3 Questions to Ask Yourself When Choosing a Startup Name

Choosing a name for your startup is a big decision. Once you’ve chosen a name, it’s hard to change both legally and in the minds of your users, so be sure to think it through at the start. Here are some good questions to ask yourself when considering a name based on our experiences with Onepager.

Can you say it without spelling it?

While we haven’t had much luck getting onepager.com yet, our current domain name is really easy to say and understand: onepagerapp.com. When you’re giving out your URL and email often on the phone, if your name isn’t easy to say, you run the risk of having emails bounced and just general confusion be created.

Does it confuse your target audience?

Our original URL was “onepa.gr”. We thought it was cool and short. When we were getting closer to launch and started showing our users our progress, people were confused about the name. This was such consistent feedback, we knew we had to make a change. The URL we settled on is longer, but it’s made our lives and our customers lives easier.

Don’t be afraid to go longer in order to gain clarity. 37signals have gotten a lot of miles out of domain names that include “it,” “HQ,” and “now.”  I’d agree that having a great product name and not necessarily the .com to go with it is not a bad situation to be in.

Does your name lock you in to anything?

One thing our name fails us on is it determines one aspect of our product: one page. We’ve often talked about expanding beyond one page, but we always come back to the name and the conversation usually dies there.

Vinicius Vacanti of YipIt actually built a script to help them find their name. The name they wound up with allowed them to totally restart the product several times and still maintain the same name. Having that flexibility is a really nice attribute.

Spend some time on your name because hopefully you’ll be saying it and supporting it for years to come.