One of the important things to settle before you start anything, a company, a site, a blog, is the name. Think about the name more than once. I mean that literally: think about it, then think about it again.
About a year before this post, we had an idea we’d thought through and planned in real detail, except for one piece: what to call it. In English, the naming problem barely exists. “How To,” “How to do things,” combinations like that come easily. In Albanian, we kept circling something like “Mësime” (Lessons) or “Si Ta Bëjmë” (How to Do It), and we actually started building under those working names. After a while it was obvious something wasn’t sitting right, and we were getting close to the point where we needed to go online with whatever we had. That’s when it hit me: the name isn’t a detail you settle later. Without the right name, you don’t get to launch at all.
Then, after a while, the name arrived. Most of our audience today knows us by a name that, at first, struck people as a little silly, a little strange. For us, that strangeness was part of the motivation to keep going rather than stop: we knew we’d found the right one. “Qysh Me,” how to, in the dialect we actually spoke rather than the textbook version, and by luck, a four-letter domain to match it: qysh.me, using Montenegro’s .me.
So: think hard, more than once, before you settle a name for your company or your product. Look it up, check what it means in other languages while you’re at it, and try to keep it simple and legible about what you actually do. Does it move the audience, even a little? Don’t underestimate a name. And think it over properly before you commit to “Qysh Me” as an answer for anything.
The line that was on my mind while writing this, from Jeff Bezos: “A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well.”
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