How to choose your business name
Finding YoniFlex.com
Choosing a business name is one of the most integral pieces of the puzzle in the early stages of starting your own business. For the next many years, you will be using your business name on websites, letter head, in emails, and saying your business name hundreds if not thousands of times.
Our business YoniFlex.com is focused primarily on the support of the pelvic floor muscles. Over time as you age (and as women have children) these muscles can weaken leasing to a host of challenges later in life, including incontinence, pelvic pain, sexual intimacy issues, and bladder weakness. We wanted a business name that encapsulated our support of people dealing with these challenges.
Do your research!
When we fist started out the challenge of finding our business name Yoni Flex, we did a lot of research. The first piece of the puzzle is to review keywords and descriptions surrounding your product or service. In our business, here were some of the keywords surrounding our products and overall business:
- Pelvic Health
- Fitness
- Kegel
- Support
- Incontinence
- Active
- Exercise
- Women's health
- Vitality
- Strength
A good first step is to use a synonym website such as Thesauris.com and take some of your product or service keywords and run them through the thesaurus to find all the other possible name variations.
For an example, if you are selling used cars online, you could use thesaurus and come up with:
- Cars: Auto, Automobile, wheels, sedan, etc.
- Used: Recycled, pre-owned, nearly new, hand me down
- Online: Connected, wired, accessible, internet,
The thesaurus is a bit of a rabbit hole, and you can continue to click from word to word to really dig deep into related words associated with your product. For example. If you search "online" one of the synonyms is "connected" - then you can click "connected' and find the word "united" and "associated" - then you can click on "united" and find the word "undivided" - often times these associative names will help you find a creative way to describe your business and company and through that discover your business name.
Once you created an exhaustive list of descriptions for your product or service, you can now start the process finding a domain name and gmail address.
Finding your Domain
For us, using a .com domain name is the most powerful part of designing a business name. If you create a business name before checking to see if the name is available in .com, you might be stuck with using an alternate extension for your name (such as .net or .biz) which, in my opinion does not have the power or clout of a .com name.
When thinking of a domain name for your business, here are a few things I would suggest you keep in mind:
- You want the domain name to be as short as possible - buycars.com is much stronger then youbuycarsnowforcheap.com
- You should be able to say your name out loud to someone and have them be able to write it down. Avoid words with many spelling options like "see/sea/c" or "to/2/two/too"
- Avoid using words or numbers that can be confusing. buy1car.com and buyonecar.com for example
- If possible, if you can have a keyword in your domain that people search for - its a big bonus. For example having the word "cars" or "buy" or "sales" in your car sales business is a big bonus.
For YoniFlex, we first found the word "Yoni" - which is a sanskrit word defined as "the female genitalia, regarded as s divine symbol of pleasure and matrix of generation and the visible form of Sakti" This word Yoni symbolizes power and strength, and we really connected with this word.
After we found the word Yoni, it was a matter of finding an available domain name that worked with the word Yoni. We wanted to come up with an additional word that worked with teh word Yoni to further expand on our business.
We had a list of about 50 different business name ideas, and to come up with these names, we used both thesaurus as well as Word Finder, which will show words with different letter numbers. We wanted a second word that was short and concise and direct.
Before we settled on "flex" - here were a handful of close seconds:
- YoniMoon.com
- YoniPeace.com
- YoniAlive.com
- YoniRule.com
- YoniDoc.com
As you can see, once we found our base word "yoni" we were able to really dive into the secondary words and discover all sorts of good business names. We went from having very few business name ideas to having too many good business name ideas.
We used the website Instant Domain Search, which allows you to search for domain names in real time to find out if they are available.
So the setup was something like this - Both Tricia and myself sitting down in front of our computers and going through word finder 3 and 4 letter words. When something jumped out at us - like "Yoni Peace" - I would check on instant domain search to see if it was available. If it was, I would write it down in a google doc. Once we had a full page of potential business names that all had available .com domain names, it was time to whittle it down.
Our final list for business name ideas ended up being:
YoniMoon.com - We liked this name as both Tricia and myself have always been connected to the moon and the nighttime. Also the word moon is calming - both Yoni and Moon are 4 letters each which adds symmetry to the name.
YoniFree.com - We really liked this name, and it was a very close second to YoniFlex. We liked the positive vibe of the word free, and 'freedom' is an often used name with all female related products and services.
KegelFitness.com - This was another strong contender, as it really described our product lineup (pelvic floor strenghteners) and the word fitness is a strong and powerful name. Ultimately it was just a little bit too long of a business name.
And a funny one we considered:
IDontPee.com - This was a bit of a tongue and cheek domain as incontinence (the inability to hold your pee) is a big reason people would consider using our product. We ended up thinking this was a bit too unprofessional, but it did make it near the top of our list.
We ended up with YoniFlex.com as the final business name because:
- Yoni is a fun word - hard to miss-spell, and combines strength and power with the intimate areas our business is involved with.
- Flex is an exact description of our products - which flex the pelvic floor muscles to strengthen them. Flex is also a powerful word - when someone flexes they are showing power and strength.
- It really rolls off the tongue - try saying Yoni Flex several times in a row. Its smooth and fun to say
- It is exactly 8 letters and 2 words, which is great for making logos and banners and other promotional materials
I hope this has given you some incite into both how we chose our business name, as well as tips and advice for how you can choose yours. I would suggest that you take your time and really think it over. Your business name is going to be a big part of your life, and just picking one quickly is a mistake.
Best of luck in your business adventures! If you have any questions please reach out to us, or add a comment to this post.
Peace and Love,
Dave