John-Daniel's Blog
Thoughts on running a developer tools company
Choosing a business name
Tagged as What you name your company is important – it’s the identity you’ll operate under for the foreseeable future. You need to be proud of the name and feel it reflects enough about yourself and what you do, and is also unique enough in a crowded market. This post covers what we did in picking the Mindscape name.
Our approach
In typical geek fashion we decided to approach the problem by using a divide and conquer method. We each went away and wrote down as many names as we could think of over the course of a week. We then put them all into a spreadsheet and each ranked every name out of 10. Then we summed the values and sorted by the rank.
There were some really terrible names in there…
Dodging a bullet
I still have the old Excel spreadsheet floating around and thought I’d dig a few of the names out that did not make the cut.
- Spawn – Great if we were starting a game company or a sperm donation clinic
- Azure – I think we all can see why that wouldn’t have been wise in light of Microsoft’s cloud offering
- Aeon – Supreme Commander was the game of the day and Jeremy liked that race
- HydroDam – “Harnessing the power of the waterfall”
- CodeRed – Naming your software company after a virus probably wouldn’t build trust
- AsusOfBasis – We must have dreamed this one up at one of those many nights at the pub. WTF were we thinking?
There were hundreds of names in the spreadsheet. To be fair, many were very good and have used many of the other names for codenames, passwords, etc.
The .com
One of the biggest pains in your backside when picking a name is finding a .com that’s available. Hunting for something that was available was the biggest suck on our time. I’m fairly sure we could have looked up a GUID for a domain name and found it taken by a domain squatter. We didn’t start out with a truck load of cash so we didn’t want to spend up large on trying to pry a name from one of these sorts of individuals, so we simply gave up. We went with a local TLD – .co.nz (New Zealand).
In retrospect, should we have done that? Probably not – a lot of people still have a strong trust of .com’s and we’re a company asking for credit card details. Our audience is one of software developers and hopefully many of them realise there isn’t really any additional trust just because somebody has a .com, so I still hope it’s not damaging our potential for revenue. If you can find a .com or buy one for a small price, I’d say do it. Don’t delay the launch of your business for months just to find one though.
Why Mindscape?
Back to our spreadsheet – Mindscape wasn’t even on the top of the list. There were six above it. We ended up just talking through the top few and seeing what everyone was happy to settle on together. How very un-geeky of us. It also focused on the mind – something that reflects software development strongly since writing code is a very intellectual pursuit.
You’ll notice however that if you visit www.mindscape.com, there is a software publisher there also called Mindscape. This was frustrating as they’re a multinational company, however we didn’t let that deter us – perhaps it should have, but it didn’t. Their products include products relating to Thomas the Tank Engine and Carmen San Diego. We were fairly comfortable that software developers would realise they were not on our site if they ended up there (and if not, the queries about when Barbie would be integrated into Visual Studio 2010 would likely fall on deaf ears 
So we ended up living at www.mindscape.co.nz
Other things to consider
If you’re planning the name of your software company keep these thoughts in mind:
- .com availability if possible
- How early in the alphabet the name is – earlier is better. Start with “A” if possible
- Keep it as short as possible (may conflict with the .com point)
- Does it express anything about your organisation?
- Is it easy to pronounce and spell?
- Don’t start it with a number or symbol – it makes it hard to use in namespaces, class names, phone books, etc
I hope this post has helped tell some of the story about our name and help those thinking about starting a software company by providing some guidance on what to consider. If you’re enjoying these blog posts and want to keep up with what I’m writing about, please subscribe via RSS.
Any questions or requests for future posts are more than welcome. Drop them in the comments after this post.
Posted by John-Daniel on 24 March 2009 15 Responses to “Choosing a business name”
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Business for geeks: Naming your software company…
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Mindscape was a big name in 1980s home computer software. They published games like Balance of Power, 720, and After Burner. It seems so weird to see the name associated with “kids and family” games these days.
Maybe you guys can put the name back on the cutting edge.
Good luck!
Great series! I just read the last two posts and have thoroughly enjoyed them. I am also a developer that stated a business (in 2001).
When I started a company, Crowell Solutions, I decided to include my last name. This indicates that I personally stand behind the products and services we provide. For a domain name, I wanted it to be short and easy to type. I chose crowsol.com which consists of the first two syllables of the company name. I also registered crowellsolutions.com and redirect visitors to the crowsol.com domain.
I look forward to the next post. Congratulations on Mindscape’s success.
[...] Choosing a business name – John-Daniel ‘ What you name your company is important – it’s the identity you’ll operate under for the foreseeable future ‘ [...]
http://www.42b5ea1a-d189-42c6-b3b0-3d41a8f2ebab.com/ doesn’t seem to be taken…
IANAL but aren’t there legal considerations to take here as well? I’m pretty sure I couldn’t just go and register Microsoft.co.nz if it were available. How did you get around this with the original MindScape or were they defunct by the time you guys started your website (or maybe they simply haven’t noticed or don’t care)?
@Dave We still spot some of the older games on local auction sites like TradeMe
@Dan Thanks for the encouragement. If I was building a mISV I’d probably do something with my name just for simplicities sake.
@Configurator – Snap it up, I’m sure somebody would want it eventually
@Kevin – We did everything with our lawyers. It appears that Mindscape (the other one) is a publisher – not a creator of software. We obtained the various Trade Marks for our name and they were obtained without objection. I think the subtlety is that they sell on behalf of others while we create the software itself. We haven’t had any issues so far. The original Mindscape is still going strong (listed on the french stock exchange I believe?). I think we can co-exist happily as we have for the last 2 years.
Cheers for the comments guys
You hit on some good points.
When I chose the name “Simplovation” I came up with a ton of possible names as well. The biggest factors that I chose to help me determine what name to use were 1) Uniqueness (fewest result when searching it on Google) and 2) Domain Name availability. I checked quite a few until I finally settled on Simplovation, where when I first looked generated zero Google search results and all three .COM, .ORG and .NET were available. This was not an easy feat and I’m still surprised it worked out that way.
http://simplovation.com
I have to say that your series is shameless self-promotion for your new company. ‘Advertorial’ is too weak a term for what you are doing. The moderators of dot net kicks should stop it, as this is a transparent attempt at generating foot-traffic to your site. I think ‘linkbait’ is the current phrase.
The flaw in the logic is that web 2.0 networking amongst a bunch of fellow geeks is probably not going to generate any work for your company, just fleeting visibility in the twitter-space.
I wonder if you get the other drirector to kick it for you, as way of starting things off?
Hyacinth.
@Chris – Nice site and handy domain name
Thanks for dropping your thoughts in.
@Hyacinth – I just checked and no, he hasn’t kicked it and neither have any of the staff. We’re not a new business – we’re in our third year of operation. I posted the story onto DNK because I’m sure there are thousands of geeks out there, just like me, who are thinking about starting a business. I want to ensure these posts do have the “development tools company” angle to them because I do believe they’re unique and more relevant to a geek crowd.
Being cynical is fine but to clarify: this is more just for my own benefit than Mindscape’s. I don’t think too many people will read about naming a company and think “hmm… and I really need WPF Flow Diagrams too”. I don’t think that’s happening somehow
Our company blog had many many more readers and subscribers – the content I post here I didn’t think appropriate for all our company readers. They can subscribe here if they like it.
Clear article. I ended up buying my .com for 1500$. I’ll need it in the future for international expansion. In the meantime I get a lot of business through my local TLDS.
[...] How to choose a name for your company? [...]
One more small tip for domain names – as well as there are many mobile devices without qwerty keyboard (most cellphones are using other standard), it’s good to have an easily ‘inputable’ name from your mobile phone. Especially if you have a social network or other frequently used resource.
P.S. Sometimes bookmarking is not a solution – mails are involved, and if you have ’speed.de’, it would be 2 times the ‘7′ key and 5 times the ‘3′ key of a regular phone. It’s not comfortable for quick and flexible fingered guys
We came up with TBODA during a pub session…
Its obscure enough to get peoples attention and we have a fun back story behind it.
I’m still googling easy ways of coming up with a good business name. In my country (South Africa) we cant use those Letter only names which makes it a lot tougher. These dont seem to follow any of the normal name selecting rules, see for e.g. http://gxi.co.za/growing-your-business/197-4-rules-to-choosing-a-great-business-name.html