One of the more challenging tasks I faced when starting my company was coming up with a great name for my product. It had to be short, memorable, at least somewhat descriptive, and of course the URL had to be available.

 I started by writing down all the words that describe the product I wanted to build. Words like family, social networking, connect, share, stories, unite, etc. Someone already owned the domain for many of my early ideas. My husband came up with combining kin and connection. Since I’m a good southern girl, I was very familiar with using kin to describe family and my site was designed to connect families. So Kinnection was born. Luckily, the domain was free. There are other sites with similar domain names which is obviously not ideal, but I’m still happy with it.

The name tested pretty well with my focus group but there were some who couldn’t figure out what the site was about so I decided to come up with a tag line. I know this is probably obvious for many people who have done this before but at Microsoft, there is a whole army of people who take care of branding so this was my first time. The tag line I came up with was: “Share memories. Stay connected.” I think both the name and the tag line will stick but you never know what will come up during our alpha.