Naming a new business can be a fun and challenging exercise. TODAY We're officially launching a new business we named Civil Hair.
I'll show every step of how we came up with the name Civil Hair. The method, tools, surveys we used and actual data we gathered to make the final decision.
Before we get too into the weeds, as part of our launch we're looking for help spreading the word.
We've been working REALLY hard launching and now we're giving it away for FREE. If this case study is at all useful, please, share our contest help us get the word out.
The more friends you invite the more stuff I'll be sending you!
It would mean so much! :)
Already know this stuff? Feel free to skip the fun parts. :)
Table of contents
Intro
As most entrepreneurs know coming up with a name is a painful process.
There are no shortages of fun, funny and creative names for businesses. However, finding ones with affordable domain names or sounded like they make sense is a challenge.
On top of that, keeping the name reasonably short and memorable makes this process twice as hard.
Without opting in for a ".biz" domain (who want's that?) a great name is next to impossible without a process.
The steps we followed helped get the ideas flowing and generate objective data for validation.
This process will allow anyone to pull the trigger on a great new business name with confidence.
The first question we need to ask is... how much time should we spend, and does the name matter?
Does The Name Matter?
Honestly, whats in a name and how much should I really care?
I spent some time trying to figure this out. Mostly in a “why am I spending so much time on this” and “let’s just get to work” vein.
Even finding an answer to this question was painful...
There's a lot of opinions out there, and they vary wildly. Some entrepreneurs/gurus say the name doesn’t matter. Then, the next says it does.
Here are some examples of various options on this topic.
General business naming rules: https://youtu.be/31hOpKnuSHg?t=13s
Does a name matter with Gary V: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYcHt_VF6x8
Then there's this pretentious a-hole we all learned about in high school...
The answer I came up with was, YES, the name matters!
But not in the way you think.
A good name will have a few features.
Easy to hear and comprehend
Easy to recall
Easy to spell
It should also help the reader of the name understand what the business does.
A bad name will be the opposite. Essentially, a lousy name costs more to market. It’s as simple as that.
Can you overcome the negatives of a bad business name?
Of course!
Do you want to go through the pain of dealing with a bad name if it’s avoidable?
HECK NO!
The moral of the story, take the time and find a great name. It will make life a lot easier later on!
The Process
Sh*t ton of names
Let’s get into the nitty-gritty. The first step is to come up with a s**t ton of names.
Goal: Find as many domain names that we can that fit specific criteria.
Domain name criteria
Short as possible
Easy to remember
Easy to hear and comprehend
Easy to spell
Tells a story of what the business does
CHEAP DOMAIN! Either all we have to do is register it or it's incredibly affordable. (we don’t have any venture funding, so $100k domain names are out!)
After coming up with a big list of domain names, it’s all about weeding them out until we have 2 or 3 golden children that fit our criteria.
Anyone that’s tried finding a domain name in the past ten years has probably had a moment of “ALL the good names are taken!”
Good news is, there’s a growing list of strategies and tools to help with this process. This last time, my partner and I came up with a list of over 200 names!
When it comes to brainstorming a sh*t ton of names. The easiest place to start is with a few naming tools. While working with the tools and brainstroming, I keep a spreadsheet and fill it out as I go.
The Tools
Many tools can make this process short and easy. One of my favorite for its simplicity is a tool call Lean Domain Search.
Name Mesh: https://www.namemesh.com/domain-name-search/
This is one of the best tools I’ve found for finding domains quickly. To use Doman Mesh, include as many keywords as you can think of. The tool will search for as many combinations as it can find. It will even include funky domain extensions to help spell words and other creative strategies for finding available domains. Results will very but I’ve noticed to find good matches Domain Mesh will usually need a few good keywords to work off. To finding more great keywords, take a look as the tool One Look below.
Lean Domain Search: https://www.leandomainsearch.com/
I love this tool for its simplicity. The only thing it asks for is one keyword. Enter your keyword in the search box, and it will pull a HUGE list of available domains including the keyword. My partner and I sat down, put in a few keywords. Then, went through everything it spat out and wrote down the good enough ones.
Note: for the word hair it literally gives over 1,500 options. Obviously, 90% of these are going to be crap. What we're looking for is the few diamonds in the rough that may work. Write down any that might apply. We'll sort out the real losers later.
Dot-O Mator: https://www.dotomator.com/
A popular trick for naming business is to combine words. Bonus points for alliteration or rhyming. This tool takes two lists of words (with some built-in pre-set ones for help) and checks which are available. We played with this for a bit until we had a solid list of names we liked.
Domain Emu: https://domainemu.com/ (Honorable Mention)
This tool works very similarly to Dot-O-Mator however only uses their own preset secondary words. This could be good or bad depending on how creative you want to get. From what I can tell they do a pretty good job with the presets. This is a new tool and I found it shortly before writing this. So I didn't have a chance use it this time. I am saviing it in my utility belt for next time. It also looks like they have a nice freemium model for some extra words combos.
One Look: https://www.onelook.com/ This is another one for the tool belt. One Look can do a reverse dictionary search to find related words. This tool does a great job coming up with a huge list of related words quickly. This can really cut down the brainstorm time and get some really great and unique words to drop into combo generators like Dot-O-Mator.
Using these tools we were able to come up with a pretty compelling list pretty quickly.
After we compiled a list of names that made sense and had an available domain, we started cutting away at the list.
Some were too long. Some too obscure. Other made use laugh but might have been too cheesy.
We whittled it down to 6 names we could live with.
Since we didn't have $100k to spend and none of the cheap ones were unquestionably GREAT we had to do some extra research.
Next, we used a survey to validate which of the OKAY bunch was the true "diamond in the rough."
The Test
Using Amazon's Mechanical Turk and Survey Monkey we set out on a mission to collect some data. Keeping our previous criteria of a name that's easy to comprehend, remember, spell, and associate with in mind we're looking for we built a test. Credit for this goes to Customer Dev Labs. They wrote a kick-ass blog post that was super helpful throughout this process.
Here's the actual survey we used for reference.
The test works like this...
Setup
Originally when we ran this test we were looking at 6 different names. Each survey tested no more than 3 names. We got 120+ responses on each survey. That was more than enough data to start seeing some patterns.
First Question Set: Hearability
What we're looking for:
Can someone hear and understand the name when spoken without difficulty?
Can they spell it when it's spoken to them?
This set of questions is designed to test if someone who hears the name can spell it correctly. The idea is if someone is referring the business to a friend you want the other person to be able to go online and find it easily. They won't be able to find it if they can't spell it. 😏
Sometimes Google will help with auto correct but we don't want to rely on that. Especially in the beginning.
The question looks like the image below. It asks "Play the audio clip below ONLY ONCE. Then, type in the name of the website you hear." We then had an HTML embed from Sound Cloud of the name being spoken. I recorded these myself with some free software that's included with any Mac Garage Band. No need to get fancy. In fact, less than ideal audio might be closer to reality for testing purposes.
Ideally, the survey taker will only play the clip once. Then, writes down what they heard.
Second Question Set: Associations
What we're looking for:
Does this name have the associations we're looking for?
Are there any negative associations we weren't expecting?
This one is a lot more to the point. We're simply asking "What Ideas, words, or phrases come to mind when you see TEST NAME." Then, an open text box where they can write as little or as much as they want.
This test was a lot more useful then we through it would be. We had everything people thinking the business did something we didn't to a few nasty associations with a few of the names.
After this questions specifically on the first set of 6 we found we were using the word "style" for our hair styling products. However, most people were associating style with clothes not hair. The first names we had with the word "hair" in them had associations a lot closer to what we wanted.
Now we know, time to go back to the drawing board and double on the word hair.
Third Question Set: Distractions
What we're looking for:
We want to distract the test taker.
We also want to make sure they're paying attention and not filling the survey with fubar.
We want to distract the test taker so the names fall out of their short-term memory. This helps set up the memory test questions coming next.
Second, we want to see if they're even trying. This will help weed out the test takers who were just making a quick buck and not giving us reliable data.
The questions we asked were:
On this website (click here), in the paragraph that starts with "Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy..." what's the 9th word in the first sentence? With a multi-choice answer.
What year were you born? 4-digit year (e.g. 19xx)
What type of cell phone do you use most often? With a multi-choice answer.
Which of these services have you used in the last 6 months? A multi-choice answer with a list of social media accounts.
What is 16 + 32? Easy question but we can filter the people who got it wrong as going through the test super quick and not giving us anything useful.
What is your Mechanical Turk Worker ID? This one is super useful for figuring out who to pay once we run in the task in MTurk.
These are all pretty objective questions we can check with some simple Excel rules. If they come up negative we remove that test takers answers. This way it doesn't pollute our data.
The last questions requiring their MTurk Worker ID let's us refuse them payment if they're not answering the questions correctly. This way they'll be motivated to give good answers.
Fourth Question Set: Memorability
What we're looking for:
We want to see which of the 3 names we gave them in questions 1 and 2 were the most memorable.
This test is super simple. If they write it in the box they remembered it. The most of the name that gets written down, and the more that are spelled correctly the better the name.
Here we get a second chance to see if they can spell the name as well as testing how memorable it is. This was my second favorite question after the assosiations test.
Fifth Question Set: Images
What we're looking for:
Specifically what images come to mind.
For our business, we're looking for positive images that have ideally involve men's hair and looking great. This question is very similar to the associations but sometimes asking for the visual can give some extra hints. It's also a great way to see if those assassinations have changed since the last question.
Sixth Question Set: Images
What we're looking for:
Positive feelings are derived from the name.
Between the images, feelings, and associations it might feel like we're beating a dead horse but this question did bring up a few concerns with some of the names.
This question is more about what we're trying to avoid. If we can, the name leaving a good feeling would be great. However, the biggest thing is avoiding negative emotions that might be brought up by our potential name.
Amazon Mechanical Turk
Next, we need to set up Mechanical Turk to get some survey takers.
Note: I did this with MTurk but I believe Survey Monkey has a premium feature that will find people to take the survey.
First things first, go to https://requester.mturk.com/ and create an account if you don't already have one.
Once logged in, select create.
Then, we're going to create a new Survey Link project.
From here we'll fill out the project properties. Here's how we set our up.
After everything is set up move onto the design phase. This is pretty easy when it comes to surveys. MTurk provides an easy-to-use WYSIWYG editor.
All you need to do is paste in the survey link. I was using the paid version of Survey Monkey which uses some conditional formatting I used to provide different codes. I would give one code if they answered the basic questions wrong and another if they got everything right.
This was another way I was able to weed out the bad survey fills. To be honest, I'd probably have been fine without this step but if you're feeling spicy. Why not?
Here's the actual code if that's helpful too. :)
<meta content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1" name="viewport" /> <section class="container" id="SurveyLink"><!-- Instructions --> <div class="row"> <div class="col-xs-12 col-md-12"> <div class="panel panel-primary"><!-- WARNING: the ids "collapseTrigger" and "instructionBody" are being used to enable expand/collapse feature --><a class="panel-heading" href="javascript:void(0);" id="collapseTrigger"><strong>Hearability Survey Link Instructions</strong> <span class="collapse-text">(Click to expand)</span> </a> <div class="panel-body" id="instructionBody"> <p>We are conducting a hearability survey to see how easy it is to hear and understand a series of domain names. Select the link below to complete the survey. At the end of the survey, you will receive a code to paste into the box below to receive credit for taking our survey.</p> <p><strong>Make sure to leave this window open as you complete the survey. </strong>When you are finished, you will return to this page to paste the code into the box.</p> </div> </div> </div> </div> <!-- End Instructions --><!-- Survey Link Layout --> <div class="row" id="workContent"> <div class="col-xs-12 col-md-6 col-md-offset-3"><!-- Content for Worker --> <table class="table table-condensed table-bordered"> <colgroup> <col class="col-xs-4 col-md-4" /> <col class="col-xs-8 col-md-8" /> </colgroup> <tbody> <tr> <td><label>Survey link:</label></td> <td><a href="http://www.surveymonkey.com/r/GKLDZDQ" target="_blank">www.surveymonkey.com/r/GKLDZDQ</a></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <!-- End Content for Worker --><!-- Input from Worker --> <div class="form-group"><label for="surveycode">Provide the survey code here:</label> <input class="form-control" id="surveycode" name="surveycode" placeholder="e.g. 123456" required="" type="text" /></div> <!-- End input from Worker --></div> </div> <!-- End Survey Link Layout --></section> <link crossorigin="anonymous" href="https://maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com/bootstrap/3.0.3/css/bootstrap.min.css" integrity="sha384-IS73LIqjtYesmURkDE9MXKbXqYA8rvKEp/ghicjem7Vc3mGRdQRptJSz60tvrB6+" rel="stylesheet" /> <style type="text/css">#collapseTrigger{ color:#fff; display: block; text-decoration: none; } #submitButton{ white-space: normal; } .image{ margin-bottom: 15px; } /* CSS for breaking long words/urls */ .dont-break-out { overflow-wrap: break-word; word-wrap: break-word; word-break: break-all; word-break: break-all; word-break: break-word; hyphens: auto; hyphens: auto; hyphens: auto; hyphens: auto; } </style>
This was another way I was able to weed out the bad survey fills. To be honest, I'd probably have been fine without this step but if you're feeling spicy. Why not?
After this is set up, you'll be asked to review everyone one last time before launching. Make sure everything is the way you need it then BOOM! Launch that sucker.
If the pricing is right the answers for all 120+ surveys should get done in less than 24 hours.
Once it's complete you'll be able to see the results in the manage tab.
The results will come as a CSV download.
The Results
From here it's all excel magic.
Here are the actual compiled results from the surveys we ran.
The names we tested were:
SentStyle.com
SirSlick.com
StylePending.com
BlackLabelBox.com
BlackBoxHair.com
SendStyle.com
CivilHair.com
SaintHair.com
TuftandTexture.com
There was a lot learned here. The more generic names like Black Label Box or Black Box Hair (our original favorites) we thought had more associations with high quality and subscriptions. However, they were incredibly forgettable and had some pretty obvious negative associations we didn't think of until after the fact.
The funny names like Sir Slick had really high memorability but also had negative associations. Most people saying it made them think of a used car salesman.
Two clearly stood above the rest...Civil Hair and Style Pending. Because of the associations with the word "Style" having more to do with fashion than "hairstyle" the obvious choice was Civil Hair.
Now, we're launching this shit!
Conclusion
Like I said in the begging, coming up with names is hard. Between my partner and me, there were plenty of disagreements. At the end of the day, getting objective data was a huge boost to our confidence with the name. On top of that, all we had to do was register it! That means we got to skip the ridiculous $20k price tag from a domain squatter.
Bonus Content
While doing research and perfecting this naming strategy I came across a lot of great content. Since the goal of this post if to teach. I'd be doing a disservice if I didn't at least include some extra videos I came across. Below are some great naming strategies or general naming info I came across that may be helpful.
Jason Calacanis (my personal business hero) with his show This Week In Start-Ups explaining his process for naming a business. Really great condenced tips for naming a business.
TED Talk on Names: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzbXht7MJVM Another interesting bonus TED Talk video I found while doing research on naming strategies.
Naming Strategies with Sasha Strauss