Company Naming via Python

Last week I registered my first ever company in the UK – hurrah and huzzah! (That’s not the company name, just the sound of me celebrating). The hardest and most time-consuming part of this operation was coming up with a name. I wanted the root of my company name to fulfil the following deceptively tricky requirements:

1. It must be unregistered at Companies House in any variation – not only should there be no “XYZ Ltd”, but also no “XYZ Accounting”, “XYZ Blinds”, etc.
2. The .com domain name must be available
3. It should be short – ideally one word, so nothing like “Blue Sky Software Consulting”
4. It should sound good to my ears (I’m going to have to live with it for a while, after all)

Initially I did the same thing most people probably do and tried to rely on my own unprompted creativity. “How hard can it be?”, I thought. “Come to me, company naming muse, I have cakes and PlayStation…”.

Apparently muses don’t like cake or video games, because several hours later I was no closer to coming up with a name and had started to feel like the least creative person in the history of uncreative people. For every name I mustered, some variant of the company name was already registered, or else the domain name was unavailable. Clearly, I needed to come at this problem from a different angle.

I thought back to my time at Talis Systems and the words we settled on when faced with similar naming challenges. “Kasabi” and “Cohodo” were two I particularly liked, and I noticed they both fit this pattern:

  consonant, vowel1, consonant, vowel1, consonant, vowel2

Perhaps this formula could help me? If I could generate a big list of random words that fit this pattern, I need only pick a few that sound good, then iteratively narrow this shortlist down to the one that best satisfies my criteria. This felt like a much more well-defined problem. And if we can write software to randomly recreate the complete works of Shakespeare, or learn how to play classic Nintendo video games, this particular problem should be an absolute doddle to solve in code.

Sweet. I reached for an editor and cranked out this quick and dirty Python script:

import sys
from random import randint

VOWELS = ['a', 'e', 'i', 'o', 'u', 'y']
CONSONANTS = ['b', 'c', 'd', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'j', 'k', 'l', 'm',
              'n', 'p', 'q', 'r', 's', 't', 'v', 'w', 'x', 'z']

def random_vowel():
    return VOWELS[ randint(0, len(VOWELS) - 1) ]

def random_consonant():
    return CONSONANTS[ randint(0, len(CONSONANTS) - 1) ]

def make_word():
    repeating_vowel = random_vowel()
    word = random_consonant()
    word += repeating_vowel
    word += random_consonant()
    word += repeating_vowel
    word += random_consonant()
    word += random_vowel()
    return word

num_words = int(sys.argv[1])
print "Making " + str(num_words) + " random 6 letter words"

words = []
for i in range(0, num_words):
    words.append( make_word() )
words.sort()

for word in words:
    print "\t" + word

I ran this for 150 names initially, giving me output something like this:

Making 150 random 6 letter words
	bemero
	betege
	beteme
	bifico
        ....

At this point I called in help – I emailed the raw, unedited list of random words to a couple of friends. One expressed some admiration for one of the words on the list; I mulled it over for a few seconds and decided that I too liked the cut of this word’s literary jib. A quick search against Companies House, a WHOIS query and some Googling later, and I had my company name: Kubuko Ltd. Easy as that, and I didn’t even need to put a dent in my cake collection.

Once I adopted a fresh approach, the whole thing came together in under 20 minutes, including the time to write and run the script, as well as the peer review by email. This little episode illustrates the value of the following activities in the face of a creative block:

1. Change your approach
2. Generate a quick list of some alternative solutions, however crappy some of those alternatives may be (“Bykymy Ltd.”, anyone?)
3. Introduce some level of collaboration with peers

And for the geeks amongst us, if you can find a way to frame a general problem as a technical problem, at least partially, and solve that by writing code, all the better.