After we raised our series A, the new investor insisted we change our name. The old name kind of sucked. We discussed it as a team for months - it was a pure time-sink, never getting to agreement, so looked into hiring a naming agent - I thought it would be like $1000, a full day workshop, beanbags, hit the bong...... I contacted a namer and it was like $45k....WTF....$45k for a fucking name. I tried haggling, and she brought her fee down to $15k, but this would be for a list of 10 names.

Fuck that! I pushed through my favorite name and moved on.

these type of prices are common in the old world of business.

I know a non-profit, that paid $30,000 for a logo and a tagline, and thought they got an awesome deal, since the going rate is like $150,000.

That's an OK number since it likely covers more than just a logo and a tagline, but rather a full brand, positioning and identity definition.

But $15K for a name alone is an overkill.

Seems like an interesting field - specialised, yet creative, and demanding core business skills as well.

Just one thing - surely he put Network Solutions in there as a red herring trap for young players? Why, oh why would you name check URL availability with a provider notorious for squatting?

The bay area seems the nation's capital of naming consultants, too. Here's an old article from Salon about some of the agencies:

http://www.salon.com/media/col/shal/1999/11/30/naming/print....

Great article - thanks. Naming is all over the news down under at the moment because one of our most beloved brands - Vegemite - just released a new product and called it 'iSnack 2.0'

Truly a name chosen by a committee only because nobody hated it ... nobody except the consumer.

I still think it may have been all a joke made by someone who had never tried one before.

Coming up with the right name for a variable or a function can easily become the most difficult part of my day. I always wanted to open variable and function names consultancy.

if you get stuck, just do the objective c thing: aInt, anArray, aXMLFile, etc. Still fairly generic, but still useful and easy to read (vs single letter variables or random things. Worse comes to worse, you can also just make a sentence out of it.

I sometimes have a problem coming up with variable names of the same length so that they would align nicely in a struct declaration :)

Seriously, if this is the kind of thing you're outsourcing, you have major creative problems.