I am huge on meanings, symbolism or cleverness in names. So in coming up with the name for my startup I wanted to be clever with it. My placeholder name was ShareCo, which stood for Sustainable HAbits and REsources COmmunity, as the product is facilitating sharing of things. But I just wasn't happy with it.
I then came up with Once, with the tagline "used by you". The idea is that sometimes we just use things once, and they end up gathering dust.
Where I tried to make it clever is the logo. The "n" in the logo is in superscript (n = number), and the "O" is a window to insert "things". So the n provokes the question, "how many times did you use (thing)".
Then came the domain name. I made it https://once.eco. If you look at the logo with the small n, eco looks like once in reverse, without the n (better explained visually). And this speaks to my startup idea: reversing junk culture, so that things we might only use once (or twice), become eco-sustainable and friendly when we start sharing them.
The tagline "used by you" also has double meaning. "Once used by you" speaks to the owner of the thing, and "used by you" speaks to the person borrowing the thing.
I don't think anyone really cares for all that, but that's how I came up with the name :)
We had a rough 3 step approach:
- Used GPT-4 to give us an initial list of 100 names which were 4-5 letters long and ended with O and U. Our other two criteria was that it had to be simple, and should be easy to spell (and hard to misspell).
- Once we had an initial list, we shortlisted the 10 that we liked the most. For each of the 10, we checked its domain availability, whether there were any existing trademarks, and how competitive the SEO namespace was.
- This eliminated about 8 out of the 10. Then, out of the remaining 2, we picked the one which resonated more with us.
Well this was tough yea. 😮💨 It changed quite a few times. It went from bix, to Bixchat to now Zapmail.
We searched around for some names, and we knew we liked the letter Z. At the time, the main thing we could do from the product was mail. So we had a poll with a few names, took a vote from the team, and here we are with Zapmail.
@marksachintha To be honest I have only used it to brain storm names for some opensource projects. But I feel it generates a lot of ideas etc. like Steve Jobs said: Creativity is just connecting things ✨
@marksachintha It's a great question!
Tbh, I do not remember clearly how it's come to my mind, but I wanted something playful and unique and we came up with l00kin, where zeros replaced with the eyes emoji and the last letter is missing as it sounds in a speech. Lately, we figure out that eyes amplify the name 😇
Coming up with the name of a startup can be a creative and fun process, but also a challenging one.
You want a name that reflects your vision, values, and uniqueness, but also appeals to your target audience and stands out from the competition.
@deluar_001 Yes, and that's what makes it most challenging because you always feel like one of those is missing
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@arbaazio I named with the combination of three "vision, values, and uniqueness" one of my startup name is SHAHEB a men fashion shop in Bangladesh.
I pick this name from an arabic word 'Shab/Shabab' that's means 'Youth' and in Bangladesh the words meaning of 'SHAHEB' is a very honorable, respectful and good looking man.
As my vision is working with youths and this name is very unique and have values in Bangladesh so I named it :)
Funny enough, I developed a free tool that helps with exactly that 😆
I always struggled to find cool names for my projects. Tools like Namelix are fun, but they feel more like a gallery of names that you can buy.
So, I first used ChatGPT to generate names for me, and then thought, well, I could build a small tool out of it to make the experience nicer and instantly also check the domain availability. This was quite tedious with ChatGPT, because I had to copy and paste the names into a domain checker.
You can find it on my profile, launched today 🥳, or here: https://www.producthunt.com/post...
@derzerstampfer pretty cool - I tired it! Funny how I like and don't like the domain availability search - it finds good names but also shows they're unavailable. lol
But good stuff Pau! God bless you!
My very first business is the one I tried to be creative with the name.
The rest were usually very straightforward to what problem they were solving (or to how they solve it)
@marksachintha having a creative name did not really make much difference on the bottom line.
I think this can make a lot of sense for B2C businesses but all the companies I launched/participated in were B2B.
I lately made an investment in a company that was B2C which carried a creative name, but that was decided before I joined :-)
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