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I'm seeing a trend of using an actual word for a brand because it's available on an obscure TLD. Unless you have a $10 MM+ to spend on SEO efforts, and that word is seldom used (especially in your industry), I think it's a mistake to use a single actual word for a brand.
I just changed the name of my app after learning some lessons the hard way. Let me share.
Some factors to consider for naming:
Suggestive meaning:
Your name suggests a meaning, but doesn't box your app into a narrow featureset, e.g. Amazon. It's a judgment call as to where to draw the boundary.
Google SEO dynamics:
If your name is two distinct words, it will take time, effort, and money to make Google search recognize that two-word name as a distinct entity.
Does your brand, or a distinct component of your brand, have a word with a high cost per click? That may be okay as long as you don't see yourself paying for ads for that word alone.
Shorter names are better. But SurveyMonkey was still successful.
Google explicitly says the TLD doesn't matter, but is that really so? Even if the TLD choice is not explicitly weighted, there may be other aspects of SEO boosting .com.
Formality:
In general, a name for selling to businesses should be more formal than a name for selling to consumers. If your business is based on credibility, like providing real estate data, have a more credible sounding name. Fun fact, CB Insights had to change their name from Chubby Brain because Goldman Sachs wouldn't list a business named Chubby Brain as a data source.
The sound:
If you need an international presence, you want a name that people around the world can say, hear, and type into Google Search. This is harder than it seems. My first employer, Appian, has a name that is not universally said and heard the same way.
You want your name to be recognizable or at least inferrable by voice-to-text algorithms. This goes for TLDs as well. For example, .co sounds a lot like .com. The .world domain kind of sounds like "the world".
Branding uniqueness:
For example, one strategy, especially if you're selling to businesses, is to concatenate two words, like Datadog.
Completely made up words need lots of marketing spend, e.g. Zillow.
Actual words make it hard to find your community's content. For example, Neon.tech has a great product, but it is very difficult to find sites talking about Neon the serverless Postgres service because you get flooded with results about the color neon.
Legal stuff:
No trademark collisions, especially in the US.
The USPTO provides a free search experience, and it had a big update recently. Regarding worldwide trademarks, I haven't heavily researched it, but Madrid Protocol is for international multi-country trademark registration.
Useful resources for naming:
instantdomainsearch.com for domain searching with refreshed results upon each keystroke
The book: Hello, My Name is Awesome. Its main point is to prioritize memorability over shortness.
Excellent writeup. Also a good idea to pay attention to the number of syllables, more syllables more complex to pronounce and remember.
Holy grail is 2 syllables
Yes, two syllables a good starting point. Of course, that's premium domain territory. But don't force it. Xata.io, good product, but the name was probably a forced name to fit into two syllables - their justification of their name is a stretch. (I think it was something like "external data". The fact that I'm really into names and can't remember its reason is not good)
Also, a contemporary and increasingly important factor is voice to text search. The voice-to-text models have an easier job inferring with an unknown name when it has more syllables. And even if your two-syllable name is known, it's likely to collide if it uses common English phonic combinations: I really like the musician Keshi but don't at all like Kesha
Also, the way English phonics work, some syllable combinations are said way faster than others. Clarity, three syllables, is said very quickly. It’s nearly one linguistic motion in the oral human anatomy
TotalTech is two or three linguistic motions depending on the American or British pronunciation
AWS is 5 syllables, but I don’t think people readily realize that because the w is said so quickly
Convex, a two syllable word with two stresses in American pronunciation and an ending X sound, has a similar total speaking time as AWS when you count the pause between words in a natural sentence. (The British conVex is said a bit faster)