About
Why The Naming Convention
In my work at Stellar, we help hundreds of ambitious founders incorporate their companies.
And as a ‘branding person‘, I have a deep appreciation for good names.
I actually sometimes get involved in brainstorming the names of my friends’ companies.
Here is some of the ‘naming’ work I’ve done…
- I have friends who sell fermented foods that are rich in probiotics, and good for the gut. So late one night, after tossing around a few ideas with them… I proposed ‘Gutsy’… and it stuck!
- Another friend was building an oil trading company, and we were looking for names that had an available .com domain. I suggested ‘Oil Matters’… and it too, was adopted.
- When I consulted for Singapore’s DBS Bank in/around 2013 — on their strategy for reaching ambitious startups in Singapore — I named the program ‘Business Class’, and it continues to be used today.
- Same thing in/around 2009 when I gave the Singapore Health Promotion Board the name for their program: ‘Healthy Together‘ — a social media and community-focused program to encourage Singaporeans to get healthy.
- I named my first PR & Marketing agency business, Omni fluence— to explain how social media was going to disrupt everything we knew back then, about ‘Influence’.
So. In short… I love creating brands — product names and company names. And I love discovering the stories behind the names, of the many startups that I meet.
That’s why I started this podcast to interview founders about their Product and Company Names… what they mean, and how they came about. What inspired the names? What other names they considered, and why they eventually chose what they chose?
I hope this effort will accomplish a few things…
- To give Founders a place to share their story… behind the one thing that distinguishes their products and companies, from similar-looking competitors.
- To help others, who are in the process of thinking up new names for their startups — in a world, where many ‘good words’ are already used, and where quality .coms are already taken.
This podcast is called ‘The Naming Convention’ for a couple of reasons:
First of all… a ‘Naming Convention’ can simply mean — the agreed way in which names are ascribed… or the way naming is usually done.
Well, if you’re a geek, then… “a naming convention is a set of rules for choosing the character sequence to be used for identifiers which denote variables, types, functions, and other entities in source code and documentation.”
But the ‘Convention’ in this name also carries a second meaning — A meeting, or assembly for a certain topic. And in this case, I hope to gather the insights of founders who named the companies that they are building.
Meet Your Host
Melvin is a 3x venture-backed founder who has successfully built disruptive companies and products in several industries. A serial entrepreneur and advisor to multiple startups, Melvin founded Stellar to enable founders to start and run global companies with ease.
Before Stellar, Melvin co-founded YFind Technologies — an Indoor Positioning Technology company — that was acquired by NYSE-listed Ruckus Wireless, Inc.
Earlier in his career, he started and ran the Asia Pacific digital business unit for global communications agency — WE Communications — growing it from zero to a team of over thirty professionals, serving Fortune 500 clients, banks and Singapore government agencies.