Freelancers: How'd you pick your company name?

Hey folks!

Talked to a few folks last week @DevLearn who were interested in starting their own consulting company. One question that came up a couple times was around choosing a company name.

Do you go with your personal name or a business name? Do you have a preference? How'd you come up with your name?

Awesome

133 Replies

over 7 years ago01/31/15 at 5:57 pm (UTC)

Jeanne Bernui

Most people can't remember the correct spelling of my first, nor my last name...

Good point regarding spelling, Jeanne. I can see where that could pose a challenge.

Reminds me a bit of the days when people hosted their sites with AOL or Geocities and they'd have these long, muddled domain names replete with special characters.

The best was when they advertised on the radio and the announcer would read the names.

"Tilde? What's a tilde? Backslash?? Wait, is that the one that goes left or right? "

Ahh the good 'ol days:-)

over 7 years ago01/31/15 at 9:37 pm (UTC)

This just made my day! Every now and again I remember Geocities and Angelfire. I always wanted AOL but we never had it. I would go over to my friends and play those AOL chat room typing games. Those were the best.

Alexander Salas

7 years ago05/30/15 at 7:24 pm (UTC)

This is an excellent discussion for anyone starting out. In my case, it was pretty easy only because my DBA started as a personal site and blog. The name is StyleLearn and the rationale is that Style signifies our choice of learning and Learn the science behind it.

Paul Alders
Hero

7 years ago08/12/15 at 10:37 pm (UTC)

Great stories Guys....thx for asking David!

Before I started my own business I worked as a teacher in vocational education. During this time I started developing my own online teaching materials.

Firstly , because I wanted to provide picture -thinking students with appropriate teaching materials and secondly , because I think any class or study must be inspiring.

The above has led to my company name EyeSpirations . A corruption of Eye catching and inSpirations.

Tegid Griffiths

almost 7 years ago08/24/15 at 12:49 pm (UTC)

My wife came up with the name for my company. She used my first name Tegid and the word ideas, so the company name is tegIdeas. We made the 't' lowercase and the 'I' for ideas in uppercase as we are about creativity and idea generation.

my webpage is www.tegideas.com but I also bought the domain names for tegtalks.com and tedideas.com based on suggestions from a local media group that meet each month.

almost 7 years ago08/24/15 at 10:55 pm (UTC)

Hey Teg, cool looking landing page on your web site. I really love the graphics!

Paul S.

almost 7 years ago08/25/15 at 6:23 am (UTC)

Hafton - One day I was meeting with a potential client and he asked, "What can you do for me?" I told him that I could get him half a ton more production per hour than was currently being produced. Both being Southern folk he said, "Haf ton, huh"? Yes I said. Haf ton....

Hafton and Hafton Systems® were born that day

Paul

almost 7 years ago08/25/15 at 11:08 am (UTC)

Thanks John, it is a work in progress and a passion of mine. One day I hope to make it a reality as I get the word out there. I am not a natural business person so getting 'out there' is proving more difficult than I thought.

Chris Wirick

over 5 years ago02/15/17 at 11:15 pm (UTC)

Old thread but great topic. Seems the biggest challenge these days is not coming up with a creative company name but coming up with a creative company name for which the web domain isn't already being 1) used or 2) squatted upon. :(

It never fails to amaze me when I find domains already registered (and generally unused) for names that seemed so completely unique or unusual. I really wish the Powers That Be would clamp down on domain squatting.