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Is the name of a company important? should I spend a lot of time coming up with a name?
Name is important. Your name is important to you, and your company name is important to your company.
A name should be hard to forget and get confused. That is key. Being simple and familiar helps.
A good name ideally allows some total stranger to "guess" what your site or company or product does. For example, Alligator as a name of wrench.
Fake it till you make it. Use a name, and overtime it will become yours. (Example: Apple, Bubble)
Name eventually becomes your brand, which is relevant to the vision of your company.
At the beginning, don't worry too much about the name. Get the idea validated and make sure you have customers. The key is the BUSINESS CONCEPT, team and value.
A video resource for naming companies:
Keep in mind, when you work on your thing for long enough time, your name is also your brand. Brand to a company is like "MJ" is to a person. It is a badge of instant recognition. The remembering of that name is worth gold.
Suggestions for naming:
Come up with many many names;
For each, check the youtube, google, and other search to see if it already taken. Watch for CPC placement and organic listings. If someone is using it, you should not use it because it can confuse your users.
Search web domain registry to see if it is available. If .com is available, take it.
For a CLEAN name, (without google, search engine, social network nicknames, and domain registry issues), you can register a company name if you like. (Your company name can be Ken's Kitchen and your domain name can be apple.com, it has no relations! Your company name and your domain name has no relations.)
Then start register the name and related ones on social network to lock them down.
USE YOUR NAME! a name that is used is yours!! eventually.
Any name, as long as you establish a trust benefit relation with your desired audience, is a brand. Branding is like branding - it just takes repeats and time.
Some case studies for namings:
A famous example is estee lauder. Whose name is Lauter, not lauder. For some reason, if the company is Lauter the company would fail completely.
A good name has repeats. Del Rey. Ton John. Newton John, DArth Vader, Coca-cola, Alibaba. There is no rules, just feeling. it is more like art in my opinion.
Good name starts with "ST". St is power name in branding. Star Wars, Starbucks, Storm Trooper, Skywalker, Stalon, Stanford, Skype, Morgan Stanley. The three Hanks brothers, Jim, Larry and Tom, only Tom made it to big stage.
Let me show you an example:
In today's internet age, names are easy to "own". For example, you can have a product like "Alligator wrench" and when you use it often enough, people typing in Alligator in a search box would be suggested in "Alligator wrench".
But be careful, if you are "lesser known", even if you type the exact word in Amazon or google ("Alligator Wrench") the top listing won't be you, it will be some alligator named Ranch, or another popular Wrench brand. Search engines GUESS what people want to search, it does not just give you the result based on the word you type.
It is perfectly OK to name your product Alligator Wrench, and use it and gradually let Google know that when people type in "Alligator" they probably mean to find the WORLD FAMOUS Alligator Wrench, not the animal in Florida. Then your company could be legally called "Minnesota Alligator Tool Company", and your trade mark could be "Alligator*Wrench" with a star in the middle, and your social network accounts could be nicknamed "Wrench_the_alligator" or "AlliWrench". And so on. Your web address could be "AlligatorWrench.com" or thewrenchworks.com. It does not matter that much at this point, but you don't want the web address to be the_alligator-wrench.co just because the domain name is "available".
Name is well, and beat every others to truly own it. Don't try to find a bad name that no one is using.
Does the name matter? good marketing and sales people know that names are important. A famous example is in the movie "the founder", when Ray Croc (founder of McDonalds) was asked by the McDonalds' brothers - "why you don't just steal from us"? Ray Croc said, from day one, I like your name. MCDONALDS. It sounds wholesome, American, and someone who would not be bullied".