Tuesday
Opinion, Tips/AdviceNaming Your Domain Or Product
Any task that involves a creation from the point of view of linguistics is innately difficult. I recall reading somewhere that most literary giants specialized in bending the rules almost beyond recognition, without actually breaking them. Of course, that is debatable. I feel we all should agree that James Joyce broke as many as he could when he wrote “Ulysses” and “Finnegan’s Wake”, and the same applies to writers such as Jorge Luis Borges. The true charm of what they did is that Joyce, Woolf, Borges and Co. made violations seem natural and warranted whenever they resorted to them.
Not everybody has the scope of a writer, though. And that is a pity – if one had the imagination a writer has, naming a product or domain would be an easy task indeed. Coming up with a suitable name is twice as important if only because it is the first point of contact your customers will have with it, and (people being people) we often judge everything on first looks.
Yeats once wrote something which stands true almost a century afterwards: “A line will take us hours maybe;/ Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,/ Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.” The same applies to the naming of a product or startup. The one you eventually go for has to be imbued with a feel of spontaneity that must not cross the line into being something a little child thought up in five seconds. Again – that is something that only a writer can achieve within a reasonable timeframe.
Look at the list that was published recently on The Next Web. Here you have the ten points they included:
1- Collect a lot of related words
2- Get a dictionary and a needle
3- Don’t use a browser to check for domain names
4- Invent your own words
5- Get inspiration from others
6- Buy a second-hand name
7- Browse a supermarket, library or fishing supplies store
8- Translate to Spanish, Greek and Latin
9- Remove some or all vowels
10- Call your mother
Let me add one of my own. Forget about naming a product in a foreign language from scratch. Translating a name is a different matter; picking one from square one might lead you anywhere, and only when we move within the boundaries of our native language we can be aware we are treading treacherous ground.
Post Tags: Business, domain, name, naming, Product, Startups
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