How to name products for start-ups
So you have a great idea for a company and its first product and you have thought of a great name for it – sound familiar? It should do, there are a lot of companies out there that go through this process and a large number of them will share the company and product name. Here are a few I thought of:
- SugarCRM
- Zimbra
Now the problem comes if you are looking to bring more products to market, do you use the company name in future products or think of new ones? SAP for example use the former (well a variation on it):
- mySAP ERP
- mySAP Supply Chain Management
- etc.
The benefit of this is that the product name encompasses the use of the product, the downside is that the naming is a bit boring and can become too long to easily fit on marketing literature.
A company like SAP, with its brand awareness can get away with this, but for us, we feel that it won’t work when trying to bring new products to market.
So what is the answer?
We have decided to go down the individual product name, similar to the way 37 Signals name their products. The big issue we have found with this is how to think up the product names.
If you have ever set up a company you will know how difficult it can be to think up a name – every great name you think of has either already been taken, or more likely the domain name has been registered, so trying to think of several new names can be a daunting task!
We are lucky, there are currently nine of us (10 if you include my dog Archie who comes into work) so the method we used below came up with a lot of potential names that didn’t sound to similar. If there are one or two of you, your mileage may vary with the method below:
The method we found most successful was to sit everyone around the white boards in the office and start coming up with names (no matter how silly), once we had filled a white board for each product we narrowed the selection down to the best three and put them to the vote. We now have names for five new products that we plan to launch over the coming months and will post details of them on this blog when they become available.
The first stage was a bit more involved than simply thinking up random names, we found after a bit of trial and error that drawing a really simple icon/picture of what the product does really helped with the process. So for example we put a picture of an office building and a chain up (to symbolise linking things together) for the CRM product/module and a whole load of names started flowing from there.
With a little help from everyone in the office, a thesaurus and a white board we now have a load of great product names! Check out the blog shortly to find out about the new products (and their names) and hopefully this might give you some inspiration when you next need to name a product.
A professional follow up
A couple of days after we thought up the product names we had a visit from a client who used to work for a large marketing company. She saw our white board (we had left one up in the office) and immediately knew what we had been doing.
Apparently this is exactly what they do in big marketing agencies and charge you a huge chunk of money for it.
So if you are a small company our top tip for the week is: buy a white board, get a few staff (or friends if you only have one or two of you – and offer them some beer once you have finished!) and draw some pictures and think up some names.
