Journal
The working title that stayed
Most companies start out with a name nobody really chose. A surprising number of them keep it.
It’s a Tuesday afternoon. The team needs something to call the repository, someone suggests a name, the domain costs next to nothing and everyone’s happy enough. “We’ll come up with something proper before launch.”
Nobody is doing anything wrong here. We’ve just seen a lot of expensive renames that started exactly like this.
Who hears what
To the founder it’s a placeholder, something to sort out later. The first customer will take it as a promise. An investor hears it once, somewhere in a long week of pitches, and either remembers it or doesn’t.
The chain
What happens to a placeholder when nobody replaces it.
01
Someone picks a name
It takes about a minute, and that’s fine. You have to call it something.
02Break point
It gets built in
The repository, the domain, everyone’s email address, then the first investor deck. Every new file pushes it in a bit deeper.
03
Everyone gets used to it
After six months nobody really hears it any more, and after a while that passes for liking it.
04
It gets a logo
Someone makes one over a weekend for the deck. Now the name has a face, and that’s much harder to let go of.
05
Customers meet it
People mishear it or spell it three ways, and some mix you up with a company in another field. Someone else owns the search results.
06
The trademark search comes back
Somebody finally checks and finds an older company with the same name, in a market you were planning to enter.
07
You rename after all
Only now it’s after launch. You need a new domain and a new identity. Someone writes a very careful announcement and your early customers wonder if you’ve been bought.
Catch it early
The cheap moment is link two, before anything gets built on top of the name. Check who already owns it. Say it out loud in every market you want to be in and listen to how it sounds in other accents.
If it still holds up after that, give it something to stand for. A good name does some of the explaining for you, which helps when nobody’s heard of you yet.
- The conscious read
- A placeholder is a decision you’ve put off, and it gets a bit dearer every month.
- The romantic read
- The first thing a new company gets to say about itself is its name, so it may as well mean something.
If this sounds familiar