It can be a pain to choose a good brand name, especially one that reflects you as a person. Chosen for its laconic nature, I encountered nkgpt by accident…

Initially, I was determined to build a personal brand fortress with nikgupta – it had my name and seemed unique enough to act as a consistent identifier across the web in a utopian ideal sort of way. Having already secured nikgupta.com years before, I was keen on establishing it elsewhere.

A unified brand comes with clear benefits:

• A single identifier make it easy for your audience and clients to recall from memory (depending on the name of course),
• It also gives your reputation consistency. Visual design is important in this too but I’ll be focusing on wording first to set the groundwork for the look. My user-registration run was going incredibly well until I’d reached the fertile battlegrounds of Twitter.

Twitter is an incredible platform that warrants its own blog post. It’s infamously known for its ability to connect the average citizen with customer service departments of hulking behemoths (supermarkets, mobile operators, political organisations, hacker cliques, terrorist groups, etc.). Most of all Twitter allows for agency that’s not possible with its main competitors.

On this basis, I’d fallen in love with the little blue bird …and yet it managed to break my heart when I discovered @nikgupta had already been taken. My slightly megalomaniacal grand brand plans for web-wide presence were foiled and I was left to wonder what I could do from here. For a brief moment, I contemplated excluding Twitter which would’ve forced me to exist as an unregistered ghost floating in a sea of tweets. However, the temptation to contribute to the platform was too strong and so I began to think laterally.

Adding numbers or extraneous letters such as natalieportman123 or jeffgoldblumtastic didn’t quite work for me – they’d come across as cognitively-heavy at best and teenaged-amateurish at worst. I needed something that portrayed the professional essence of the nikgupta identifier without using the same.

I looked back to Twitter itself and sought inspiration from founder Jack Dorsey’s feed, admittedly with a tangential curiosity as to what his initial tweet was (wrongly guessing it’d be some variant of “Hello World”). “just setting up my twttr” was a modest yet poignant way to begin what has now transformed into a behemoth of a social network basking within its minimalistic communication boundaries. It was Jack’s unusual method of spelling his brand that inspired me to dispense with the vowels. Thinking it was highly unlikely that anyone would have that combination of letters as a username, I went about revisiting my branding plans by securing the necessary virtual properties. @nkgpt was mine!

I quickly registered nkgpt.com and later was very lucky to realise that I could obtain an even shorter domain – .pt being the national top-level domain name of Portugal, and with registration rules welcoming anyone in the EU to purchase a .pt TLD, I jumped on the opportunity to grab it immediately. I did revel in the fact that my personal domain was now only five letters and a dot long (although with Brexit on the horizon, this may be short-lived).

Overall, I’m happy that I could find a brand that I liked as well. There are plenty in the wild that don’t make sense or too loosely reflect the purpose of the represented entity. For me, it represents my professional self in a neat quick-to-type package. It also falls into the realm of short-term memory – “seven-things” being the average human memory-retention limit. I’d also read British literacy studies saying the brain is able to fill in gaps when letters are missing in a word. So a sntnce lk ths isnt ttlly cnfsng. As long as a large bulk of the letters including the first and last letters are present to form a pattern, the compressed word is usually readable.

If you too are seeking a brand, there’s plenty of inspiration to be found in others’ usernames across the internet, from Twitter to Reddit and everything in between. As time goes on though, be prepared to not find what you’re after as more people register their usernames in competition with you. Unless these companies delete inactive accounts, the pool of available usernames will diminish. Act sooner rather than later to define your brand without appending numbers and being overly obscure. Above all, work hard to give build your brand reputation; after all, you can find solace in the fact that a glowing reputation is not only affected by but can also drive the value of an unknown name …and you don’t have to look further than the story of J.K. Rowling to see this.