.

The perfect name

Is Clickport the perfect name? No, definitely not. But I don't hate it. I don't feel like a fool when I say it out loud. I don't feel embarrassed by the name. And, it's somewhat suggestive about what my product does. It will do for now!

If you want to follow my progress on Clickport, follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/tom__quirk.