Do you need a name for your company, website, product, or service?
Hire The Name Inspector (a.k.a. Christopher Johnson, Ph.D.).
He can do any or all of the following:

• Help you define your naming problem.
• Analyze a list of competitors’ names and suggest positioning and name types to stand out.
• Do independent creative naming and present name ideas.
• Run a group brainstorming exercise or do other forms of collaborative naming work.
• Help you find an available domain name.
• Identify a domain that might be for sale, and help broker a purchase.
• Analyze a list of name candidates and pick the best one(s).
• Do a quick “gut check” on a name that you’re almost ready to go with.
• Suggest taglines and other marketing language to play off your name.

Naming, like politics, is the art of the possible. Sure, it involves creativity, and playfulness, and all those qualities that creative firms claim to be bursting with. You can judge from this blog whether The Name Inspector has them too. But ultimately you have to work with the raw materials that language gives you, and you have to find a name that does what you need it to. Various obstacles make that really hard. For example, you might find that every name you think of is already registered as a .com domain.

Finding the right name, the name that works for you, takes strategic thinking and a deep understanding of what language gives us to work with. The Name Inspector brings those assets to every naming project he does.

Gregory Ng (VP, Creative Director of Brooks Bell Interactive) calls The Name Inspector “the most rationally strategic person on the science of naming that I have found online”.

Dan McComb (Co-founder of Biznik) comments, “Naming is something that happens at the crossroads of intuition and science, and The Name Inspector is the guy standing in the middle of the intersection, directing traffic.”

The Name Inspector’s qualifications are hard to beat. He’s got serious academic credentials in linguistics, years of experience creating and analyzing names (both at a top naming firm and as a consultant), and, for you techies out there, firsthand experience of the technology business and the world of startups.

When you hire The Name Inspector, you pay for his expertise. You don’t pay for a snazzy office and a staff to go with it. By working out of a virtual office and maintaining this modest (but nonetheless fabulous) website, The Name Inspector keeps his rates surprisingly affordable.

Here’s what a few customers have to say:

We hired Chris to help us with naming, and he was fantastic: helped us frame our objectives, came up with great ideas, helped evaluate ours, etc. He’s fun to work with, creative, and is one of those people who brings theory and an academic background to the table in an incredibly grounded, useful, he’ll-make-you-feel-smarter kind of way. If you’ve got something that needs naming, Chris is your guy.
-Michael Dougherty, formerly Co-founder of Redfin, currently Co-founder & CEO of Fridge Door Inc.

Alakoa engaged Christopher to assist in naming a product. He demonstrated an incredible amount of knowledge on the subject of linguistics and marketing. He was great to work with, and I would recommend him to anyone that could use his services.
-Bryan Batchelder, Co-founder & CTO of Alakoa Corporation

I hired Chris to help me with what I thought was a very challenging naming project. He quickly analyzed the problem, breaking it down linguistically and socially in a way that was alert to my business needs. I am convinced yet again, that it sometimes pays tremendous dividends to hire an expert. And when it comes to naming, no one is more expert than Christopher Johnson
-Fred Zimmerman, Associate Professor, Dept. of Health Services, School of Public Health, UCLA

he asked us how we liked TableFare. We loved it. It was available. We were able to lock down all the web domains. We had our name! The funny thing is that we had danced around very minor variations of that name over and over again, but had never put those exact syllables together.
-Carol and David Peterman, Founders, TableFare

Some names that The Name Inspector has come up with:

Common Root Architecture specializes in ecologically conscious architecture for community-oriented clients (website not up yet).

Gist prioritizes your email contacts, collects information about them from your inbox and the web, and organizes that information so you can make the most of it. Gist was founded by T.A. McCann and incubated by Vulcan Capital.

Mindsite is a new website from Redfin co-founder David Eraker. It helps users make informed choices about mental health by giving them access to information about others’ experiences with mental health diagnoses and treatments.

TableFare is a new Seattle company that designs kitchen and dining implements.

Viviti is a new web-based platform for blogging, website building, and content management.

Let The Name Inspector solve your naming problem. To find out about his rates and availability, just send an email to the address below describing the kind of naming help you need.