Recently, I wrote about how we came up with our brand name Typogram and some advice (dont’s on naming a startup. I got a lot of positive feedback on these two articles, and that got me thinking — maybe I should expand them into a naming guide and app! 

My co-founder and I are working on a mission to create high-quality content to improve our SEO for Typogram. My first project at Adobe was to work on an interactive Typography lesson called Caring about OpenType Features. We put a lot of design and engineering effort into that blog post, making every example interactive. Creating high-quality content worthy of being referenced or mentioned on other websites can be very time-consuming but rewarding in terms of SEO. 

My co-founder Hua is creating a Typography glossary index with interactive examples, which is building upon her excellent previous work on “Typography Jargon Buster” in our other Newsletter FontDiscovery. I thought I could create a helpful guide about naming a startup. 

The name is as important as the logo and branding for a startup. It is the first thing founders need to work on. And name sticks — it is harder to change than logos. I haven’t found many resources to help startup founders brainstorm a suitable name, but I know some elite brand design studios do offer naming workshops as part of their service. We at Typogram created a DIY workshop kit for finding your brand personalities; maybe we can create a unique workshop with a framwork to help founders and their team brainstorm a great brand name!

I then switched to research mode. My first step in tackling this is to study startup naming trends and find some naming patterns from existing successful startup brands. 

I looked into Crunchbase and searched for companies that were founded between 2017 and 2022.

When I started to tag the startup names with naming patterns that I found, I noticed many names sounded foreign to me. I don’t know if these names are made of an existing word and an invented word. Lacking the proper context, I decided to grab a new set of data that is filtered by countries and limit it to the United States, UK, and Australia to filter out non-English names. This will add bias to my study, but I think my inability to understand other languages will taint the tagging data I am able to produce anyway. 

My plan for the project is to:

• Go through each name and tag them with its “name pattern”

• Come up with a framework for naming; the framework includes various naming patterns for brainstorming and scoring rubric that measures each brainstorming results and picks the final name

• Write an exhaustive naming guide and post on Typogram Blog

• Make a web app for naming workshops that incorporate the framework, ideally, the app can automatically search for available domain options for each name candidates

As a founder, would you find this helpful? What do you wish to be included in a startup naming framework?

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See you next week! If you have friends who are interested in founding startups, please consider sharing my newsletter with them!