Lightning pitch: SquadHelp, a game for nameless companies

Company: SquadHelp

Headquarters: Chicago

Founding team: Darpan Munjal

Why we like it: Achieving a good brand for your company is everything. If it’s bad, everyone will remember it for the wrong reasons and if it’s good, they’ll remember it for the right ones. And thats where SquadHelp comes in.

From gaining recognition and new customers to inspiring your employees, investing in branding, you’re setting your company up for success. A professional appearance shouts credibility, it will earn people’s trust making it much more likely they’ll purchase from it.

The brand name, in particular, is crucial – after all, how are customers going to recommend a company if they can’t even remember the name?

Startups are launching all over the place, and it’s hard to find a great name that hasn’t been used yet and hiring a branding agency can be costly, especially for small businesses just starting out.

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On realizing how expensive branding agencies are, Chicago-based crowdsourcing platform SquadHelp set up a naming contest service that’s a fraction of the cost of hiring an agency. From as little as $199, nameless companies can receive quality suggestions from hundreds of creatives around the world – and they only have to pay for the suggestion they love the most.

Whether it’s an app, service, company, website or startup, SquadHelp will help you come up with a great name.

So, how does it work?

• SquadHelp uses quality algorithms to run a competition in which competitors or ‘creatives’ submit names for a specific client.
• Each time a creative suggests a name, they receive a rating from the client.
• The top ranking creatives get to submit more names.
• Ultimately, the client chooses their favorite name.

For the creatives, this is serious competition. Using the algorithms to determine the creatives who constantly achieve high ratings, badges are then awarded as different milestones are achieved. The top 30 creatives will be published on a leaderboard  which gives them the opportunity to submit additional names. The advanced algorithms developed by SquadHelp means that the quality of the suggestions are high, higher even than the quantity of them.

With over 60,000 creatives in SquadHelp’s community, the contribution and creativity that goes into your brand is immense. The process is also extremely fast – most companies receive several hundred suggestions within the first 24 hours of the contest.

SquadHelp sounds like a fun game to play even if you don’t have a business to name, but for those who do, it’s a dynamic way to choose the best name for you and your company.