The brainstorming process behind the naming of a company

Last Friday Jon gave us a tongue-in-cheek list of possible names we could have chosen instead of RentConfident. The real process of choosing our name was much more serious.

Clever Girl

I'm overly fond of the word "clever." It feels nice to say. It has lots of strong consonants. It reminds me of the first "Jurassic Park" movie. It also bears a decent resemblance to my last name. "Clever Realty of Chicago" was an official DBA for my old company. When I started work on the project that was to become RentConfident, it was natural that I would therefore call the thing "Clever Tenant."

Clever Tenant became the original working name of the project. In fact, the some of the oldest files on my hard drive are still saved in a folder with that name.

When I invited Jon to join me as a business partner the company couldn't be so closely tied to my own name anymore. We dedicated a few hours of our weekly meetings to coming up with a new name.

Contrasting Styles

We agreed on a bunch of words that related to the apartment industry, then split up for a bit to come up with something that referenced both rentals and what we do. The outcome is a pretty hilarious indicator of our two contrasting personalities. Jon stayed on the couch and wrote from the heart, as he tends to do. I stayed by the computer, meticulously running every name I came up with through a domain name checker and the Illinois Secretary of State's database of existing businesses to make sure I wasn't leaping at something that was totally unavailable.

You can see our notes below. Jon's are the tidy ones on the left. Mine are the frantic angular scribbles on the right. (Folks have said that I write like a guy and that Jon writes like a girl. I think we're both fine with that.)

Upon comparing notes, we came up with three unique options that we both liked. I brought ResidenScience and RentSnoop. Jon brought RentConfident. We were quite fond of all of them. At an impasse, I loaded up SurveyMonkey and put the three in front of my Facebook friends to choose.

Jon's option won the vote.

Making it Official

It's pretty telling how much the internet has affected modern business and branding. I registered rentconfident.com in October 2014, pretty much within an hour after the SurveyMonkey quick poll was done. It took us until March 2015 to get around to reserving the name with the Illinois Secretary of State. If we'd missed out on the corporate name we could have used "RentConfident of Chicago" or something similar instead. There would be no similar alternatives if we missed out on the domain name.

Oh, and for you grammarians out there, we did look at picking up rentconfident.ly. We decided the $75 cost for a ".ly" domain was not worth spending for what was basically a nerd joke. We also didn't feel terribly comfortable hosting a domain in Libya, the country that owns and maintains all domains that end in ".ly". It's tough to maintain uptime when foreign governments shut down access to the internet. Maybe we'll add it to the roster someday when the political atmosphere in Libya is more stable.

What's in Your Name?

How do you name things? Your business, your pets, your kids. Let us know in the comments!