You've got a great idea; you have run it past a few friends whose opinion you trust and they have all given it the thumbs-up. You are now ready to create your company, but first you need to come up with a name. In this article, we mainly focus on the legal element of registering a name, as opposed to the marketing aspect. Don’t forget that a good and effective business name can also be your most powerful branding tool. So, you should give a lot of time and thought when coming up with it.
Finding a name that you and your founders agree on can be a surprisingly challenging and time-consuming process. If you are the only founder, it’s much easier, but do run the name by friends and family for their ideas and feedback.
Thankfully, there are lots of online resources and business name generators such as Namelix, Shopify and Oberlo that can help you. Good luck!
Once you have decided on a company name, it’s important to check a few things:
Once you have checked the four points above and are happy, one last consideration is to make sure you aren’t unintentionally exploiting another brand name (e.g. calling a search engine Doogle, or similar!). If that’s all OK, then well done, you've selected a name. You’ve completed the first step on your journey.
So next, when you are ready, is to legally create your company. There is an excellent article here talking through the possible options and how you go about it.
You can start a funding round in minutes with a free FounderCatalyst account, experiment with our service and see how easy it would be to save time, money, and emotional resources by using FounderCatalyst when raising your next funding round.
You can see a sample of the paperwork we'd generate, invite colleagues to act as investors, and truly experiment with how easy we make it. Then cancel the experiment round when you're ready to start a real one!
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