How to pick a good startup name
Why did you pick the name Frigade?
We get this question frequently. Frigade is a nonsense word so people are inherently curious about what it means and why we chose it. Well, the short and possibly disappointing answer is that it doesn't have any specific or punny meaning when it comes to product onboarding.
How did we settle on the name Frigade?
At a high level, we followed a simple framework made popular by Y Combinator, and we think this framework is useful to any founder thinking about naming their startup. The following was our guiding criteria for our name.
- Do you own the .com for your name?
- Can people pronounce it when they read it?
- Can people spell it when they hear it?
- Will people find it when they Google it?
Do you own the .com for your name?
Yep, we were able to get the .com, .ai, .so, .co, and more for a decent price.
Can people pronounce it when they read it?
Mostly! Frigade is combination of two real words: frigate and brigade. It's pronounced like the latter, though we occasionally hear people say it like the former.
Can people spell it when they hear it?
We ran spelling tests on friends, family, and former colleagues before making the purchase.
Will people find it when they Google it?
The advantage of a made up startup name is that there's not much competing on it. When we first launched, Google automatically showed results for "frigate" instead of Frigade. Now, with additional SEO hits, we are the number one result when someone Googles us.
Lessons learned
We took this framework seriously since we learned the hard way with our last startup called Perform (joinperform.com). Perform was a great name for what we were building, but the problem was that it was also a great word for many other things. We never got close to the first page of Google search results, even when people were actively looking for us.
Other names we considered
We churned through a ton of possible names for what is now Frigade. You can use websites like Brand Bucket and Brandpa to find startup name domains. Enjoy and best of luck!
