Start-Up Podcast #2 Choosing your company's name and brand's name

Hi Guys, this is Vaibhav and Akshay the, co-founders of Kazam and today we'll be discussing how founders come up with the name of their company and how we end up choosing Kazam for our company.


Domain Names: Earlier days were quite easier for you to choose your company's name as there was less competition and fewer companies. We all know the story of how Steve Jobs ended up choosing Apple as the name of the company. Nowadays, there is a domain war that is happening around the globe (you can't register a DOT COM name and it's super expensive). It has become a basic necessity to be super innovative and creative with your domain name. In the context of India, big companies have their names based on the names or surnames of the founders, for example TATA, Birla, Ambani and more. However, if we move on to the DOT COM revolution or the silicon revolution that happened in the west the names of the companies were very high tech names and later the names were changed into simpler names. Fun Fact: In the beginning Amazon was named as relentless and, still the domain name rentless.com belongs to Amazon. It is a tech-friendly trend that nowadays you'll see DOT IN, DOT IO and more in which you get the first name that you want in the first place. In this perspective, the companies that came in the 1990s had a great head start, were innovative and made good use of having the opportunity of creating names. For someone like Naurki.com, you know what the company is about just by the name. As a Limited Liability Partnership (LLP) or Public Limited Company (PLC), when you are trying to register your company in India, you have to go through the Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) and, you get a list of names and the name has to get approved. You do not have much liberty on what name you want to keep.


Kazam Name's Story: We were also hunting to find out the right DOT COM name for our company. We stumbled around a lot of names from Electra and ZOAR got booked before we could book it due to competition. We were searching for various names and now, have a hypothesis which we should ask from GoDaddy and BigRock that once we are searching for names online does it becomes expensive after that? Fun Fact: Keeping and trading domain names is a business itself. Why Kazam? We talked about Flash an electric-superhero character from a fiction movie who is super fast. We quickly realized we won't be able to get Flash, moving on we went to Shazam found out it is already an app related to Flash. After brainstorming more ideas, we thought of combining Shazam with magical words like "Abracadabra". Finally, we came up with Kazam (Flash + Shazam with a magic spell of Abracadabra). However, we now have a different challenge of pronunciation from "kaazam to kaezam".


Legal Considerations: You need to take care of a lot of legalities. You can't create a generic name for your brand after the commodity you are selling. For example, if you are selling rice you can't name your product rice itself (you can, but someone will legally dispute it) but if you are selling mobile phones you can name your company as rice. Please consider various other factors before naming and buying domain names such as trademark, right violation, if already a company exists with the same name or not) or else it will be a big hassle to change everything once registered or bought.


Facts & Trends:

Nowadays people are much open to DOT IN than to DOT COM. IN the earlier days DOT COM came much more naturally to people than DOT IN.

More focus on vernacular words such as Khatabook or Dastavais.

Names from Indian traditional literature, names from our accurate language like Moglix (similar pronunciation with Mogli). This is due to the search capabilities of Tier 2 and Tier 3 people who search keywords in their language.

Company names can become verbs for example Paytm (Paytm Karo), Google (Google it), Swiggy (Let's just Swiggy it), Dunzo (Dunzo Krvalo), Kazam (Kazam Karle). On the other hand, some names don't become verbs, for example, Google Pay (one won't say Google Pe kardo), Charge Point (Charge point Karlo).

Remember a good name can be a boon but it can also be to blame! Let's say you choose a name and, the name kind of creates a psychological barrier. For example "Book My Show" was initially for booking movies and they diversified to travel segments. If they just would have been Book My Movie they couldn't diversify it more.




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