A startup name checklist worth actually running through

Most naming advice hands you a list of adjectives. Memorable. Meaningful. Unique. None of it helps when three candidates are sitting on a whiteboard and the decision is due Friday. What helps is a sequence of tests, cheap ones first, so the weak names die before you have spent anything on them.

The order that works: disqualifiers, then the spoken tests, then legal, then the domain, then the leftovers. Follow it and you will never pay for a trademark search on a name nobody can spell down a phone line.

Eliminate first, rank later

You cannot usefully rank names by how good they feel. You can strike out the ones that break something, and that work is fast, unglamorous and objective.

• Does it collide with a well-known company? Sector is irrelevant here. A name one letter away from a household brand buys you years of being mistaken for it.
• Does a word in it change meaning across a border? If you intend to sell outside your home market, read each candidate to a native speaker of your two likeliest expansion languages. Ten minutes. It has spared a lot of companies a rebrand.
• Does it marry you to a product you may not sell in three years? "Wellness" in the name is fine right up until you pivot to logistics. Narrow descriptive names are cheap today and expensive later.
• Can you say it out loud without flinching? If a co-founder hesitates over the pronunciation, a customer certainly will.
• Does it read differently in lowercase with the spaces removed? Compound names occasionally produce a second meaning nobody intended. Write every candidate as it will appear in a URL and read it cold.

Whatever survives that is a genuine candidate. Eight in, three out, roughly.

Names live in the ear, not on the page

Founders imagine their name being typed. It gets spoken far more often. So the tests that matter are auditory.

The phone test. Say the name to somebody who has never heard it and ask them to write it down. A wrong spelling is not automatically fatal, but you have just agreed to a permanent tax: every mistyped URL is a visitor who never arrives. Silent letters, doubled consonants and any name that could plausibly end -er or -r will fail this again and again.

The radio test. Say "we're at [name] dot com" aloud. If you catch yourself adding "that's [name], spelled...", the name costs three seconds every time anyone mentions it. Across a company's life that is a real drag on word of mouth.

The voice assistant test. Dictate the name into your phone. If the transcription comes back wrong, expect it wrong in plenty of other places too.

The noisy room test. Soft consonants blur in a bar or a conference hall: f, s, th. Hard ones carry: k, t, p, b, g.

Do an hour of searching before you pay for any

You will want a solicitor or a trademark attorney eventually. Before that, your own searching will remove the obviously doomed candidates for free.

• Search the trademark registers. The UK IPO, EUIPO and USPTO all run free public search tools. Look up your exact name and near-identical variants in the classes that cover your product. A mark in an unrelated class is usually survivable. A mark in your class usually is not.
• Search the companies register wherever you plan to incorporate. Company name availability and trademark availability are two different questions, and you need both answered.
• Search the open web in quotation marks, with your industry as a second term. You are hunting for an unregistered business already using the name, which can still cause you grief under passing off or common-law rights.
• Check the app stores. Apple and Google both refuse listings that closely duplicate an existing app name.

A name that clears all four is worth handing to a professional for proper clearance before you print anything. Self-searching finds the obvious problems. The subtle ones are what you are paying for.

Price the domain before you fall for the name

This is where shortlists collapse, and where founders make expensive mistakes in both directions.

The first mistake is refusing to consider any name whose .com is taken, which rules out virtually every real word and most short coinages. The second is picking the name and assuming the domain gets solved later with a hyphen, a "get" prefix or a .io. Those solutions work. They also cost you typo traffic and a little perceived seriousness, every day, forever.

The workable position sits between the two: settle the domain question before you commit to the name, and price it honestly.

• An unregistered .com costs registration fees and nothing else. Rare for real words, quite achievable for invented ones. If you want a coined name that is definitely free, a keyword search built for brand names only surfaces things you can actually register, because Name Studio checks each invention against the live registry before it shows you anything.
• A registered but unused .com may well be for sale. Prices run from a few hundred to well into six figures, depending on length, dictionary status and how many other people want the same string.
• A .com in active use by a working business is not really for sale. Move on.

If the aftermarket is where you are shopping, browse before you fall in love with anything. Working from a list of domains already priced and available inverts the usual order helpfully: you choose from what exists instead of chasing something that doesn't. On Names.com the transfer runs through escrow, so neither party has to move first, and buyers pay no fee. The 15% commission comes out of the seller's side on completion.

One dull but useful note. Leasing a strong domain is a genuine option when the purchase price is out of reach this year. You don't own the asset and it isn't free, but it beats launching on a name you already know you'll replace.

Twenty minutes on the surrounding real estate

With the domain settled, sweep the rest of the namespace. You will not get an exact match everywhere. Consistency matters more than matching.

• Handles on the two or three platforms you will genuinely use. One prefix or suffix applied everywhere beats a perfect match on one platform and improvisation on the others.
• A usable email address. Long names have a way of producing [email protected] at thirty characters.
• The obvious typo variants. You needn't buy them on day one, but know what they are and who owns them.
• Search results for the bare name. If page one belongs to something unrelated and stronger than you, you'll be fighting for your own name for years.

Three checks, then stop

Put it in a sentence you'll say out loud. "I'm the founder of ___." "We use ___ for that." "___ raised a seed round." Awkward in your mouth means awkward in everyone else's.

Leave it for 72 hours. Novelty fades. A name that felt clever on Monday and merely fine by Thursday is probably fine. A name that felt clever on Monday and faintly embarrassing by Thursday is a bullet dodged.

Ask whether you'd say it to a stranger without wincing. That is the whole test. Hesitate at a dinner party and your sales team will hesitate on calls.

Then stop. The marginal value of an eleventh shortlist round is close to zero, and a good-enough name that ships beats a perfect one that lands after your competitor's.