Naming projects

How the … do people come up with names for companies and projects. I don’t get it. It seems that I can come up with a name in two ways:

1. Grab the first that comes into my mind and go with that even though it blows. Notetagger ?! Cmon, Jakob, surely you can do better…
2. Spend forever pondering synonyms, combinations, puns, making endless lists and evaluating, scrapping, thinking, reconsidering, and eventually end up deciding that I can’t come up with a name that works. Gah!

To top it all off, I’ve found a criteria that’s perfect for figuring out if the name I’ve come up with is good enough: The domain name is taken. For all worthwhile top level domains.

Sigh.

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There’s a business of companies that help and consult companies on how to find the best names. The most well-known is Igor, which has a broad reputation in the advertising agency. I have never worked with them myself, but I have had collegues back when I was in the advertising business that had.

I really do not think that a name should just be random because the domain name is available. I tried about 100-200 names before I found the one for my current company Captive. Captive because we like to captivate (possitive sense) our customers for long-term results.