Rhymes with Orange

One of my favorite topics to teach is how to name your startup. Naming can be difficult. Naming can be tricky. You not only need to think up a great name, but you also then need to worry about whether you can own the matching domain name, the Twitter handle, the Facebook page, etc. But even more important than those, you need to worry about what else is in the search results when you Google the name.

I love the Fledge brand name, but back in 2012 it was third on my list. The first choice name was taken by another business accelerator. I could have purchased the .com for the second choice, but the Google results were full of chicken incubators. I like chickens, but didn’t want my company sitting on a page surrounded by chicken incubators. The only results for “fledge” were Wikipedia’s article defining the English word, along with similar pages for dictionaries.

Original cartoon at Rhymes with Orange

You have a decision to make. If you have seconds to decide, you go with your gut. If you have minutes, you might take that minute to weigh Plan A with Plan B. If you have weeks you might create a pro-con list to help decide between those two – or even three – options. If you have months, you might take the time to brainstorm for some out-of-the-box options. What most people overlook is that there...

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