Ask HN: how do you name your business/product?

1 points by arkitaip ↗ HN
I'm curious to know how you guys name your products and businesses. Do you follow any particular process? Get help from naming companies? Ever created a name that turned out to be terrible?

3 comments

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We currently rebranded everything from DropClock.com to eFreeme.com. The phonetics of the name of DropClock weren't that good and in addition most people confused it with DropBox. eFreeme.com on the other hand was easily understandable when saying it the first time. With that being said, we are currently selling DropClock.com domain in addition to 6000 stickers that are tailored to some sort of Buy/Sell website. We have over 5K invested in this brand and to just push it aside was a bit of a sore spot for me, but hoping that it's worth it in the long run.

My previous company was named UsedVancouver.com, unfortunately we needed to register every city in the world, and we did, so we ended up managing about 1200 domains.... OUCH. So if you have a product that is going to scale to individual cities make sure you make it generic enough to just "subdomain" it like craigslist does.

A short and catchy domain is what you want. However it's difficult to find those, but they are out there! And more importantly it's good to find a domain search engine that gives you lots of options. Good luck!

Did you just brainstorm the name efreeme or did you use another approach?
I found a domain search engine (that doesn't exist anymore) that let me filter domains. I wanted a 6 letter domain or shorter that was meaningful. There weren't that many options so I only had a handful to choose from. I got dixxo.com and dixxxo.com as well for $9/each. I also have hublify.com and dropclock.com.

I didn't really know what product I was building but I had those domains. It wasn't until last month were I pulled efreeme.com out and started using it... The point is get a good domain, and you'll never know when it might come up that you could use it.