"How To Name Your New Startup Streams Store?"

Your business name should have meaning or feeling about it

Ideally, you want your company name to reflect meaningful and positive information about your business. Can people immediately understand your business? Nonsense names like "Google" and "Yahoo" are attractive because they are catchy, but such names cause you to spend more money on branding and awareness. Your mission, purpose and story have a say in your business name. Think hard about what is that short attractive word that delivers the meaning for your business and doesn't need mass marketing and global brand awareness to be a household name. 

Our business name: For us, Startup Streams was an obvious win. I would like to think that it says what we do "on the tin" and can convey that we 1. Are involved with providing services for the startup community and 2. ‘Streams’ relates to revenue streams. Startup revenue streams = Startup Streams. I would also like to think that it expresses that multiple startup businesses are available to purchase from us - which they are.

Trademark search your business name

Search USPTO.gov (US) to see if you can get a trademark or service mark for your name, this can be all the help you need at this point. Double check that your name of choice is legally available. Just because the domain name is available, doesn’t mean that someone else has the legal right to it. 

Lesson learned: Early on in running Startup Streams, I inappropriately named one of our businesses for sale, which sells digital social greetings cards, as 'InstagramCards.com'. Totally forgetting that Instagram  is of course a trademarked name, Instagram's legal team discovered my domain name purchase which was linked to a Shopify store within 24 hours of the store going live. The legal team contacted Shopify who removed the store and shut it down immediately, without even contacting me first to request that I change the name. The business was a write-off. But it was a good job that a customer hadn't bough the store yet. Whoops!

Find resources to generate thoughts

There are several sites online that can help you to generate business ideas: VisualThesaurus.com and Shopify Business Name Generator to name a few. I would however use the suggestions from the websites as inspiration for you to come up with something better, as the results should be taken with a pinch of salt. I personally feel that a business name is too important to be left to a free online app to make one for you, but it can be a good starting point if you are really struggling.

Get feedback for your ideal business name

Everything looks good when it is written. Make sure you say the name out loud and see how it feels. Ask people around you if they can easily pronounce it upon hearing. Then ask them what they think it means. If they struggle to pronounce it (we would have been told that Olympvs isn’t obviously pronounced as Olympus if we asked more people), then it’s time to go back to the drawing board. 

Pro tip: Use a mixture of asking people to write down your business name upon hearing it (this will help gauge how well referrals will find you in search), and asking others to pronounce it after you have written it down. If both groups say and write it the same way, you are onto a winner.

Make sure your business name doesn’t have a negative side to it

What I mean by this is that you should make sure that your business name, especially if original and quirky, doesn’t have an ulterior meaning. Think about when Facebook officially changed its name to Meta, and the backlash it got from Israel. The word ‘Meta’ means ‘dead’ in Hebrew. 

An accidental name affiliation: Corona beer was the butt of the joke for many memes over the period of the pandemic. One Instagram follower posted that Corona should change their name to something with fewer negative affiliations, "like Ebola”. Of course, when Corona was established in 1925, it had no idea that a worldwide deadly pandemic would have the same name almost 100 years later. But although a rise in Google searches did show people searching for “beer virus” and “corona beer virus”, sales actually rose by 13% in 2020. It seems there really is no such thing as bad press?

Does your ideal business name make you happy?

You are the ultimate decider for your business name, so say the name and ask yourself if this really stands for everything you have dreamt your business could be – if it doesn’t make you happy then follow your heart to make any changes.

Our business name: I am personally pretty chuffed with the name Startup Streams, and as you will be blasting your new business name all over social media, on your website, your business cards, your email signature… it is important you have a name you can personally get behind and be happy to be your business’s number one fan. You are brand ambassador numero uno. 

Check if your ideal business name is available as a domain name.

Even in 2022, it is highly recommended that you have the company's domain name as a ".com" instead of using alternative names such as .net, .org, .biz, and other possible domain extensions. That said, .io and .co have become far more common and accepted as domain extensions with status. 

Customers tend to associate .com domains with a more mature business. Go to GoDaddy or similar and see if you are lucky. There are chances that someone will already have the .com name you want, but many domain owners are willing to sell their name for a reasonable price – so get on and see what you can get.

How we do it: When we come up with business names for our Startup Streams members, we focus our searches around a .com domain name which has no more than 3x words - all of which are main focus keywords for their chosen niche to aid with SEO whilst clearly telling their future customers what they're all about. As an example, we may call / have called our Premium Diet Guides businesses as 'DietDecider.com', 'SelectDietPlan.com' and 'PickDietPlan.com' - easy to remember, say and spell. 

Once all due diligence and business name checks are complete, don’t wait too long.

If you have done everything to find the perfect business name – don’t wait. As soon as you have received the feedback, made the changes, and you're happy with the outcome – set the name, start your business and watch it grow.

Lesson learned: We have seen a few times in the past 2 years when we have setup a new Startup Streams store for one of our members and within the 24 hours of a member telling us what business name they wish to use and whilst waiting for us to make the store for them, someone else has bought the domain name they wanted - almost unbelievable! If you find an awesome business name, my advice is to buy it. Domain names are relatively cheap and if you don’t end up using it, you can sell it on by using domain name selling platforms.

Our logo: After you have the name, the next stop is the logo. For Startup Streams, we manage to enforce our business name. You will see a large ’S’ for Startup Streams, the ’S’ is shaped as a stream and the logo is as a triangle pointing up: Start - Up Streams = Startup Streams. 

Business name inspiration

Here are a list of names I have come up with over the past 20 years for my own businesses, since starting my first business (age 12) outside of the Startup Streams ecosystem which may help with ideas of your own: 

• Skateboard sticker company - Gosch Extreme (Previously Gosch Skate before pivoting).
• Bushcraft survival guide audiobook company - Adventurist Survival
• Bushcraft survival school online portal, based in the UK - Great British Bushcraft
• Kickstarter: Packets of seeds to attract bees to your garden - Seeds For Bees
• Online travel guide exchange service and community - travelguide.exchange
• Crowd shopping online marketplace - CrowdShopping.com
• Production of professionally designed SlideShare presentations for businesses - Social Slides

Are you a Startup Streams member and are still not sure about what to call your business?

So, how is you decision making going? Have we managed to make you change your mind or have we reinforced your original thoughts about what you wish to call your business? If you are still struggling, please get in contact with customer success and we’d be happy to help out: success@startupstreams.com