So you want a good app name?

Alsalam alikom wa rahmat Allah wa barakatoh (aka peace upon you!)

Fact: there are more than 100million registered hosts worldwide[1].
Fact2: there are 170K English words in Oxford dictionary[2].
Or to paraphrase, good luck finding an obvious domain name to register!

There are a lot of web sites that try to guide you through a semi-systematic process to find that perfect catchy memorable name. The good ones admit it's not exact science and there is no one size fits all recipe.

Before I begin describing my personal experience, if you are not convinced finding a good name is important, I suggest you read this article first.

DISCLAIMER: this is mainly for English-named services/apps. If your target audience is some local market, you have more freedom in picking names...

Now that you are back, here are the tips I found the most useful (your millage might vary):

1. Make it a priority to name your business/app/website.
• It inspires all team members,
• It forces you to focus on the essence of what you are trying to do,
• It creates a common language everyone agrees on.
2. Don't come up with a name in a bubble.
• Engage your team members. I can't stress how important it's for everyone involved to feel belonging.
3. Make a copy of this Sheet. And fill in all names as you go...

• The sheet automatically looks up the app name on Play Store, iTunes and Domain names. 
4. Generate at least 30 names to begin with. Some tools I used:
• http://wordoid.com/
• http://www.dotomator.com/
• http://www.dotomator.com/web20.html
• http://www.thesaurus.com/
• https://translate.google.com/ (find names in other languages that can easily be pronounced/spelled in English)
5. Pick "nice" names
• Stay under or at 10 characters..
• Make sure it's pronounceable and spellable (not a word but you get what I mean)
• Compound names are less desirable but a good strategy if you have to..
6. Now you need to get rid of the worst 10.
7. Now you need to get rid of the worst 10.
8. Keep repeating that till you have 10 remaining.
9. Time to vote!
• You can use something like: https://modernballots.com to collect and combine votes.
10. Viola! You have a pick... 
• In the past I've had to repeat the process because the name picked here didn't pass sniff test.

If you have some money to spare, you can actually test the names, create fake web pages with domain names and advertise on Facebook to gage audience interest (make sure you target the actual potential audience for your service)

Best of luck!

[1] http://tekeye.biz/2014/how-many-websites-are-there
[2] http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/words/how-many-words-are-there-in-the-english-language