How to come up with a good name for your SaaS product

I don't think your SaaS name matters as much as you think. With that being said, when choosing a SaaS name, I rely on 3 approaches:

a) Rhyme. I'll go on RhymeZone and input a keyword related to my niche. Let's say I'm creating a SaaS about teams. If you type "team", you'll get rhyming words like "beam", "diem", "seem", etc. Combine them: "TeamBeam", "SeemTeam", etc.

b) In domaining you have this notion of "brandable" names. There are specialized sites like BrandBucket that sell "brandables". You can just take a name you'd want and register a non-com version of it.

c) Use a good name generator like Namelix. You often have to input one word there, and the tool will combine that word with another word several times. See if a combination makes sense.

What I do is generate a bunch of names using these techniques and come back within a day. What name "pops" from the rest? Which name did you remember more than the rest?

Hope this helped!

I'm a trademark attorney and clients ask me this kind of question all the time. I wrote a fairly extensive blog post about how to come up with a brand name at https://jpglegal.com/how-to-come-up-with-a-brand-name/. The considerations for SAAS founders are not fundamentally different from those of other industries, but a large portion of my clients are software developers so I had them in mind when writing that blog post.

WorkWithDitto's good answer hits some of the notes I hit in my blog post, but here's a quick summary of things you should consider:

Possibly the single most important thing about your name is that you should make sure somebody else won't be able to make you change it later, and that you'll be able to get full trademark protection for it. Without trademark protection, copycats will start showing up on Google and in app stores, and you won't be able to remove them. With a registered trademark, you can immediately remove infringing listings from Google, app stores, Facebook, etc. simply by filling out a form yourself (no lawyer needed).

As WorkWithDitto mentioned, picking a descriptive name is actually a bad idea. Imagine if Microsoft had been called "Text-Based Operating Systems". The logic of that name wouldn't have lasted very long. Fortunately, they chose a very vague name that hints at their nature as a software company without restricting them. "Apple" is also cited by trademark attorneys as an example of a good brand name because it has nothing to do with computers, but their name ended up being a problem for them as they expanded into health software and music.

"Apple" is such a common word that even though it probably wasn't being used for hardware and software when Apple was founded, it was being used in pretty much every other industry. So they had to fight the Beatles' Apple Records for years in court before reportedly buying that trademark for $500 million so that there wouldn't be issues with music products. They also regularly fight my own clients in court whenever my clients try to use the word "Apple" in any product name, for industries like health and entertainment. I don't mean they're called "Apple", I just mean that they have "Apple" in them; e.g. "Apple A Day" for health consulting.

Google is a much better name than Apple because they can expand into any industry and be certain that nobody is using it, because they used an obscure word that nobody else was using, and then took the additional step of misspelling it. They probably save tens of millions of dollars in annual legal costs compared to Apple. The name is also so distinctive that by the time they got famous, anybody considering using the name "Google" in another industry probably decided not to because people would think they're related to Google because of how specific of a name it is.

It's also very valuable to have your name be easy to remember, spell, and pronounce.

People cite "brand marketplaces" like BrandBucket and Squadhelp as good places to look for brand names, but they don't sell brand names, they sell domain names. And they're not inherently "brandable." The sort of direct-hit trademark clearance they do is no substitute for a trademark attorney researching your specific brand name for your specific product and seeing if there are any partial matches, spelling variations, etc. registered for goods/services related to yours. So you can spend $5,000-$10,000 on a "brand name" only to find out that you can't use it for your product. I have a blog post about this too at https://www.communer.com/brands-for-sale-not-at-domain-name-marketplaces/.

An alternative to domain marketplaces is my Indie Hacker company, Communer, at https://www.Communer.com, where you can buy or sell registered US trademarks, many of them with a matching dot-com domain name included. It only launched about eight months ago though, so it has a relatively low volume of about 80 trademarks for sale, and only a few of them are registered for software, but here's the specific link for software brand names for sale: https://www.communer.com/product-tag/software/

Sorry for mentioning so many of my own blog posts and projects here, but your question is exactly the question law firm and bootstrapped startup exist to answer. Brand names are my life right now.

There are lots of great tools already listed in this thread so I'll describe my approach. Coming up with a great product name in a short period of time such as a day or a week is hard. However, doing it in a longer period of time is easy. I typically setup a list somewhere such as Notion, Trello, or a spreadsheet. Then I simply add name ideas to it whenever I think of a new one. I start building the product without a name. As I'm working on the features, name ideas start to flow more naturally. Additionally, as the overall product starts to consume more of my thinking, I start to notice more and more things around my everyday activities that spark new ideas. For example, if I'm building a CRM, whenever I see tweets about sending emails to customers, I get new product name ideas. As mentioned before, I keep adding these names to the list. If you want, you can even do a quick search on godaddy to check availability before you add them. This process leads to a long list of ideas. Then I break that list down into a smaller group by applying rules I think are important such as short names, relevant keywords, easily remembered. Eventually, I'll narrow down the list to about 5 names. From there, I just take another week or so thinking about those last 5 names as I'm building and usually one starts to become a favorite.

In most cases, a name will just start sounding right as you build your product.

One strategy is to just pick two words and put them together.

Examples:
GumRoad
HubSpot
SubSplash

Believe it or not, I'm actually a professional namer in my "real job" (in addition to being a startup founder), and here are my two cents:

• you want the name to have a story. If someone asks you why the product is named a certain thing, you want to be happy they asked, and proud to tell the story. You want them to be glad they asked, too -- like, it's not just "oh, well, my dog's name is Rover, so..." The story should make sense for your product or benefit, but it doesn't have to be "spot on" -- it can be more evocative or associative and still be cool. For example, my startup's name is Ditto (which I happen to really like, obviously) :) . We chose this name because part of the product's goal is helping clients and contractors communicate clearly and stay on the same page throughout a project. This name would be considered "associative" - it's not completely obvious, but it makes sense when you hear the story.

• very often, descriptive names feel "safe", but that also means that they're forgettable. Think about Dollar stores... Dollar Tree, Dollar General, Family Dollar... do any of them really stand out for you? You know what they are, but if you can't actually remember a particular brand, what good does that do? Additionally, if your name is too descriptive, you may find that in the future, you pivot or grow in a way that makes the name obsolete.

• SCREEN for availability -- trademark (at uspto.gov) and common law (google) -- if someone else is using your name OR a name that is very similar or even similar phonetically in a similar class of goods or services, then you can't use it. At the early stage of a startup, it doesn't feel like this matters too much, because the biggest risk is that your product won't be a success, not that you'll be sued for trademark infringement, but it is worth doing the preliminary screening and saving yourself a potential headache in the future. (Unless you're independently wealthy, I'd wait and not spend money on trademark attorneys, just yet -- just do the best you can yourself on the TM website and google.)

I like to spend time thinking about the emotion I want to evoke, and then look for synonyms and translations in other languages like Japanese.

But what I end up with usually includes a nod to the industry I am in or the type of person a user is.

Better Sheets is because its better than plain vanilla google sheets.

HypeLetter, tried to evoke a fist pump. And was in newsletters.

CouponMaker sounds super normal and plain but it is intentially maker because the users are creators and makers on Gumroad. CouponCreator might be a better name, but I liked the shorter word Maker.

OnlySheets evokes OnlyFans and is OnlyFans for Google Sheets.

Dark Habits is a bad habits tracker I made to evoke dark mode in google sheets.

I have a good one "Nylo" and I own that domain btw "nylo.io"
that was the first name I used for my saas currently named: nolly.io
if you liked the name and it's also short contact me

Pick a word that describes your Saas + Pick a random animal = your SaaS name.

Examples:
BannerBear
SplitBee
SurveyMonkey

Whatever you do I also verify the domain is available with a suitable TLD (.com, .app, .io, .co, etc) and maybe even that the Twitter handle is available although that's usually a lesser concern.

Don't overthink it.

The easiest method is to chose a word that describes your product well and stick another random word to it.

For example:
ScrapingBee
Lama Life
Bannerbear

Surprisingly, https://namelix.com can be really good at times.

Great Article. Bookmark now just for the Lawyers inputs here.