Brand names are extremely important: 77% of marketers say that proper branding is critical to growth.
Bad names can be confusing, hard to remember, hard to spell, and hard for your audience to tell their friends about. A bad name makes it harder to build a business -- no matter how much you might personally love it.
But how can you tell the difference between a good name and a bad one?
By following some specific guidelines based on human psychology and consumer behavior... and then scientifically testing your assumptions.
Investors and founders like Paul Graham, Jason Calacanis and Rand Fishkin have talked about the importance of startup names before, but most of the info is pretty basic and just helps you narrow down the ideas you already have.
There’s very little information about the best ways to brainstorm new name ideas, and there’s almost no information whatsoever about validating those ideas with decent numbers of real people (i.e. not just asking friends and family).
Those steps are important because if you choose a name that people:
a) forget easily
b) have trouble spelling, or
c) are confused by
It can make it much, much harder to gain traction.
Even when founders put a lot of thought into what to name their businesses, if they aren’t careful they can still make huge, expensive mistakes. (Recent examples: ConvertKit changing their name to Seva and then back again, or Teachable having to rebrand from Fedora.)
So I did a shitload of research on the best way to pick a name and URL for a startup (or product, or blog).
I collected best practices based on advice from investors and founders, marketing data, and behavioral psychology, and organized it all in one place as a 4-step blog post (which you can see right here).
It covers everything from the most important success factors to follow, to the best ways to brainstorm, to how to A/B test and validate your ideas.
It’s too long to fit into a single reddit post but here’s a summary:
1. Understand what makes a good brand name
Great brand names:
Another thing: the name you choose also doesn’t have to perfectly fit your niche either, as long as it doesn’t clearly imply something different.
2. Use the right tools to brainstorm ideas
Tip: research shows that the early evening is the best time for brainstorming because you’re less likely to filter yourself at that time.
This part covers the best methods for brainstorming, which can save you a hell of a lot of time while producing excellent ideas.
Brainstorming is most effective when you don't try to filter or censor yourself, which means you end up with some good ideas... as well as a lot of bad ones. This step helps you quickly get rid of all the bad ideas from step 2. It goes into much more detail about the factors mentioned in section 1, plus adds more like:
All of the above may be enough for you to pick a great name, and if you want to do this as quickly as possible you can stop here. But if you want to be extra sure about it, you need to test your best 2-3 ideas. This section will show you two different tests you can use:
The first test is a survey that goes beyond just asking for opinions; it uses some interesting tricks to actually test for important factors like ease of spelling and memorability. It includes these sections:
Section #1: Hearability Test
This section will tell you how easy it is to hear, understand, and spell your brand name ideas.
Section #2: Word Associations
This section will let you know what your website name ideas make people think of. If one of your URLs makes people think of something dirty, this is how you’ll find out.
Section #3: “Palate Cleanser” Distraction
The most important point of this section is to give people something else to focus on for a minute to see if they’ll forget your brand names. (Because in the next section, we’ll test how memorable the names are.)
In addition, the questions in this section can also help you find out a little more about the people taking your survey.
Section #4: Memorability Test
Remember, you want your name to be as memorable as possible. So now that we’ve distracted your survey takers for a bit, it’s time to find out if they still remember your website name ideas.
Section #5: Emotional Associations
We already asked what people think about your name ideas. Now it’s time to ask how they make them feel.
Believe it or not, you can get much different responses to that simple difference in phrasing.
Section #6: Preference and Trustworthiness
Time to ask, point-blank, which of your site name ideas people prefer and trust most.
The second test takes a more quantitative approach. It uses a free tool called SERPTurkey to mimic a Google search results page to see which of your name ideas people will actually click on more.
If you don’t already have an audience to push these tests to, this section also shows how to get hundreds (or thousands) of people to take them for pennies using Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Important note before you test: be sure to register any domains (buy the URLs) for the names you’re strongly considering. I recommend using Google Domains or Namecheap for this, both of which have limited refund policies for the URLs you don’t want to keep.
If you don’t register your domain ideas, one of your test respondents will register the domain out from under you. Also consider grabbing any likely misspellings, and the major social media profiles.
For a lot more details, including illustrations, take a look at the full guide here.
Bad names can be confusing, hard to remember, hard to spell, and hard for your audience to tell their friends about. A bad name makes it harder to build a business -- no matter how much you might personally love it.
But how can you tell the difference between a good name and a bad one?
By following some specific guidelines based on human psychology and consumer behavior... and then scientifically testing your assumptions.
Investors and founders like Paul Graham, Jason Calacanis and Rand Fishkin have talked about the importance of startup names before, but most of the info is pretty basic and just helps you narrow down the ideas you already have.
There’s very little information about the best ways to brainstorm new name ideas, and there’s almost no information whatsoever about validating those ideas with decent numbers of real people (i.e. not just asking friends and family).
Those steps are important because if you choose a name that people:
a) forget easily
b) have trouble spelling, or
c) are confused by
It can make it much, much harder to gain traction.
Even when founders put a lot of thought into what to name their businesses, if they aren’t careful they can still make huge, expensive mistakes. (Recent examples: ConvertKit changing their name to Seva and then back again, or Teachable having to rebrand from Fedora.)
So I did a shitload of research on the best way to pick a name and URL for a startup (or product, or blog).
I collected best practices based on advice from investors and founders, marketing data, and behavioral psychology, and organized it all in one place as a 4-step blog post (which you can see right here).
It covers everything from the most important success factors to follow, to the best ways to brainstorm, to how to A/B test and validate your ideas.
It’s too long to fit into a single reddit post but here’s a summary:
1. Understand what makes a good brand name
Great brand names:
- Are memorable.
- Don’t get confused with something else.
- Are easy to pronounce and spell.
- Aren’t too long.
- Are available.
Another thing: the name you choose also doesn’t have to perfectly fit your niche either, as long as it doesn’t clearly imply something different.
2. Use the right tools to brainstorm ideas
Tip: research shows that the early evening is the best time for brainstorming because you’re less likely to filter yourself at that time.
This part covers the best methods for brainstorming, which can save you a hell of a lot of time while producing excellent ideas.
- Google’s “related searches” feature
- Thesaurus.com & relatedwords.org
- The best rhyming dictionaries
- A few helpful word lists
- Addition, subtraction & substitution of letters
- The 3 best domain name generators/search tools
- The problem with startup name generators
Brainstorming is most effective when you don't try to filter or censor yourself, which means you end up with some good ideas... as well as a lot of bad ones. This step helps you quickly get rid of all the bad ideas from step 2. It goes into much more detail about the factors mentioned in section 1, plus adds more like:
- Sounds like a brand name, not a generic description
- Not already taken (name, trademark, URL, socials)
- As short as possible
- Fits your target audience and aspirations
- Also: how important is getting the ".com" URL?
All of the above may be enough for you to pick a great name, and if you want to do this as quickly as possible you can stop here. But if you want to be extra sure about it, you need to test your best 2-3 ideas. This section will show you two different tests you can use:
The first test is a survey that goes beyond just asking for opinions; it uses some interesting tricks to actually test for important factors like ease of spelling and memorability. It includes these sections:
Section #1: Hearability Test
This section will tell you how easy it is to hear, understand, and spell your brand name ideas.
Section #2: Word Associations
This section will let you know what your website name ideas make people think of. If one of your URLs makes people think of something dirty, this is how you’ll find out.
Section #3: “Palate Cleanser” Distraction
The most important point of this section is to give people something else to focus on for a minute to see if they’ll forget your brand names. (Because in the next section, we’ll test how memorable the names are.)
In addition, the questions in this section can also help you find out a little more about the people taking your survey.
Section #4: Memorability Test
Remember, you want your name to be as memorable as possible. So now that we’ve distracted your survey takers for a bit, it’s time to find out if they still remember your website name ideas.
Section #5: Emotional Associations
We already asked what people think about your name ideas. Now it’s time to ask how they make them feel.
Believe it or not, you can get much different responses to that simple difference in phrasing.
Section #6: Preference and Trustworthiness
Time to ask, point-blank, which of your site name ideas people prefer and trust most.
The second test takes a more quantitative approach. It uses a free tool called SERPTurkey to mimic a Google search results page to see which of your name ideas people will actually click on more.
If you don’t already have an audience to push these tests to, this section also shows how to get hundreds (or thousands) of people to take them for pennies using Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Important note before you test: be sure to register any domains (buy the URLs) for the names you’re strongly considering. I recommend using Google Domains or Namecheap for this, both of which have limited refund policies for the URLs you don’t want to keep.
If you don’t register your domain ideas, one of your test respondents will register the domain out from under you. Also consider grabbing any likely misspellings, and the major social media profiles.
For a lot more details, including illustrations, take a look at the full guide here.
thanks!