Using Data to Pick the Optimal Name for Your Startup

> Thanks to @milesgrimshaw who inspired this reminder not to believe everything you read, even if there's seemingly cohoret data to support the argument.

I was reading the article thinking what crap this is, then came to the end. Well done.

It was an article the other day from "Paper by 53" about Facebook's new Paper. Why not choose a more unique name? After all, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr etc. are "unique" names that has ended up as words in our vocabulary.

I remember asking Mario, the creator of libgdx, why he chose that weird name for his framework. He said it was because it would be easy to search and get the results you were looking for. Not a startup, but semi-relevant to naming.

By the way: this needs to be matched against a baseline distribution of initial letters in words and common names. Zoozimps, yo.

For further reading, my own testing on actual data of startup names vs. venture capital raised revealed that the name is completely uncorrelated to the amount of capital raised.

http://minimaxir.com/2013/10/wrds-and-vwls/

Nice message at the end, but to be honest I don't think anyone bought the story in the first place.

Optimality implies objectivity. You don't choose the optimal name, you find out what it is.

abfiloprtx.com