When Google Hates Your Name: Why We Renamed Our Startup

It's one of the first things a startup has to do and one of the most difficult: choosing a name. We recently went through the process again, after our original name, "Cadio", wasn't working for us.
First and foremost, most people had no idea how to pronounce "Cadio". We would constantly have to help them as they struggled to say it for the first time. In addition, it gave no indication what we did. Many people thought we made a new kind of medical device or something related to "Cardio". Google agreed with them:

Worse still, it was not a memorable name. As I met new people I would do a simple test: I'd introduce myself and Cadio and, then, a few minutes into the conversation, ask them if they remembered the name of my company. Very few people would correctly remember Cadio.
For these reasons, we realized "Cadio" wasn't going to work and started coming up with a new name. We wanted something which was easy to say, hinted at what we did, and was a domain we could get. We tried a number of methods and the approach that worked best was to take words at the heart of what we do (Geographic, Location, Maps, ...) and add different endings to create a new word that was easy to say. This is an increasingly popular way to name a startup: Backupify, Performable, Shareaholic, Embedly, ...
There's a million domain tools to help with this process. One that's particularly useful for exploring options following this scheme is Wordoid. It creates pronounceable fake words based on a real word you give it. The results are then displayed with whether the domain is free or not and how common a term it is on the internet.
The other tool we used a lot is: Domize. As you type, it will return if a domain is unregistered or not, and also if it's available on a secondary market.
Using these tools, we came up with a list of close to 100 candidate names. As a team, we choose our favorites, giving anyone the right to veto a name. Once we narrowed down the list, we enlisted the help of the MassChallenge community to make the final decision. I put our top two choices up on the whiteboard along with "Cadio" and asked other finalists to put a checkmark beside their pick. After a few days of voting, the result was clear. Less than 10% of people chose Cadio, confirming our decision to change our name. And three times as many people selected Locately as the runner-up, GeoFox. We had our name.
If you're starting fresh, don't repeat the mistakes we did. Make sure your name:

Is easy to pronounce
Indicates what you do
Is memorable

When choosing a name, it's best to get it right the first time.
 
 
Drew Volpe is the CTO of Location Analytics startup Locately. He's been a co-founder or early employee of four startups, all focused on data processing and analysis. He was formerly Director of Engineering at Endeca Technologies and most recently co-founder/VP of Engineering for BankFox.com. He holds an A.B. in Computer Science from Harvard University and is a KCBS-certified barbeque judge.