I love telling the story of how we picked our name because it is still hard for me to believe how it came to be. It all happened while we were brainstorming the idea of our business at the North & Halsted Borders in Chicago.
We had a good sense of our business idea at this point but we had to come up with a cool, descriptive and short name at the same time. Picking a great name is hard. It either happens in 2 seconds or takes days, or even months. On top of it, you must hope that the dot com domain is available.
After a few espressos we were absolutely stuck! Then we decided to check out some name generators hoping for a creative spark. We had played around with a number of them but defenitly spent the most time with a cool Web 2.0 name generator – www.dotomator.com. It pretty much went like this – both of us staring at the randomly generated names that the screen was spitting at us, and kept clicking “next”, “next”, “next”, like Internet-addicted Energizer bunnies.
An hour of this was enough for me and I gave up. I jumped off the chair, and clear my mind amongthe bookshelves. As soon as I made a few strides, I heard Emil yell – “Oh my god!” As much as I couldn’t believe it, the name generator displayed the two words that are now our name: “BrowseWorks”. Oh my god! Our unanimous reaction was that the name was perfect! We knew as soon as we saw it. No doubts, no second thoughts. The name reflected in a number of different ways exactly what we were intending to be in business for - the shop that does work related to browsing the web, or the shop that makes your site’s browsing work well!
An“after-shock” of excitement followed immediately when we found out that the dot com domain was available. My knees bent and I almost fainted in the middle of the book store (maybe I am exaggarating a tiny bit). How incredible was that! Most decent domain names have been reserved long ago. Of course we reserved it right away before someone else grabs it.
The name BrowseWorks is a perfect name according to my crietria - it is short (2 words or less), memorable, uses common words that would not be misspelled by the average person, and says what we do. The way we found our name was what can be called destiny. If you have been looking for your business name, believe me, the right one is waiting for you. Use your own brain but don't completely dismiss name generators on the web (google "company name generator"). At the very least they may give your brain creative material. Remember not to settle for a compromise. Keep trying until you find it. The test to know whether you have found your name is to have 0% (I do mean zero) regrets or feeling of compromise when you look at the name today, a day later, and 2 years into your business.