Naming a company can be frustrating, especially as common domain names keep dwindling.

A friend shared a helpful process that he's used for consumer brands in the past.

I've found it's also helpful for any nascent company or brand:

Brand Naming Exercise

Part 1: Brain Dump

Get out a piece of paper and a pen with no computer, phone, tablet, or any other electronics.

Your goal is to get as many ideas down on the page as possible to kick-start your creativity faucet. Just let the ideas flow. DON'T JUDGE anything you write down.

For each section, write until you can't come up with any more ideas and then move on to the next section:

1. Core Values and Principles: List your business's core values and principles. How do you conduct business? What do you stand for?
   
2. Aspirational Goals: List your business's aspirational goals. What are the biggest, most impactful outcomes you hope to achieve?
   
3. Special Sauce: List your special sauce. What makes your business unique and different than everyone else?
   
4. Value and Enablement: List what your business allows people to do and who it allows them to become. What does it let them do that they couldn't do before? How does it make them a hero in their own story?

Part 2: Review

Once you've exhausted your lists for each of the sections above, STOP.

1. Review Commonalities: Review the sections and highlight the items that are the same or similar in each section.
   
2. Group by Subjects: Make a new section and list all of these common "subjects" with space to write below each of them.
   
3. Find Similarities: Make a list under each subject and write similar words, phrases, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs. You can use a thesaurus or ChatGPT / Claude / your chosen LLM, but don't get distracted by looking up domain names. Once you've exhausted your creativity here, it's time to whip out your computer. 
   
4. Organize: Make a spreadsheet with each of your subject lists broken out.
   
5. Search for Domains: Begin searching if domain names are available for each of your subject lists. It can be helpful to color code or mark which domains are (1) available [Green], (2) taken [Red], and (3) if any names have either similar brands or large brands using that domain or a similar one [Yellow].
   
   Try searching the subjects by word, the word slightly misspelled, or the word with an adjective or adverb before or after it.
   
   I usually use an LLM to help me tweak ideas, Domainr to search, Cloudflare to buy them at cost, even if the latter sometimes has some quirks.
   
6. Choose a Name: Finish going through all your lists of subjects. Review your color-coded/marked domains to choose the one that resonates the most. You're usually looking for something: (1) easy to spell, (2) will be high on the page if a customer Googles it, (3) is differentiated enough from similar names/brands that are either in the space or in another space but big enough to eat up your traffic or mindshare.
   
   Hopefully, you've got your company name!

Part 3: Still Stuck?

If you still haven't found a few you really like, move to this section. 

1. Different LLMs: Look up the subjects in different languages.
2. Pop Culture and Historical References: Think about pop culture or historical references related to your subjects. LLMs are great sounding boards for this.
3. Ask Peers and Customers: When you talk about your company, how do you describe it? How do your customers talk about your company?
4. Two-Word Combinations: Try recombining some two-word combinations with your subject and adjectives or verbs. We were pleasantly surprised to find "Biotech Hunter" and snag biotechhunter.com this way.
5. Add a Prefix or Suffix: Popular ones depending on the current trend include, prefixes: "get-" and suffixes: "-ai," "-ly," "-agent," "get-," and "-app."

Have other tips? Add them in the comments, and I'll see which ones make sense to incorporate into this exercise.