Revealed the brand... "Archium"

It took we quite a while to decide on the name for this product. I really love wordoids - brand names that are easily pronounced because they look like real words but in fact are made-up words. Instagram is a great example - not a real word, but there's no question how to say it (not for English speakers, anyway).

I spent hours using the fantastic tool wordoid.com. It generates wordoids for you, while offering heaps of control over what it's generating, AND shows you whether domain names are available for the generated words. Awesome!

The problems we'll be solving at Archium are related to software architecture, so I spent quite a while hunting for wordoids that related to architecture. Funnily enough, wordoid.com didn't suggest archium, but while I was reviewing all the other things it was spitting out, it popped into my head and the lightbulbs went off. I went googling for it and I found two things:

It's an actual word. It means 'archive' in latin, which may end up having some relevance to the product.
There's very little use of it on the internet. Certainly it wasn't a word that was already in use by a big brand. It's a word we can own online very quickly (which is a huge advantage of a wordoid as opposed to a common real word like Square).

A quick search of trademark databases in Australia and the U.S. turned up very little, and nothing in the related field. So it was set.

I grabbed the .io domain that was available, but other than that I sat on the name for a while, as I had no reason to incorporate or advertise, so I just kept it to myself. I didn't tell ANYONE outside my family. I trust my friends not to go stealing my product name, but you know... "loose lips sink ships".

Then one night I had an idea for a logo. I banged it out in Keynote fairly quickly, then showed my wife, expecting to get a "that's pretty daggy" response and subsequently throw it away and pay a designer.

Instead, she said, "Did you make that? It's really good!"

"Are you sure?" I said. "It's the first thing I thought of."

"It's good enough. Use it."

And that's a phrase I need to get used to using more as a founder: "It's good enough."

With the name and logo done, I felt it was time to get the ducks in a row. I incorporated a company, registered the trading name, submitted the name and the logo as trademarks, and claimed the org name on GitHub and LinkedIn. Unfortunately, the .com domain and the Twitter handle were already taken - I'll figure out what to do about that in the future.

With all that set, I thought it made sense to put something up for a website in case people go looking for it. At the moment, it's just a LaunchRock site on the cheapest plan. I'm not planning to drive traffic to it any time soon as most of my customer development will be happening offline for a while.

That's it so far. You can see the logo on http://archium.io/ - I'd love to know what you think! Sign up for updates there if you want to know more, or follow me on twitter at https://twitter.com/evolvable

P.S. It's pronounced AR-key-ehm, just like architecture