Progress Update No. 06 - Terrible First Versions and Choosing a New Name

1. The Difficulty of Choosing a New Name

I need to choose a name for a new company but these days it's incredibly difficult - everything's bloody taken!

This is the minimum checklist in my mind:

• Domain name available
• Linkedin available
• Search engine results page is relatively uncompetitive
• Easily spellable if you hear it in conversation
• Nice bonus: conveys something relating to the company's offering - (so in this case, solving ad creative production for performance marketers).
  

❌ What Doesn't Work

The " Digital" format is a complete blood bath.

Honestly, by now pretty much every reasonable-ish sounding noun has been taken with this format and will generally already be a marketing/creative agency somewhere.

✅ My Favourite Format: Pairing Two Dictionary Words

(Dictionary words mean they're not made-up words or misspellings)

Single dictionary words (e.g. fast.com) are brilliant but are either taken or if they are miraculously available, you'll have to stump up quite a sum probably £100k+ if it's a decent word.
But pairing up two dictionary words gives you a fair shot at finding interesting combinations that are available at a good price AND tick all the boxes above.

So after some research, I've landed on...

🥁 🥁 🥁

Tiny Cult.

It's available, uncontested in search results and I was able to nab the Linkedin handle.

Meaning-wise it hints at the fact that I want this company to be something where we actively choose to work offering cool/useful things for a smaller group of Performance Marketers who get the game and are probably a bit more advanced.

So if that means saying "no" to a bunch of customers who aren't the best fit, then that's ok.

If we end up with a small but passionate group of Performance Marketers where we can crack on and do some great stuff together - starting with creative production for ads today - then in my eyes that will be a brilliant outcome.

Hence, "Tiny" + "Cult".

Slight downside - the .com is available but for ~£2k.  

So to start with I'm rolling with tinycult.co.uk.

I'll stump up the £2k once this goes somewhere :)

2. Getting a First Version Live

They say if you're not embarrassed by your first version then you shipped too late.

Well, behold this absolute monstrosity of a V1 landing page.

85 lines of horrendously crap code, straight from the opening Hello World module of Codeacademy 😂

https://tinycult.co.uk/

P.S.

Update:  I couldn't help it, had to update the damn thing with at least a link to some Gslides for more info.  

(So now it's 95 lines of terrible code)

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