Choosing A Name
You would be surprised how hard it is to come up with a name for your business. It reminds me of a commercial I once saw where this guy won a huge lottery and bought his own island, and he joked that the hardest part was thinking of a name.
A lot of people think you have to pick something descriptive of what you do. But do you? Look at how many companies have names that are completely unrelated to what they do, like Apple, for example. Now of course, everyone associates Apple with computers, but that’s because of branding and marketing. Sometimes a name is just the last name of the people who started the company. Sometimes it’s just a made up word, like Twitter. What is a twitter, anyway?
Maybe it’s something that sounds specific but is actually generic, like “Applied Systems.” Ohh, that sounds cool. But wait… what kind of systems and how are they applied?
Then you need to make sure you can get the domain name of whatever name you choose. When people look for your company, they’re instinctively going to type your company name with a dot com at the end of it and assume that’s your website. Is it? This can be a huge hurdle, since as many people will tell you, “all the good domain names are taken!” So you either need to find something weird and unused, or buy the domain name of your company from some “domaineer” (read: cyber squatter) who has been holding onto it for years and wants an arm and a leg.
And you need a logo to help with marketing and branding. It can be fancy or it can be simple, it just has to be memorable.
It sounds simple, right? How hard can thinking of a name be? Ha, wait until you try it.
