“Your name is like sweet fragrance poured out; therefore young virgins loved you.” — Song of King Solomon 1:3

It took me three weeks to come up with the name Monierate.com.

Pronounced “Money Rate,” Monierate.com is a website to compare dollar rates across exchanges in Nigeria.

I believe a name is just what you want people to call you or your product. There are no rules to naming.

However, when it comes to building an internet product, the name you choose matters. So many articles have been written on how to choose a great domain name, and I do not intend to write another one.

But to give you some background, here is how I got the name.

It must be memorable at first encounter

How many times have you heard or said the words “What is your name again?” It happens all the time, usually for one of two reasons: either the person doesn’t care about you, or it just isn’t easy for them to remember your name on first encounter.

As long as I’m building a product that is solving an important problem for people, they will care about it, so I needed to make sure the product name is easy to remember.

To achieve this, the name has to be easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and meaningful to what the product is all about.

Simple, but hard to achieve. A 50 percent trick to this is to use words people are already familiar with. For example, the words “sound” and “cloud” are well known words, so naming an internet music company SoundCloud is smart. Even a moron can spell it, and also find it meaningful to what the product is about.

The word “Money” is already a universal English word, and it has no second meaning. Once you mention money anywhere, the meaning is always the same.

The word “Rate” is also a universal word, but it can communicate slightly different meanings: measurement or classification.

4.5 stars, or X-rated.

However, one of the first questions someone who wants to exchange money will ask is “What’s the rate?”

For a product that provides information about exchange rates, combining the words “money” and “rate” makes it easy to spell, pronounce, and remember.

So I settled on Moneyrate.

But. Read on.

It must be a .COM, or burst

No matter how smart your product is, if nobody trusts it, they won’t use it.

.COM is the most trusted domain name in the world. If a company has a .COM on its name, it is automatically considered a stronger internet brand than a product with any other domain extension, like .co.

The problem with not having the .com of your name is that it signals weakness. Unless you’re so big that your reputation precedes you, a marginal domain suggests you’re a marginal company. Whereas (as Stripe shows) having x.com signals strength, even if it has no relation to what you do. — Paul Graham, cofounder of YCombinator

This is a financial data product, it should be trustworthy.

However, Moneyrate.com wasn’t available. So either I find another name that is easy to remember, or get creative. It must be a .COM.

I chose the second option.

Get creative with words

Most names you come up with won’t have a .COM. So one needs to be creative.

One way to be creative with names is to loosely, or wrongly, spell the words, yet make them sound or look close to the original words.

  • Finance ~ Binance
  • Kudi (meaning Money in Hausa) ~ Kuda
  • Pay ~ Pey, Paye
  • Spend ~ Spedn
  • Send ~ Xend

There are so many successful companies that creatively spelled the original words as their name.

Since Moneyrate is a combination of two words, I had more room for creativity.

It was hard to be creative with the word “rate.” The best I could get was “wrate,” which sounds the same as “rate,” but I didn’t like it. Maybe it is great, but I just didn’t feel right about it.

It was easier to be creative with the word “money.”

Moni, Monie, Moniy, Monni, Monnie, Mony, Monny, Monney, Muney, Muni, Muney, Munney.

I decided to go with “Monie” since Monierate.com was available, and the word Monie is not new to many Nigerians.

Praise God!

But, there are no rules

Why you may have learned something, keep in mind that there are no rules in naming your internet product.

So many successful internet companies did the exact opposite of what I did with Monierate.com.

For example, somebody may tell you not to use numbers in your domain name, but there are many successful internet companies with numbers in their name, e.g. News24, Cars45, 1688, Zip2. The list is inexhaustible. Some will tell you to avoid hyphens, good, right? But go on Google and you’ll find lots of successful internet companies with hyphens in their names.

For me, I wanted a domain name that is memorable, trusted, and maybe cool. It happened that Monierate.com is perfect.

But remember, when building a product, you are FIFA, so set and play the ball by your own rules.

We are all going to make it.

It may also interest you to know how I purchased the Monierate.com domain for next to nothing, with a service similar to Monierate.com but in the domain industry. Already drafting the article, just stay tuned and I will update you.