Bacon for Start-Up

How do you choose a name for your start-up? Where do you begin?

Most often the name reflects the offering; Digg, one assumes dig.com was long gone and way too expensive to buy so Kevin & Co just added an extra ‘g’ for good measure and thus was born a hip social news aggregator, ‘yeah man, I Digg it’.

It seems to help if your name can also be used as verb, ‘I Googled it’ and ‘I’ll Twitter you’, ‘I’m spending the next 3 minutes Yahooing’… hmm perhaps Yahoo’s lack of verbage explains it’s current predictament?

Web 2.0 is splattered with dropped vowels; Flickr being the champion of them all. YouTube sticks to the basics, with a name that sort of reflects the product but is grammatically wrong. One assumes, again, that YourTube.com was taken.

Mahalo took refuge in the Swahili/English dictionary, inventing a new rule, which is find an uncommon web language and tap into the translator what you would have liked to call your business in English and hey presto, you have a name that will help you scale in Africa.

Erick Shonfeld over at Techcrunch has an interesting piece on getting it wrong:

‘The name SimulScribe totally sucks for our business. People have a real challenge remembering the name and they cannot spell it, which is a real problem considering that new customers need to type in our web address to sign up. When your company offers a consumer product that relies on viral marketing, a difficult name is a really bad thing. In fact, I’m constantly amazed at how well we have been able to do with such a shitty name.’

So there’s a free EasyJet bacon bap for anyone who can think of a domain name that is free and catchy for a start-up you know nothing about, in fact if the name you suggest reflects the start-up you get 2 x bacon baps (flight not included, offer only available on a London - Barcelona flight that I’m on).

UPDATE: Going back through this article and adding the links in I discovered dig.com links to Disney and not a site about soil n’spades, as one would assume. YourTube.com is a spam site for Hot Babes which I had assumed though I was hoping for a little more naked gratuity.

Posted in Start-Up | No Comments »