How did you come up with the name for your startup?

Forem is the name of our company behind DEV — we haven't always had the cleanest approach to making this clear, or even making the name of DEV clear (do you say dev dot too?)

But Forem is still a great name in and of itself, and of course it's a play on the generic "forum" term, but the idea is that Forem stands for For Empowering Community

As an iPaaS we thought about names that reflected us being the last visible layer a developer needs to interact with. This lead us towards thinking about the light spectrum, and we chose “Violet” as our name since it’s the last color you see at one end of the spectrum. It also just so happened that the “violet.io” domain had just gone up for sale that same week which made it feel like it was meant to be.

I've had the opportunity to work on several brands over the years, how the brand names were conceived vary:

• Conducting a full-scale brand study ($$$)
• Picking a domain name from a list that a VC was squatting on
• 420-fueled brainstorming sessions (my favorite method)
• Adopting the brand name from a company we acquired
• DomainsGPT

Years ago (high school, I think), I thought up the name "Hyperbolic Systems" for a company. Basically as a cool name that would appeal to a high schooler. I few years later, when I was out of school, but at the county courthouse for jury duty, I filled out the paper work to register that as a company (not a corporation).

Years pass. I take jobs at various companies as a full-time employee, so no need to actually use the Hyperbolic System company. One day, in the mid 90s, when the internet was still new (and registering a domain cost $100!), I check on the domain name. "Hyperbolic.com/.org/.net" were all already taken (and one by a company that gave it's name as "Hyperbolic Systems").

Later the phrase "Novel Theory" just came to me as a cool expression, and by now, registering domains had gotten cheap, so I grabbed up "NovelTheory.com". A bit later, I go thru the same process with "Honest Illusion". Eventually, I put my resume & stuff like that on NovelTheory.com, and my blog of HonestIllusion.com

Eventually, I take a job (then a few more) as a consultant, but since I didn't have a proper LLC, I had to go thru a W-2, which means I was actually an employee of the recuiter firm which found me the job, and the whole deal was messy. So, I figured I should actually create a LLC for myself (btw, mycorporation.com is GREAT for that!), and since NovelTheory.com already had my business stuff on it, I registered "Novel Theory LLC" (and on my next consulting job I was able to bill on a 1099 and get paid much more!)

I like to think of how to leverage the name as either a quick way to describe the underlying service or as a way to wriggle further into the mind of a prospective client _after _ they learn of the service.

I'm a solo entrepreneur so I realized that my brand was myself and that's it.
Therefore my company's name is jmfayard.dev

Im a solo entrepreneur. It took me a few months to come up with my company name but I was still building the MVP so I didn’t rush into choosing a name right away. I created my own little system to generate ideas for different names. It took a few tries to get one that satisfied all of my different criteria but I eventually got one that I constantly get compliments on when I tell it to people.

Criteria:

1. Make sure people like the name. Ask friends, family, or anyone else in your life whose opinion you value. They don’t need to be industry experts or anything, but avoid asking people who are too worried about hurting your feelings and won’t tell you if they don’t like the name.
2. Make sure your desired website domain hasn’t already been taken by someone else. I personally wanted a “.com” domain but that was just a personal choice. Also, there are companies like GoDaddy that buy up tons of domain names that sound good and re-sell them for like $5,000-10,000 as opposed to the default price (which was like $12 back when I did it on Google Domains). This is a huge waste of money for a pre-revenue startup that needs cash so just keep the name and change the website extension from “.com” to something else like “.net”, “.dev”, or “.ai” and you should be able to get a cheaper one. Having a “.com” extension might be ideal, but it won’t actually impact your company’s performance and there are more important things to spend money on. You can always buy the “.com” extension later on once you’re actually making money if it really matters that much to you.
3. Check the web and Apple/Android app stores to make sure there isn’t already another app/company with the same name.
4. The company name should reflect/imply something positive about your company/product. For example, one of the first ever antidepressants is named “Effexor”. That name’s been grandfathered in but a new drug could not get a name like that today because the name “Effexor” is supposed to subconsciously make your brain think it’s going to be “effective”. The reason the FDA has cracked down on this is because it actually works to some degree. (Shoutout to my doctor for this one). One example of a software company with a name like this is QuickBooks. There’s a reason they didn’t name it “SlowBooks”.
5. Making up a one-word name will make your company easier to find in search engines and save you money on advertising long-term. The made-up word should be the result of combining 2 relevant words. I call this the “Bill Gates Method”. PCs used to be called “microcomputers”. “Micro”-“soft” creates SOFTware for MICROcomputers. Another example is “Net”-“Flix”. A slang term for “watching a movie” is “catching a FLICK” and “Net” is slang for “InterNET”.
6. Do some research and make sure another company doesn’t already own the rights to this name. Start by playing around with some of these tools uspto.gov/patents/search . For most search tools and search engines, putting quotations around your search term tells the program to filter for only exact matches (i.e. search for “QuickBooks” instead of QuickBooks). This is so it doesn’t return results such as “Here is a list of 10 quick books to read”.

I eventually came up with a name that my friends/family all thought was great after maybe 10-15 different attempts.