I haven’t written a blog post in awhile and its because we’ve been furiously working on launching our latest startup.  μ

I can’t yet tell you what we tried to build over the past 10 bajillion (I’ve lost count) sleepless nights, but I may drop a few hints along the way…so, off to the name game!

In the very beginning, this can be the most agonizing process a startup team will go through, so prepare yourself for the following furious five factors:

1. Cooks in the Kitchen — how many people have to agree on the name? In our case, we have a handful of stakeholders.
2. B2C – we’re  a business-to-consumer, disruptive technology company, not B2B, so it helps that the name be descriptive, easy to spell, and make sense. If we were a B2B company, we could basically name it whatever we want and build the service brand around it.
3. Double Entendre — Jay Z likes to brag that he writes lyrics that can be understood from multiple levels (sometimes 3 like on Drake’s new album). I don’t think he’s the best at it but he tries.  In the startup world, it’s akin to DropBox.  I mean, what a perfect name for their auto-syncing, file sharing, “networked server” consumer & small business service. You physically drop files into their digital box and it syncs auto-magically across multiple computers, mobile devices, friends computers, etc.
4. Coke Vs Pepsi — no, we’re not competing in the CPG (consumer products group) industry, but we are competing in an area that’s been around since the mid 80s and one that marketers have used nearly since that time.  Good luck finding literally any available keywords in these circumstances, let alone the available domain to go with it.  In 2010, “.com” availability is going to be BY FAR your biggest hurdle; it was certainly ours.
5. Verbs — notice how people use the term Google both as a company name AND as a verb, as in “I’m going to google that”?  Yah, incorporating the same concept was something we hoped to do as well, but is one of those difficulty 9.5 sorta things where the stars have to align just right to work.

So given these limitations, how did we possibly come up with a name you ask?  Well, it sure wasn’t easy.  We scoured the internet, thesaurus, dictionary, wikipedia, and google for keyword ideas.  We thought in terms of physical and intangible objects, we thought of scientific names, the periodic table of elements, space, quarks and quasars, verbs, and on and on, ad infinitum.

After logging hundreds of flight hours on domain.com searching for available .com keyword phrases, we finally settled on one with the mission critical keyword in it.   We came up with some other really catchy names, but they simply weren’t available as a .com and we simply weren’t willing to settle on that 4th factor.

In the end, we’re satisfied with our choice, as we now have to build the identity, brand, and service to support it, which are much more important than the name in the end anyways.

The problem however, quickly became a numbers game.  We simply couldn’t overcome with variable costs associated with building out this revolutionary new consumer-to-consumer communication technology.  Note:  I realize that revolutionary is probably the most over-used word in the dictionary, and something that comes with every single startup on the planet.  However, this truly required no change in user behavior, has a 97% usage rate, and has a glaring flaw that everyone seems to miss, which we corrected.

Thus, and sadly, you’ll probably never get to hear the creative name we came up with (unless some technology changes in the short term).  However, I will say that naming and branding is another specialty of ours so if you need help, just give the Branding Experts at Evolyte a shout.

You should follow @seanMeverett on Twitter here but only if you want to