Daily we are surrounded by business names, some of them easy to be remembered or not.
When you decide to start a business one of the first things that you should consider is to choosing a name business name for your new business or startup.
Is it so important? For sure it is, it’s true that a good business name, won’t make your business or brake it apart, but if will get it right from the beginning it will save you lots of stress later one.
In many cases, if you change your mind about you business name, the legal paper needed to be done are pretty expensive, not having in mind the marketing cost that will involve the re-branding.
When you choosing a corporation name, consider the name carefully and make sure is the best decision on short and long term, because you will have it for a long time and you be the first impression of you potential clients business.
So there for are some characteristics of a great business name to have in mind when you will start/refine results of the brainstorming.
- Uniqueness
- Tells a story, about the purpose or about the values of you of the business;
- Describe the nature of your business, can even discribe a value, a market desire, or one of its problem;
- Distinguish you from you competitors;
- Easy to remember;
- Long-term game plane;
- Includes a legal element like limited, incorporated or corporation.
- Online availability
Check availability for your .com or at least .net web domain and if you plan to start locally, your local extension is good to take in consideration (.es for Spain, .it for Italy, .de for Germany, .fr for France and so on). Right away check the social networks for the username availability. The last thing that you want is to name your business name in a certain way, your social media profiles in a different way. That will make your harder to find keeping away your fans, clients or maybe future partners, because it will be hard to memorize different names/usernames for your business.
Find here 7 Online Tools that will help to check domain name and social media username availability for your desired business name.
Paths to follow when you start your brainstorming for your business name.
- Business name by desire;
Here are some examples:
– Forever Living
– No Pain No Gain Nutrition
– Die Hard Batteries
– Lean Cuisine
– Five Hours Energy
– SuperValu
Business name by symbols
- Name by problem
Another approach in your process to find the right business name, is to put in the name the main problem that you intend to solve through your products or services that you will offfer. That will help you later on your selling process. This is a good path if you will runn on a mature market or a well established industry.
You should do your homework before and find out from your future customers, what are the main problems with the “X” products or “Z” service and what are their frustrations related to intereactions with working team that offer them the product or service.
Here are some examples that respect this criteria:
– Never Late Electrical
– Never Lost Pet Tags
– Never Summer (snowboards designing and construction )
– Start Ya Bastard (spray to help start engines)
All the option that you have in are splited between:
- Choosing your own name as your business name
- Choosing a name that fit the business purpose
- Choosing an unique name that’s not in the dictionary.
- Choosing your own name as your business name
If you already choose to go ahead with your own that’s great as long your name is not a common name and it is easy to brand. But if that’s not the case and you want to choose different name for your business hear are some tips and trick that will help you to come along with some interesting names:
If you plan to start a business which will require scalability and you have in mind the option to sale it later on you should think of an unique business name, because even if you will leave from the company it will stick with its original name. Sometime can be good for you, if the company it will go well, but if not won’t be good for you.
- Choosing a name that fit the business purpose
- Choosing an unique name that’s not in the dictionary.
- Word Merging
Examples:
-Grupon
- Abraviation
Tools that will help in your search:
Wordnik.com
Thesaurus.com
Wikihymer.com
WordMerge.com
Adding an prefix and a suffix:
The last step that you have to make is to ask you local authority to do an search report to check is the your business name is available. In many cases if the name is available, you can reserve it for 90 days or so. Be sure that you complete your incorporation of you company this amount of time, in this way you will be sure that the business name stay yours.
Also, but not the least, a good name won’t change anything is the product or the service that you sell is pretty bad, don’t invest to much time and energy in the choosing name process and start worrying about the product.
