Naming your company is tough. Here’s what we did. Hopefully it will help someone naming their start-up company.

What to use for inspiration? Take a look at the customer’s daily environment. Look at the items they use. Listen to the expressions they say. If you don’t have access to their daily environment, then watch tv shows about them and read books, industry magazines, and blogs about them. To add more names to the mix, create noun plus verb names from the items and terms found earlier.

We came up with 257 names. And that’s just the ones that passed the “worth remembering” test and I wrote down. Culled down to 29. Then 7. Finally, one victorious – Cloud Dine Systems

The secret weapon for us: Idioms. In our case, “Cloud Nine” which means “a state of extreme happiness”. (For idiom lists check out https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/ , https://www.idiomconnection.com/, and https://www.phrases.org.uk/ ). I imagine metaphors and similes would work just as well.

Why did we pick Cloud Dine Systems? It just worked for us on multiple levels. The play on an idiom used to express extreme happiness tied into one of our fundamental values: creating customer delight. From a less inspirational, more factual point of view, we use cloud technologies to create our solutions and serve the businesses that create dining experiences.

Hopefully this will help someone looking to name their own company. If you have any other suggestions for inspiration or techniques that worked for naming, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Thaddeus