You will rewrite your pitch deck a dozen times. You will pivot the product at least once, change your pricing more often than your sheets, and argue with your co-founder about the logo at two in the morning.
The name, though, tends to stay. It ends up on your incorporation papers, your domain, your trademark filing, your first invoice and the lanyard your tenth hire wears to their first conference.
So take it seriously. Not precious. Seriously.
Here is the short version. Naming a startup means generating a wide pool of candidates, testing them against your strategy and real people, then clearing the survivors for trademark, domain and language problems, so the name you choose is distinctive, ownable and easy to say.
The long version is the rest of this piece. I have watched enough founders get this wrong, and a few get it gloriously right, to have opinions.
Why does a startup name matter at all?
You have probably heard the opposite advice. Ship the product; nobody cares what it is called. There is truth in it. A great name will not save a bad business, and plenty of odd names have become household words.
But a bad name costs you in small, compounding ways. Every time a prospect mishears it on a call. Every time someone types it into a search bar and lands on a competitor. Every time an investor asks you to spell it.
And occasionally the cost is not small at all: a cease-and-desist letter from a company that registered something similar years before you were born.
Ease matters more than it should. Newly listed companies with easy-to-pronounce names and ticker codes have tended to outperform hard-to-pronounce ones shortly after listing. The effect fades, and nobody should pick stocks this way.
But look at the mechanism. When a name is easy to process, people feel more comfortable with what it stands for. Fluency feels like trust.
Start with a brief, not a brainstorm
Most founders open a group chat and start throwing out words. Resist that for one day.
Write a one-page naming brief first. What do you do, in one sentence? What will you do in five years if things go well? Who is your customer, where do they live and which languages do they speak?
Add two more questions. What do your closest competitors call themselves? And what feeling should the name carry: speed, warmth, precision, mischief?
Then set some hard constraints: maximum length, whether it must work as a verb, which markets it must survive in. And decide now whether the exact-match .com is essential, or a modifier will do.
The brief keeps you honest later, when your favourite name fails a test and you are tempted to make an exception. It also stops the loudest person in the room from winning by volume.
Know the kinds of names on the table
Trademark lawyers sort names along a spectrum. Learn it now, because it predicts how easy your name will be to own.
At one end sit descriptive names that simply say what you do. They are instantly clear and very hard to protect, because no one gets to monopolise ordinary words for their ordinary meaning.
Next come suggestive names, which hint at a quality and make the customer do a little work. Arbitrary names borrow a real word from an unrelated world. Invented names are coined from scratch, and they are the strongest of all legally, because nobody else could have been using them.
Asia’s best-known start-ups cover the full range. Gojek takes its name from ojek, the motorbike taxis found all over Indonesia: suggestive to anyone who knows the word, which happened to be its entire early market. Xiaomi means “millet” in Mandarin, an arbitrary choice that its founder, Lei Jun, later loaded with meaning about starting small.
Grab began life in Malaysia in 2012 as MyTeksi, became GrabTaxi, and in January 2016 dropped “Taxi” altogether, by which time it had grown well beyond cars. Notice that. A descriptive half of a name is often the first thing you outgrow.
At the invented end, George Eastman coined “Kodak” in the 1880s. He liked the hard letter K and wanted a short word that was easy to say and resembled nothing else. It still does.
Generate far more than you think you need
Aim for two hundred raw candidates. Yes, two hundred. Most will be terrible. That is how you find the four that are not.
Work in several directions at once:
- Real words from your product’s world, and from worlds that have nothing to do with it.
- Compounds that join two ideas, the way Facebook or YouTube did.
- Altered words, where you trim, extend or respell something familiar.
- Foreign words, carefully, with a native speaker in the room.
- Coined words, built from sounds and fragments that carry the right feel.
Zalando, the Berlin fashion retailer, built its name on the Spanish word zapatos, shoes, then reshaped it into something that sounded like nothing else. Lenovo is a blend: “Le” from Legend, its original English name, and novo, Latin for new.
Two tricks help. First, borrow vocabulary from a distant field (navigation, botany, music theory) and see what sticks.
Second, collect sounds before meanings.
The best naming agencies take sound seriously. When Research In Motion hired Lexicon Branding in 1998 to name a new email pager, the company’s own shortlist was full of options like EasyMail and ProMail. Lexicon steered it towards BlackBerry: friendly, unexpected and nothing larger rivals would choose. The bouncing, repeated B did some of the work.
Then let the list rest for a day or two. Distance is a surprisingly good editor.
How do you know if a startup name is good?
Cut your list to about fifteen, then run every survivor through the same filter. A good startup name should pass most of these:
- The phone test. Say it to someone over a bad line. Can they spell it without help? If you find yourself adding “that’s with a K”, you have a problem.
- The radio test. Could they find you after hearing the name once on a podcast?
- The pivot test. Does it still work if your product changes? Imagine your company in five years with a different flagship offer.
- The shortlist test. Put it next to your three nearest competitors. Does it stand apart, or blend in?
- The sentence test. Use it in a sentence a customer would say. “Have you tried ___?” Some names come alive; others sound like a pharmaceutical.
- The search test. Google it. If the results are flooded by a celebrity, a common word or a well-funded company, you are starting a fight you may not win.
Founders keep making the same three mistakes: names nobody can spell, names chosen because the .com was free, and names that described the first product and nothing after it. The rule that catches most of them is blunt. If you have to spell it out loud, keep looking.
Clear it before you fall in love
This is where most founder-led naming goes wrong. It is also the part people skip, because it is boring.
Picture the classic version. A founder checks that the domain is free, launches, and only later discovers a competitor with a similar name in the same market. The threatening letter arrives on cue.
The right response is almost always the same: rename now, while the name is worth almost nothing, rather than in three years, when it is worth a great deal. Better still, avoid the letter. Do the clearance in this order.
Trademark search first. In Singapore, the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (IPOS) lets you run a similar-mark search online before you file. Search the classes of goods and services you trade in now, and the ones you plan to.
A Singapore registration lasts ten years from filing and can be renewed. If you plan to expand, the Madrid System administered by WIPO lets you file one international application covering many member countries; Singapore joined in 2000.
For anything you are about to spend real money on, pay a trademark lawyer for a proper opinion. It costs less than one round of rebranded packaging.
Domain second. Do not let the domain drive the decision; let it confirm one. A modifier is fine at the start (“get”, “try”, “hq”), and plenty of companies have grown into the exact match later. Airbnb began life as AirBed & Breakfast and shortened its name in 2009. What matters more is that the domain you can get does not belong to someone confusingly similar.
Social handles third. Check every platform your customers use. Consistency across them matters more than having the shortest possible handle.
The Asian language check most founders forget
If you are building in Singapore, you are almost certainly building for more than one language. Your name will be spoken in English, Mandarin, Malay, Tamil, Bahasa Indonesia, Thai, Vietnamese and others. Test it in every market on your five-year map, with native speakers rather than translation apps.
Listen for three things. Does it mean something unfortunate? Does it sound like something unfortunate? Can people actually say it?
That last one catches more founders than you would think. Some consonant clusters trip up speakers of certain languages. Some vowel sounds simply do not exist in others.
Numbers carry meaning too. In Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese and Korean, the word for four sounds very like the word for death. Nokia skipped a 4000 series of phones, and OnePlus jumped from its 3T straight to the 5.
Thinking of a number in your name? Check it.
The flip side is opportunity. A Chinese name can be an asset in its own right rather than a transliteration. The tea-and-ice-cream chain Mixue trades as 蜜雪冰城, roughly “honey snow ice city”: part description, part little fantasy.
When Lenovo went global in 2003, it kept its Chinese name, 联想, meaning “association” or “connected thinking”, while choosing a new English one, because “Legend” was already registered by too many businesses abroad. Two names, two jobs.
The best local example of a name that travels is close to home. Carousell’s three founders started the company in Singapore in 2012. They took the name from the Kodak Carousel pitch in the TV series Mad Men and added an extra “l” to hint at selling.
Carousell’s first brand campaign: a Singapore-born name that travels and hints at selling.
Easy to say in every market it entered. Instantly suggestive. And ownable, because of one extra letter.
Africa offers another. Safaricom’s M-Pesa puts “M” for mobile in front of pesa, Swahili for money. Two syllables, both meaningful to its first customers in Kenya, and impossible to confuse with anything else.
Test with real people, but don’t run a poll
Show your final three to ten or twenty people who resemble your customers. Do not ask which they like. Ask what each name makes them think the company does, what it would cost, and whether they could find it again tomorrow. Then ask them to spell it.
You are not looking for a winner by vote. You are looking for red flags, misreadings and the one name people repeat back to you without being prompted.
Expect the best name to make someone uneasy at first. New names usually do. Familiar names feel safe because they are familiar, which is precisely why they rarely stand out.
A good name tends to grow on people within a few days. A weak one never does.
Commit, then make the name earn its keep
Once you have chosen, file the trademark, buy the domains, secure the handles and stop debating. Then put the name to work.
Tell the story of where it came from; people love origin stories, and Carousell’s is still retold.
Spell the name the same way everywhere. Decide whether it can be a verb, and lean in if it can. Give your product names a system so the company name does not have to carry everything.
And if, six months in, you realise the name is genuinely hurting you, change it early and cleanly. Grab’s founders renamed twice. Lenovo rebranded after nearly twenty years.
A name is an asset, and like any asset, you can trade up if you have to. It just costs more every year you wait.
Before you file
How long should a startup name be?
Shorter is generally better: aim for two or three syllables that are easy to spell after hearing them once. Length matters less than whether people can say, spell and remember it.
Should I choose my startup name based on domain availability?
No. Choose the name on strategy, distinctiveness and legal clearance first, then find a domain; an exact-match .com is useful but not essential, and many companies add a modifier or buy the exact match later.
How do I check if a startup name is trademarked in Singapore?
Run a similar-mark search on the IPOS Digital Hub across the classes of goods and services you trade in. Then have a trademark lawyer review your shortlist before you file.
Still staring at a whiteboard full of half-good names? Bring us the shortlist, and we will help you find the one that lasts.
