Tips from the Hub Incubator: Naming Your Company
Choose Your Business Name
Quick Guide
The name should be
- Short
- Memorable
- Suggestive or fanciful, but not descriptive
- Has unique spelling easily found with web search
Checking availability
- Name available according to LARA
- Domain available
- Not a registered trademark, or easily confused with one
- No other organization, product or service nearby that would be easily confused with yours
After selection
- Company registered (DBA, LLC, etc.)
- Domain(s) registered
- Start using publicly
- Decision to trademark
Follow-up
- Logo created
- Trademarked (optional)
- Business cards, flyers, signs, etc. created
Naming Your Company
Coming Up With Good Names
Coming up with a name for your company is often challenging. It requires equal parts inspiration and investigation, and often the first names don’t work out.
A good name needs to be unique but memorable, and distinct from existing organization or brand names. It also needs to be distinct from your product name. It can be suggestive or completely arbitrary, but should not be descriptive; leave descriptive names for your products or services.
For instance, Apple started out as Apple Computer Company, a fanciful (Apple?) but also suggestive (Computer) name. It soon changed to Apple Computer, Inc. However, the original products were also named "Apple," and the company later chose to rebrand its product lines to distinguish company from product, picking up the Macintosh product line. As computers ceased to be its primary focus, the name was again changed in 2007 to just Apple, Inc. More recently, Facebook the company started out with one product: Facebook. As it acquired additional products (Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.), the need to rebrand grew. Facebook the company is now Meta, in a rebranding that has cost an estimated $500 billion.
You’ll also need to find a closely-related domain name that is available, and that won’t lead to another website if customers make a minor error typing it in. While many new domain names have opened up, ".com" is still the suffix of choice for companies, particularly those doing business in the U.S., and easy-to-remember domains are getting hard to come by. This can influence your choice of both product and company name.
Trademarking
Many business owners are quick to trademark (sometimes confused with “copyrighting”) the name they come up with to prevent others from copying their brand. A trademark protects the name or its representation from copying across the United States, but it’s not always the right decision.
Ultimately, the decision of whether or not to trademark is an economic one, and it’s about balancing risk and reward. Is the price worth the (future) benefit?
Some Helpful Links
Google is your friend when weeding out names, but so is the United States Patent and Trademark Office's Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS).
How We Help
We've been there, we have legal contacts, and we'll work with you to come up with—and protect—a good trademark or service mark for your business. We'll help you with the creative process, the research, and the risk/reward analysis.