What’s in a Name?

Naming your high-potential startup is one of the first actions of a co-founding team. The selected name captures the essence of the fledgling company as you go out into the world raising money, connecting with partners, and ultimately selling to customers. It is a more critical and strategic decision than many realize, so let’s examine some lessons learned regarding this fateful decision.

For many founders, naming a company is profoundly bold and emotional work. It represents that creative action of calling forth a new entity into being. You need a name to create a corporate entity. You need a name to communicate your passion for the problem you are solving and the solution you are providing. You need a name to distinguish your company from others. You need a name to convey your value to potential customers in a memorable way. Yet, founders often are internally focused on their own new company genesis process, and there will sometimes be things learned later that influence naming choices. Here are three examples that illustrate some of the factors that go into naming a company to help illuminate these factors:

Accuri

Initially, the co-founding team chose Accuri Instruments as the company name. Accuri was a riff on “accurate,” with the goal of capturing our purpose of creating accurate instruments. We added instruments because, at the time we founded the company, we had a fuzzy notion of developing multiple instruments over time, so the non-specific breadth of “instruments” felt like an umbrella that could house various product offerings.

A few years into product development, we had prototype flow cytometers (a scientific instrument used in scientific and medical research and medical testing). We realized that calling ourselves Accuri Instruments failed to quickly and succinctly communicate what we were doing to our prospects. In addition, having raised angel and venture capital, we now realized that we would not be building a whole stable of different instruments underneath this particular corporate entity because of our investors’ timelines. We changed the company name to Accuri Cytometers to capture what we were doing.

Then, we reached the point of beginning to market and sell our first instrument. We made the considered choice to emphasize the company name, Accuri Cytometers, in our marketing rather than trying to build brand recognition with two names, a company name and a product name. We named our first product the C6, which left room for adding additional versions and ancillary products, and built the brand around Accuri Cytometers and Accuri C6. Ultimately, customers embraced the brand and began calling the product “The Accuri.”

It was the right call to focus our naming choices on a word that was distinctive, evocative, and simple to say and remember. Following the M&A exit to a big company in our flow cytometry space, the Accuri brand name survived because of the built brand equity. The C6 name was never intended to be the focus of marketing. In fact, it was intended to minimize the details of the product name while focusing the company and product association on Accuri, a friendly and distinctive name designed to evoke our value of accuracy.

Judy Security

At founding, Raffaele Mautone, a cybersecurity expert, was unsure what to name his new venture, so he took his daughters’ first initials plus a planned Detroit headquarters to get to a personally meaningful start, AAD. A name search with these letters yielded AaDya, but was pronounced A-Dee-Ya in Latin and the Middle East. To try to connect more closely to cybersecurity, they tried pronouncing AaDya as A-DAY-YA and added Security for Aadya Security. The challenge was that, for prospects, this name still did not capture the essence of the product and was challenging to spell and remember.

Over time, as the product developed, one of its features – an AI cybersecurity assistant named “Judy” became central to the user interface. Judy captured the user-friendly brand essence that helped small and medium-sized business customers feel supported in tackling complex cybersecurity issues.

When customers started talking about the product as “Judy,” the lightbulb went on. The team recognized that changing the company name to Judy Security would make the sophisticated software company more accessible and approachable.  The new corporate name captured that helpful user-friendly personification while conveying its mission to improve security. With a memorable, easy-to-spell name like Judy Security, you never forget the name after you meet them!

After executing the name change and updating the branding, customers easily connected the product they loved with the company that delivered it. By encouraging small and medium-sized business customers to “Meet Judy,” Judy Security helped their customers and prospects learn how to protect their virtual environments with Judy’s comprehensive security features.

Fifth Eye

Initially, the team developing the technology that would become the foundation for Fifth Eye named their project “Trove,” and we went through the licensing process under the name Trove Analytics. However, I was always cautious about investing in this name because a quick internet and USPTO search revealed that many companies had Trove in their names and trademarks. As a result, while we completed our technology license agreement and raised our initial round of funding under the Trove Analytics name, I decided not to invest in building a website and brand until we had the resources to do naming and branding right.

Once we had money in the bank, we hired a full-service creative agency that immediately questioned our company naming choice. With their help, we generated criteria for an effective name (unique, memorable, easy-to-spell, evocate of the value we were seeking to deliver, etc.) and developed a list of over 100 options. Our tiny team of five iterated through several stages to shrink the list down to the best candidates and ultimately landed on Fifth Eye, which captured the idea of seeing something valuable, avoided the cultural connotations of third eye, and was easy to spell. We rejected many “made-up words” because using made-up, oddly capitalized, or overly generic word practices often results in a brand name that is difficult for newcomers like prospects to spell, remember, and engage with. Once we had our name, we developed logos, branding, and a website to introduce what we were doing to the world.

As time progressed, this software medical device company created our first AI-analytic that was ultimately granted a De Novo authorization to market by the FDA. Because it was the first of hopefully many analytics the company would get FDA-cleared, we gave that product a specific name that related to its purpose and left the door open for new, unique product names that would facilitate FDA clearance while branding them all with the overarching corporate brand.

Hopefully, these three case studies highlight some of the considerations that deserve attention when naming startups, which ideally means avoiding starting with the wrong name. At the same time, if you discover that a name could be better, these cases also highlight that it is possible to pivot successfully to a new name and leverage that name effectively.

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Thank you, Raffaele Mautone, Founder and CEO of Judy Security, for sharing your story of naming Judy Security for this blog! Check out JudySecurity.ai for an excellent example of personifying a sophisticated software product to make complex software much more accessible and approachable.