How important is a name?
I’ve been wracking my brain and spinning my wheels trying to come up with a name for my business and app. I’ve come up with a few decent ones but none ever feel “just right”. How important is an app name to the overall success of a business? Should I just go with something and move on? And maybe later I can rebrand when inspiration strikes?
Just a quick reminder that there was once someone that named their company "Apple".
I don't think it's quite true to say that a name doesn't matter, but it's almost certainly true that it matters less than whatever it's blocking you from doing. I'd definitely pick something and move on. It's not that hard to change later, and I think it's very possible you'll end up just sticking with whatever you pick.
I would put it this way. When you are starting out, a fantastic name doesn't make any positive difference, but a bad one will make a negative difference.
Avoid long/complex names and commonly used words. Go for a "brand name" that will make it easy to be found on search engines.
what about multiple words strung together? It makes the name a bit longer, but the concatenation makes it pretty unique.
It something that I do, but I usually use two short words.
You can do it even with fairly long wordslike Product Hunt, Fresh Desk, Quick Books and so on.
I wouldn't use more than two unless it is still very easy to remember.
I don't think the name is very important in the success of a business, but it does represent the process to synthesize the business idea into few words / just a name. I think it's a good exercise to practice the entrepreneur mindset.
Nice answers here. Agree with @tilikang here on the time part.
Lately, I have been using bustaname.com to get a simple name with .com domain with the 2-word combinations. This is to make it memorable when word-of-mouth. I do this just for a day. You can get surprised you can get good .com domain names. :)
If I want a short name, I just think of something good to hear and book it.
I'm a name geek, for me it matters a lot. I remember writing a front end framework where it took me more time to pick a name than write the framework itself lol.
That said, I think @tilikang put it beautifully - "it matters less than whatever it's blocking you from doing" - that is 100% correct.
3-4 characters, catchy & easy to memorise !!
That be it IMO
3-4 characters would be great! Pretty tough these days to find a domain available that's that short though :/
Make it as short as possible. Never more than 2 syllables.
Try to make it SEO-unique.
Check it's not offensive in other languages.
Don't worry about .com domain.
do you have any additional resources on why not having the .com isn't a big deal? I've always considered it to be pretty critical from an SEO point of view.
Nope, but I'm sure you can easily find tons of content that supports both opinions 🙂
I see it this way: if getting .com domain requires investing a lot of resources (time/money), I'd stop and think if I can get higher ROI investing these resources into other activities (that could bring sales faster compared to organic SEO).
IMHO, It's not. It just needs to be easy to remember, spell and not confused with others. What's tinder? What's twitter? What's yahoo? google? ebay? uber? facebook?
I know what you mean when you say 'just right', in fact in one of Indie Hackers podcasts, the founder of Key Values said she took a whole week to think of a name (highly recommend that episode btw!).
From experience, it's more important to make sure your name is unique enough that it actually comes up on Google when ppl search for your product. I made the mistake of making my name 'Too Many Tabs', and there was already a website related to this with a higher domain authority. Or just changing one letter helps! ex) epic high -> epik high
The idea of changing a letter or two definitely makes sense to be unique. However, I'd be concerned about the spell-ability of the name. ie, someone hears about your website, not seeing it written down googles "epic high", and being confused as to why they can't find it.
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