Namestorming

Lately I've been trying to help my boyfriend come up with a name for the startup company he and a few of his family members are involved in. It's coming to the point where "the project" just isn't cutting it anymore, and they want to make it seem a little more tangible with an actual name. Okay, I'm a PR person, no big deal, right? I've come up with campaign names and concepts, team names and event names so it should just take a little brainstorming. Wow-- it is an entirely different story when you dive into something that is outside of your comfort zone, and for me computer hardware and programming is exactly that. I definitely had to be creative and get a little help from web articles and a thesaurus. Some articles I found really helpful were: How to Pick a Company Name: Tips From the Trenches and 10 Company Name Types on TechCrunch: Pros and Cons. From this I decided the best way to go about it would be to first generate a list of words. Next I took longer words and broke them into two pieces so I could see if two split words would go together, or if part of one word would fit with another whole word. This way I could include multiple concepts the group wanted in the name while also creating unique names that are not already in use. This was a lengthy process and out of a fairly long list I found through Google searching that about 75 percent were already in use. As frustrating as this was it forced me to get more creative and more specific to this group's ideas and product. After coming up with another lengthy list I weeded out the ones I wasn't happy with, pulled the couple that stuck out to me, and added a few I wasn't sure about to share with the group. The next step is to put all of our brainstorms together, cut it down to a manageable number of names, and then create a survey to get thoughts from potential clients. This will help ensure that the name of the company will be as effective and client-friendly as the product it represents.

I'm reading: Namestorming