How to Name a Firm in 8 Hours

A guide and case study for naming a business.

Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky and Braden Kowitz, three partners with Google Ventures, released a fresh book Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test Fresh Ideas in Just Five Days earlier this month.

They’re giving away a free guide How to Name a Firm in 8 Hours to anyone who buys the book. It discusses how to name a firm in a day, and gives a real example of how they named Element Science.

Out of fairness to the authors, I’m not going to recap the entire guide. But I’ll highlight some interesting takeaways from it.

Names that are too specific can be problematic. The firm considered its long-term plan and decided to avoid anything descriptive of its current technology so it wouldn’t pigeon-hole the firm in the future.

Come up with themes ahead of individual names. Rather than immediately brainstorming possible firm names, the team came up with themes or concepts for the firm, such as mythology, data words and superpowers. It used these to generate specific names.

Don’t look at domain availability early on. It was interesting to see that they didn’t look at domain availability until late in the process. At that point, they took the names, considered suffixes and prefixes, and checked availability.

The kicker: the team was able to hand register ElementScience.com.

I just ordered Sprint today, so I haven’t had the chance to read the book. But I think the naming guide and case study is worth the price by now.

(Thanks to Lisa at myRollcall for the tip.)