How we chose the name Attio

Choosing a name is no small feat. It’s the heartbeat of your company, the first impression you make on potential customers, and the foundation of your brand identity. With over 362 million domain registrations across all TLDs, finding something unique, memorable, and available is even harder.

When preparing to launch Attio, we went on a journey to find the right name and make sure the domain would be available. From navigating high domain prices, compounding words, inventing new ones, and ultimately trusting our instincts - it was a process that challenged us at every turn. But in the end, we found a name that felt right for who we were and who we wanted to become. Here’s the story behind how we chose the name Attio.

The only requirement

Securing the right domain is one of the toughest challenges when launching a startup. Your domain is the epicenter of your brand - where potential customers go to learn about what you do, where you convert most of your customers and, in our case, where users access our product every day.

When we were choosing our name, we were aware that several TLDs like .co and .io were fashionable amongst startups - largely because they tend to be more readily available. Despite that trend, having a .com domain was our one non-negotiable requirement. As Paul Graham puts it:

"The problem with not having the .com of your name is that it signals weakness. Unless you're so big that your reputation precedes you, a marginal domain suggests you're a marginal company." - Paul Graham

It's the gold standard for any brand. So we knew we needed a .com domain.

.com does not come cheap

We initially took a targeted approach: we created a shortlist of potential names - mostly interesting one-word domains like flow.com - and began researching availability, tracking down the owners, and submitting offers.

Unsurprisingly, one-word .com domains don’t come cheap. Seven-figure openers weren't uncommon, with the lowest priced domains starting in the low six-figures. Although the response rate was promising, we quickly realized that this approach wasn’t viable for us - we had only raised a pre-seed round at this point.

We needed a new strategy.

Compound words?

Despite there being ~170,000 words in the English language, a fair proportion of these won't make a brand name and the rest are almost certainly already parked by professional domain resellers.

So, we turned to compound words.

This opened up a wealth of possibilities, but an infinite number of combinations to research is a lot. To help narrow down our options, we created two lists:

Primary words: These were words related to our product’s goals, our company’s mission, and were short (one or two syllables) for ease of compounding.
Secondary words: These were words that worked well as endings and were relatively neutral.

One spreadsheet later and we had this:

We began scanning through hundreds of possible combinations, and we categorized our options into three groups:

Black: Good, but currently taken.
Blue: Good, taken, but potentially purchasable.
Green: Good and available.

Even though there are many successful companies with compound names (think Dropbox, Facebook, YouTube, or PayPal), nothing felt quite right. Not to mention the fact that searching through hundreds of sub-par names for a rough diamond is a painstaking process - we decided to change tack again.

Getting imaginative

If one-word domains were too expensive and compound names were too limiting, what about inventing a new word?

We found an incredibly useful tool: instantdomainsearch.com.

We began experimenting with different combinations of letters to find something that was available but also reflected the brand identity we wanted to build.

Of course, we couldn’t just mash the keyboard and hope for the best. There's a general pattern that English words follow in order to make sense.

Only certain letters can be repeated twice in a row (t, p, r, d, b, l and s).
No letter can be repeated three times in a row.
Vowels and consonants rarely group in sets greater than two.

After several sprints, we had come up with the following shortlist of potential names:

If the process sounds a little random, it's because it was. But over time, we found ourselves getting into the rhythm of it and making some real progress. Names like Twilio, Vercel, and Monzo were reminders that creating a new word is entirely possible, and sometimes it leads to something great.

The final hurdle

Once we had our shortlist, we had to pick our favorite. To make the final decision, we had to weigh four key factors:

Spelling: If someone heard the name, would they know how to spell it? Could they easily type it into Google a few hours later?
Pronunciation: Would it work in different accents? Would someone immediately understand you, or would you be left forever repeating it to potential customers? If people only ever read it, would pronunciation be uniform?
Competitiveness: Could we rank at the top of search results? Could we secure matching social media handles to ensure consistency across platforms? Were trademarks available to protect our name?
Feel: We all experience a myriad of brand names on a daily basis. As a result, almost everyone has a great sense for when a brand name feels right. We didn’t want our name to have any negative associations, and we wanted it to have the ability to be big.

No prizes for guessing which one we settled on.