Three Tips for Naming Your Small Business in 2025
Barbara from SharkTank has some tips to follow when you name your business. Matt reacts to her advice. He agrees with some and gives a few tips himself. If you’re starting a business soon watch this to help you name your business.
There are tons of people out on social media giving business advice. Some of it is good advice, but most of it isn’t good. In this series watch CapForge’s owner react to different advice videos. He’s an expert in all things business and has 20+ years of experience under his belt. Some of the things he reacts to might even surprise you!
Video Transcript:
Business Advice Video:
It ain’t so easy to name 1 let me give you my three tips. No. 1 your name’s gotta be short. No. 2 it’s gotta be easy to pronounce. 3 the name has to apply what the business does. Let me give you three examples of good names. Crispy Cones. Says exactly what it is, they sell ice cream cones. Cousins Maine Lobster. Another great name. Everybody likes cousins, they trust them, they’re from Maine. You know they’re selling lobsters. Holiball. A great name. They’re selling oversized Christmas balls for the holidays.
Matt’s Review:
I don’t think the name is as critical as she’s making it out to seem. I’m also not sure that I would have known what Holiball does right off the bat. I guess if I thought about it for a minute. Holiball. Maybe if I saw it spelled I would think of Holly like the decoration. Ball, Christmas balls. Maybe I put that together. I don’t know that’s immediately obvious though. Crispy Cones is fine. But Cousin’s Maine Lobster is not what I would call short. So I mean yes, general advice you know it’s helpful to have a business name that is descriptive of what it is. But you can also use a tagline for that. So I can think of some names like Google, Xerox, and Oracle. Those don’t necessarily tell you anything about what those businesses do. Tesla. But with a tagline or a little, you know, a little more information you can pretty clearly establish what they’re about. And those names stick. They make good brands. So I don’t think it has to be descriptive. I do think short is good. I do think pronounceable is good. And I do think there’s only one good way to spell it. One obvious way to spell it. That’s helpful. So again Holiball kind of falls down there. I think they spelled it H O L I B A L L. But it could have been H O L L Y or H O L L I or H O L L E E. That one I think kind of fails the test on a few different metrics. I think easy to spell, easy to pronounce, short, and ideally with the dot com available. That’s gotten a lot harder these days. Most of the dot com is either somebody’s using or somebody’s at least sitting on and hoping to sell to you. And dot com is not as dominant as it used to be but it’s still pretty much the default for website names. And obviously or maybe not obviously, but also important is not already being used by someone else. If you’re planning to be a brand that is bigger than your local area then you wanna make sure it’s a unique name that isn’t already being used by somebody else for some other kind of business or some similar kind of business. And you’re gonna run into trademark issues and have to rebrand at some inconvenient time. At a lot of cost and a lot of expense and confusion to your current customers. Because the name you’ve been using is taken by somebody else. So I generally like Barbara. I think she has reasonably good advice a lot of times. But obviously, I have a few different opinions on this one than what she came up with.
