Naming your startup: fun, friendly or just plain hipster?

If your startup name can’t potentially be used as an everyday verb or doesn’t end with “ly” you’ve probably missed the trend train. Geekatoo, LOOKK, Ordrin, Wowzer, and of course Lettuce, are a handful of startups featured on 500 Startups who have joined the ongoing Web 2.0 fab of quirky naming schemes for their businesses. But there’s a thin line between having a brand name that shows your startup’s fun, friendly and innovative and one that screams “hipster!”

The original old-timers
Google, Facebook, Apple all have names that make at least a bit of sense. Google is an adaptation of ‘googol‘, which is at least an actual word. Albeit not a popular one, but it makes sense. Facebook is well… a mashup of face and book which kinds of makes sense and sounds a lot better (and less serious) than The Book of Faces.

Apple is, of course, simply referring to the fruit and it’s suspected of having some sort of link to Steve Jobs’ memories of working on a farm in his childhood. Others have noted that the name was relevant because it comes before its biggest rival (at the time) Atari in the alphabet. Whatever the case may be, the point is that it makes sense.

These names were all still very quirky before they started becoming part of our daily vocabularies. Probably one of the exceptions, Yahoo! doesn’t make sense to the average person and screams for attention. Though it was apparently first called “David and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web”. Thank the internet that didn’t fly.

In the last few years startups have taken it on themselves as an almost prerequisite for fitting in with the rock ‘n roll tech startup scene. Be quirky or go home. Ironically, by trying to be fun, interesting and original, many startups’ names get added on to the lists of hundreds more attempting the same thing. And gets very annoying.

Fun, friendly… fail
David and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web or The Book of Faces don’t really roll off one’s tongue, does it? But something like Teamly, Spottly or Sqoot roll quite nicely. At first glance, they might make little if no sense to the average person, but at least they sound friendly and fun.

Then on the other hand, if you tell your parents you work at Soldsie or Social Spork they might have a little facepalm moment or shake their heads in bitter confusion. Many people (including your customers) can see the irony of trying to be original and hip. Instead of having a name that stands out, it easily becomes blurred with the other hundreds trying the same thing.

Is your startup potentially a verb?
One trend that is growing popular and becoming an ultimate goal using your company name as a verb. Ever since “Google it” became the satisfying round-off in an average debate, startups have decided to follow suit. And what better way to brand oneself than hijacking everyday vocabulary?

“We should Skype sometime, it’s been a while”, “Just Facebook him a message” or “We should like totally Instagram these chocolate fondants dude!”

Could brands such as Google ultimately become “generified” or synonymous with our general vocabulary and replace terms like “search” for instance?

Keeping it clean and simple
Naming you’re company is of course incredibly important for your marketing persona, namely your brand. That almost goes without saying but remember that popular “Drop the ‘The’. Just ‘Facebook'” scene in The Social Network. It is said to be one of the crucial things that added to its success. Just ‘Facebook’ is clean and simple.

Death to vowels and carefully considered typos
Take any noun or verb and drop a few vowels. Hell, why not drop all the vowels. Behold Flickr, Tumblr, Scribd and the little less known Zooomr, Spinnakr, Forrst — a few names you’ll soon come across if you haven’t already. Why would anyone do this? Well, besides showing how quirky you’re trying to be, in many cases these domain names or Twitter handles are easily available if not cheap.

Speaking of removing syllables, certain startups also love shortening their names and rounding it off with their site domain being “ly”, “it” or “ist” for instance. Think Bitly, Owly or Learnist. They all incorporate their domains in their company names because it shows they’re not boring.

Too often you’ll find the name of the startup is the company product rounded-off with “ly”. “My company helps you trade stocks, so I’ll call my startup Stock.ly.” If you’re not a geek then you’d probably never understand the “.ly” sites, whereas a simple “.com” domain has universal appeal.

The Next Web quotes founder and CEO Utsav Agarwal of the gamified music sharing app nwplying. “Nowplaying described the product in its simplest form, but it was too common a hashtag for us to possibly differentiate ourselves and create a brand around it — hence the term nwplyng, i.e. ‘nowplaying’ sans vowels,” he says. “Plus, the domain name nwplyng.com was easily available.”

He also noted however that although this might have stood out on social media, they sometimes have difficulty explaining it verbally or users often misspell it. Companies also misspell their own names on purpose. Reddit, Disqus and Netflix are prime examples and they work pretty damn well.

It’s hard to pin point what the recipe for your startup name should be (if there is one) but one thing is for certain — you definitely don’t want to be known as one of those a few years down the line.

Image: djpoblete09 via Flickr.