Does Your Business Name Really Matter?
October 15th, 2010 | Small Business | No Comments »
Like all new businesses, when we were coming up with a name for our product, we struggled a bit. We had to balance the availability of a “.com” domain, making sure the name is protect-able from a trademark perspective, and that the name would actually convey a sense of what we do. This may be wrong, but we wanted to focus on a “.com” domain, and one that spelled out our product name (not “who you gonna trust.com”).
We looked for available domains (because we didn’t want to spend a lot of money on a domain name), and then applied the next level of filter — conveying a sense of what we do. We looked at a lot of “trust” type names, but none really seemed to work. Then we focused on “score” and “scoring”. There were many more options.
Finally we looked at the list in terms of what is the best from a trademark perspective. If the name is too literal, it can’t be protected (e.g. www.transparencyseal.com”). It has to be a bit unrelated (e.g. apple computers).
There is no real surprise if you’re reading this blog that we wound up with KikScore. But did all this brain damage over a name actually matter? I mean, most of our traffic comes from other sources — like our partners, twitter or paid search clicks. In other words, it feels like we could have named the product anything we wanted to and the traffic would come. But is that really the case? Maybe becaue of our name, people feel like partnering with us? Maybe we wouldn’t have any traffic from Twitter if our name was “BreadScore” (though that just gave me a new business idea)?
What are your thoughts? Does a name, in the beginning, really matter?
