Stetoscope

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Reading, the Daniel Scocco article about domain names, I realized, I recently had to find two domain names, one for this blog, and another for the site I am developing. I do believe, that the domain is “vital” for the brand.

When I started, I had a lot of great advices that gives constraints but no direction to go :

• “It must be short, remember people have to type it”
• “It must be fun, remember that genY leads on the Internet”
• “It must describe what you do, remember you do not have many occasion to explain your activity”
• “It must be brandable, remember that any community should identify to your name”
• “It must be a dot com, people might like your service if they cannot type the URL, you are dead”
• …

It must, it must, it must,… If, you add the domain name scarcity to those cumulated advices the task seems impossible. So I decided to make it my way. Here is the direction I followed.

I. After a quick look to other names, I noticed three kinds of domain names:

• Those that tells you what they do : facebook, technorati (technorating), …
• Those that goes directly to the user benefit : yahoo, myspace, youtube…
• Those that symbolizes the brand idea : amazon, flick’r, google, wikipedia…

I did not try to choose between those categories, I only tried to find 5 good names for each… What an exercise! It forced me to focus on my key service, on my main benefit, and my key value… By the way, in the end I had 15 different names options.

II. I forgot those names for while and went back at them with new eyes and another pupose  : I wanted lovable names that could be turned into a verb (like google that from had been turned into a verb). In the end I just had four names left.

III. Then I made one-to-one tests with 20 people and that oriented me to certain kind of names.

IV. I identified the key facto that differenciated my sites from its competitors and adapted the creative patterns to this strong distinctive point.

Eventually, I had the strong feeling I had the name I was looking for…

PS : In deed, the process I followed to find stetoscope was quite shorter.
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