Is a great business name worth the price of a daily coffee?
Pretty much anyone who comments about startups agrees - a good name can make all the difference. It can get you noticed and remembered. And if it can help to establish credibility in the early stages. It's a vital ingredient of a brand.
In the self-start culture, you might expect to be able to come up with a name yourself, and secure a perfect .com domain for less than a fiver.
And even if finding the name for your business proves to be more of a challenge than you first thought, you're not going to spend thousands on a domain name. Are you?
So how much is a great name with a perfect .com domain worth?
To arrive at an answer, let's look at it another way.
If your business is going to succeed, you might think it reasonable to develop a 5-year plan. Your costs might be broken down into thousands per year, hundreds per month and so on.
I never thought I'd ever write this phrase, but ...here goes: Let's do the math. Five years is 60 months. Let's assume a month is a nice neat 4 weeks, or 20 'working' days. So five years is 1,200 days.
This is where 'coffee equivalence' comes in.
Many of us like a daily coffee. Some of us need it. It makes everything just a little better. But all of us would survive without it. And most of us don't stop to think about the cost.
Obviously, the price of a coffee varies from country to country, and even from place to place - even without factoring in your taste for glitzy lattes or seasonal extras - so let's make the maths easier and assume that a coffee costs $3, or £2 in the UK.
Over 5 years, your daily caffeine fix might cost you $3,600 (or £2,400).
So here's my question: is a great business name worth the price of a daily coffee?