Project Q

  Every investment deck I’ve seen always claims a massive market size for whatever industry a business is addressing. These usually involve using cut and paste stats from some consultancy, market research or investment research company. Heaven knows how often I've prepared decks in the past that have been guilty of this. The trouble is that market size and addressable market size are two very different figures and the latter is usual a fraction of the former. The global TV market is easily worth $1 trillion. The market for rights management software, which underlies the whole industry, is probably £500m, or 0.05% of the market size. Then this is taken up by competitors, so the addressable market size is considerably smaller. Factor in churn and the volatility of the TV market thanks to mergers and you suddenly end at a very different figure for the actual addressable market. You can apply the same metrics to online streaming technology or asset management software for the industry....

Coming up with a pithy name is easy, but finding one that is in some way unique and even meaningful is a real problem. I always start with the .com URL, which is a hiding to nothing in itself. You can spend hours on the site of a name registrar such as GoDaddy. It's not surprising that suffixes such as .ai and .io are increasingly popular. Still, the .com is the holy grail.. In the case of Project Q we came up with a great name - one that is meaningful, relevant, short and where, hallelujah!, the .com URL was available. But the fun doesn't stop there. You need other accounts - Twitter and Instagram handles, a Gmail address for YouTube and Adwords, etc.. Of course, none of those are available (although many of the names you covet haven't been used for a decade or more) and we had to come up with alternatives in each case. Things were a lot easier in 1996... If you're looking for suggestions, Shopify has a name generator here:  Business Name Generator - Free Company Name ...