How did you choose your name?
As the title says, how did you come up with your product or company name?
I’ll start - I found a domain that would work for a music project I was originally working on. A few years later, I decided to use it for a weekend project that was completely unrelated.
Best advice is using the T-shirt or tattoo test.
T-shirt Test: The name and what you do has to fit on a T-shirt. When someone looks at the t-shirt it must instantly convey meaning they understand. It must also have enough mystery for the observer to do a double take. Example: The name of my podcast is CodeLess. It's all about Makers, Tools, and Heroes in NoCode. The name is a verb and an adjective about how to approach the continuous trend of software abstraction.
Tattoo Test: It should be something you'd be willing to wear as a tattoo.
Hope this helps. anchor.FM/CodeLess
Love it. Thanks for sharing.
I chose it due to the similarity of Docker which it is based on, only to find out that it's a slang for a sexual activity 😂
Still keeping the name though!
Oh damn. Now I had to look up what you meant. Well worst case scenario some of your traffic may either be those or people really interested in Jurassic era rocks http://palaeos.com/mesozoic/jurassic/jurassic.html 😂
NORMALLY, I would spend a lot of time dialing this in, always making sure to vet available domains for each idea before settling in.
For StartupHeroics, we were forced to choose something quickly as YC was expecting everyone to launch some kind of "dirty mvp" that week.
It was temporary in my mind but over time a lot of others had an influence on it so it stuck for now.
Well it's the company name anyway... we are still working on a product called
UpStar Academy which was a name I spent a little more time with before all this got started but the high-level domain wasn't available.
Normally I would not proceed with a name if I couldn't get the .com but UpStar was hard to resist so I just bought the .academy extension for the time being until we get it launched and have more leverage.
Last note, I usually try to test the name just like anything else, as well. See what a couple dozen or more people say.
I like the upstar academy name. Where did you get the domain extension? The renewal pricing I found was between $40 and $60 yearly.
Thank you
I often get .com from IONOS as they offer $1 for first year which is handy for experimenting. (pro tip: new accounts only but there are ways around this)
I probably picked up the .academy from google domains though,
so yeah, the annual price likely isn't great.
Awesome. Thanks for the tip Greg.
I used one of those naming generators (can't remember which one) and put in words like "thank you" "team", etc...
It came up with something like "Team box" but one of the other options had "Thank" next to it. These kinda combined as "Thankbox" in my mind and that's how the name was born.
I'm quite happy with it since I recently had someone who I'd told about it once a month ago ask me "how Thankbox was going" which means it's a memorable name.
Thankbox is pretty neat. I like your pricing model where you're charged only when it’s ready to be sent. I’d imagine that lessons the friction quite a bit.
Thanks - yeah that's the hope, though I'm planning to make it even easier than that. I want to see how far down the process of creation I can take people before having them register.
Finding a name at least for me has always been incredibly painful because of trademark issues and branding issues. We chose CRUU which stand for...
Create
React
UI
UX.
The reasons why are:
Nice 4 letter domain name. Good point on the brandability / trademark factor. So do you pronounce it like crew?
@agerard Yup, we pronounce it like "cruu." May I ask how you might pronounce it? I just want to be aware of any unintended name pronunciations for branding reasons?
I was saying crew only to notice your username would be crewcrew haha love it!
@agerard ha ha thanks!
My project is about Astronomy.
I did brainstorming on evocative names taking a look to domain availability.
Then I encountered the tool naminum.com and tried some keywords.
I chose cosmopad and I registered cosmopad.org
Hey love the name. And it fits your product well too.
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