How to Name your Company?

Think Vitamin recently put out a post about how to name your company. Their top five characteristics for what makes a good name are:

1) It's easy to remember

2) It's easy to spell and requires no explanation

3) It describes your business category

4) It describes your benefit

5) It describes your difference

They also suggest sticking to a few constraints including:

1) It has to be one or two syllables long – no more

2) Each syllable starts with a strong consonant (B, C, D, G, K, P, Q, T)

3) It's fun to say ("…that just rolls off the tongue")

Their examples of good names are: PayPal, Best Buy, and QuickBooks.

Here is how a few famous companies got their names:

• Microsoft is the combination of MICROcomputer with SOFTware. It was originally named Micro-soft and the – was later dropped.
• Yahoo! is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,” but the founders insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: “rude, unsophisticated, uncouth.”
• Sony is the combination of sonus, the Latin word for sound, and “sonny”, a popular slang term used in American culture when the company was named.
• Hewlett-Packard was named when the founders filliped a coin to determine if the company should be called Packard-Hewlett or Hewlett-Packard.
• Apple was the favorite fruit of Steve Jobs. He threatened to name to company Apple if his colleagues did not come up with a better name by end of day. The name stuck.

How did you go about picking your company name?

Referred to thinkvitamin.com