Think Vitamin recently put out a post about how to name your company. Their top five characteristics for what makes a good name are:

1) It’s easy to remember

2) It’s easy to spell and requires no explanation

3) It describes your business category

4) It describes your benefit

5) It describes your difference

They also suggest sticking to a few constraints including:

1) It has to be one or two syllables long - no more

2) Each syllable starts with a strong consonant (B, C, D, G, K, P, Q, T)

3) It’s fun to say (”…that just rolls off the tongue”)

Their examples of good names are: PayPal, Best Buy, and QuickBooks.

So how does YoungEntrepreneur stack up?

YoungEntrepreneur is easy to remember, does not require an explanation, is pretty easy to spell (although some people do misspell entrepreneur), and describes the business category. I would also argue that it describes the difference (targets young people who are entrepreneurs) and to some extent the benefit of being involved.

In terms of the constraints, at five syllables it is over the two to three maximum and it does not start with a “strong consonant”. Is it fun to say? I’ll leave you to be the judge.

I would add a few more items when considering a company name such as

• Is the domain name available?
• Are my keywords in the company name?
• Do I have a chance of ranking for these keywords?

Any entrepreneur thinking of starting a new business has to factor in the online components of choosing a business name.

YoungEntrepreneur.com does, after all, rank #1 in Google for the important keyword “young entrepreneur” and also ranks on page 2 for the keyword “entrepreneur”. It would have been a lot harder to rank if the Toren brothers did not pick such a great domain name!

Here is how a few famous companies got their names:

• Microsoft is the combination of MICROcomputer with SOFTware. It was originally named Micro-soft and the - was later dropped.
• Yahoo! is an acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,” but the founders insist they selected the name because they liked the general definition of a yahoo: “rude, unsophisticated, uncouth.”
• Sony is the combination of sonus, the Latin word for sound, and “sonny”, a popular slang term used in American culture when the company was named.
• Hewlett-Packard was named when the founders filliped a coin to determine if the company should be called Packard-Hewlett or Hewlett-Packard.
• Apple was the favorite fruit of Steve Jobs. He threatened to name to company Apple if his colleagues did not come up with a better name by end of day. The name stuck.

How did you go about picking your company name?

Evan Carmichael
YoungEntrepreneur.com Blog Manager

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