What does every business start with? Many would say with an idea, and sure, that’s a valid answer. The whole concept of how you want to create your company, the products and services you’ll come up with, and how you’ll manage to sell them is what truly shapes your business. However, the first thing that interests people about your brand is its name. It’s what creates the connection.
Being part of many businesses’ founding moments, we know how hard it is to give a brand its own identity. There’s always that natural urge to ask everyone around you for ideas and feedback on your shortlisted options. Sometimes that can work; most often it doesn’t. And when it does work, you’d be surprised by how many of the names that you and your team think of are already taken.
This is where Squadhelp comes in. With its help, we’ve been able to name a few companies for as little as $300.
Making it simple and fun to give your company the name it deserves, Squadhelp takes care of the whole process whilst providing you with the opportunity to dedicate your time to other important business activities.
In this review, we’ll explore Squadhelp in detail. You’ll be able to learn about all of its features which will show you why it’s such a valuable resource when it comes to naming a company.
Getting Familiar With Squadhelp
Back in 2011, Darpan Munjal struggled to name a venture he was currently working on, so he founded Squadhelp as an experiment. He gave entrepreneurs an opportunity to launch mini-contests in order to draw inspiration for their companies’ names. Creatives could join and submit their ideas for a humble reward.
Until 2016, the platform operated on a small scale, simply as a side project. When this “leisure pursuit” started to organically grow unanticipated traction, Darpan realized the full business and market potential his creation had and decided to dedicate to it full time. That’s how he shaped what Squadhelp is today.
Now, Squadhelp can brag about helping create 14,000+ brand names since its inception – a success attributed to its wonderful community of over 200,000 creative experts and constant innovation, making it the largest platform for branding and business naming today.
Why Do You Need Squadhelp?
Securing a name that’s a perfect fit for your brand can save your company from falling flat on its face the second it enters the market. Working with a naming service can greatly leverage your position in this area by helping you pick unique names, hence saving you immense amounts of valuable time.
Squadhelp does a great job of implementing the crowdsourcing experience, so you can benefit from the collective creativity of thousands of people.
With them, you’ll get an opportunity to go beyond the simple “sourcing” of ideas by using their advanced features. Their approach to handling creatives ensures naming submissions are of great quality.
In this post, we’ll give you a chance to find out all about each of Squadhelp’s many useful features, so let’s get going.
Features and Services Offered by Squadhelp
Even though we dedicated this article to Squadhelp as a company-naming service, the platform offers much more. There are additional features that Squadhelp offers, most of which are there to enhance the brand-naming experience, but there are also some that can help you promote your company in other ways. And we’ll talk about them all.
Let’s explore the features offered by Squadhelp, how they’re priced, their pros and cons, and then we’ll list some real users’ reviews to see what they have to say about their experiences with Squadhelp.
Naming Contests
The main Squadhelp feature helps you discover the best name that will separate your brand from the competition. To achieve that, you launch a contest where experienced freelancers will present their ideas and suggestions.
Squadhelp enables you to request a name for your business, brand, product, website, book, app, movie, etc. After you select what you’re looking for, you should pick the industry in which your company will operate and describe your business activities and goals.
Then, you provide some additional info that could help people picture what you’re aiming for and include some keywords if you like them to be a part of the name. Tell them which emotions you’d like to convey and what your target audience is.
You can go over The Art Of Writing a Perfect Brief – a pretty helpful guide with 4 writing tips for creating the perfect brief and getting the best results from your contest.
Squadhelp will throw in a matching .com domain name as well, with any of their plans, but you can include other domain extensions too.
An important aspect of Squadhelp’s approach is that the platform performs an instant trademark check if you decide to scale from the basic plan. The platform will complete one availability check on one database for the Gold plan. For the Platinum plan, you’ll receive four trademark checks (including the USPTO). These plans also allow you to include NDA’s to protect your contest and the briefing you disclose.
Additionally, Squadhelp offers a whole section dedicated to name ideas. Visit it to get inspired and get considerable resources, tips and tricks that will help you choose the right brand name for your business.
Managed Contests
Squadhelp offers two more plans where you can experience agency-level, white-glove name discovery. You can still launch a naming contest, but with this option, everything will be taken care of by an experienced branding consultant.
You can schedule a call and explain everything about your branding project to your assigned consultant and they’ll make sure to apply the best practices derived from the most successful contests.
By choosing managed contests, you’ll enjoy a much larger pool of name submissions and other perks such as expert consultations, more trademark validation options, and additional naming choices. All to deliver the best possible outcome in a span of about 2 weeks.
Names for Sale
Squadhelp boasts over 75,000 premium domain names that they sell for competitive prices. The word “competitive” in the previous sentence refers to most of their domain names which on average cost from about $1500 to $3000, however, they do have some very desirable options that can climb up to a price of half a million dollars.
This feature is most suitable for those who don’t want to wait to acquire their website name and anyone who finds their dream website name in Squadhelp’s pool of curated names.
You can narrow down your search by selecting your preferred industry, price range, domain name extension, length, emotions, style, etc. You’ll also receive a complimentary logo with your purchased domain name – a very practical perk so you can tick off another item on your “company launch” list.
If you’re squatting on some domain names, Squadhelp features a marketplace where you can sell them. They’ll polish them up for you with a logo and some appealing description in order to promote them and sell them faster.
Logos & Taglines
Besides the naming contests, Squadhelp supports creating contests for logos and taglines as well. These two assets are a great way to create a memorable brand and make your company stand out.
You can visit the collections of logos and taglines that have been previously generated through Squadhelp contests and use them to get a sense of the direction in which you’d like to move your branding strategy.
Squadhelp’s global collective of creatives is eager to earn by entering every contest, so they’ll be extra engaged in bringing their top game regardless of whether they’re submitting a name, logo, or slogan for your brand.
Audience Testing Service
The professional audience testing service offered by Squadhelp is an excellent opportunity to obtain reliable opinions on your top qualified names, providing you with a name that
echoes the most with your desired audience.
You can choose up to 6 names (or logos) that you can’t decide between and select targeted criteria based upon age, location, or gender. The survey will be shown only to those groups that fit your target.
There isn’t any restriction on whether or not you need to only use names from your published contests; you can also include names made up by you or your team.
Squadhelp’s audience testing packages allow a single question that will be asked to 100-500 respondents. If you opt for the lowest tier, you’ll get your results in just 3 days. However, you can request additional questions and include more respondents. Contact Squadhelp if you’re interested in getting a custom quote.
Video Creation Service
Another way to use Squadhelp to boost your marketing is its video creation service. Based on what you have in mind, expert branding consultants will help you craft your video marketing strategy.
They offer options for a one-time delivery of one or four videos or monthly plans for ongoing, consistent promotion of your brand and products.
You can choose one or four core videos that will accurately depict who you are and what your business does. Squadhelp’s team will work tirelessly to quickly deliver them to you for revision to ensure that the videos flawlessly capture your brand massaging.
The monthly plans are awesome for creating successful social media campaigns. You’ll get 2 short videos per week to promote on your social networks in order to capture your audience’s attention and optimize your conversions to stay relevant in your industry.
Trademark Filing Service
When you’ve finally chosen your brand name, logo, or tagline, it’s time for you to secure it and protect yourself from potential infringement.
Squadhelp offers a trademark filing service that will appoint an experienced trademark attorney to handle the whole process for you. They will assess up to 3 names or 1 logo and let you know which one is most likely to secure protection.
Then they will prepare your application and file it with the USPTO, monitor all the deadlines, advise you on the post-registration activities and proper use of the trademark, and inform you of any attempts by other companies filing for a similar trademark.
With Squadhelp, you can file your application for a trademark in just a few days, but only in the US. Take note that the entire process of trademark registration can take up to 6-9 months.
Squadhelp Pricing
As seen above, we went through many Squadhelp features that are part of their different pricing plans. Let’s cover that part here!
The naming contests are offered in three plans: “Bronze” which costs $299, “Gold” which costs $449, and “Platinum” which costs $749. If you decide to run contests for a name, logo, and tagline, you can combine them all in one package and get a discount on its price.
There are two plans to use for launching managed contests: the “Standard” plan will be yours for $999 and you can acquire the “Enterprise” one for a hefty lump sum of $1999.
The audience testing service costs $179 for the “Basic” package, $349 for the “Boost” package, and $699 for the “Premier” package. If you need more than what these packages offer, you can contact Squadhelp for a custom plan based on your requirements.
If you order a set number of videos through Squadhelp’s video creation service, the price for the “Core Video” package is $129, the “Video Essentials” package costs $349, and you can contact Squadhelp if you need to scale from that.
The video creation service’s monthly packages include the “Monthly Digital Ad Plan” which costs $349/month and the “Social Media Video Plan” which costs $449/month.
The trademark filing service is offered on a one-time fee and costs $724 per single filing.
Pros and Cons of Squadhelp
Squadhelp is undoubtedly the biggest and most popular platform for brand and business naming. In this section, we’ll summarize all the aspects where Squadhelp impresses and disappoints.
Pros
Let’s point all the key areas where Squadhelp receives the most praise:
- A complete range of naming services.
Besides simple naming contests, Squadhelp offers managed contests guided by professional branding consultants. There are also many other useful features including logo and video creation, tagline generation, targeted audience testing, and a trademark filing service, composing a complete branding experience so you can stand out from the competition in a remarkable way.
- Trademarking for the ultimate protection.
Securing your acquired brand assets is a must, and Squadhelp offers a very convenient way to achieve the desired protection.
- Combining packages for a special price.
We mentioned that, if you combine more contests on a single package, the final price for the whole package would be less than paying for the separate packages.
- Affordable prices.
Squadhelp might seem pricey at a first glance, but it actually costs much less than agencies that provide the same service.
- Refundability.
If, for some reason, you decide that the contest you launched didn’t meet your expectations, you can get a partial refund as high as the cash price offered for your contest.
- Startup resources.
Squadhelp features a collection of helpful resources to help your startup or small business find the right ways to grow; a model very similar to that of StartupResources.
Cons
Here are some drawbacks to Squadhelp which we think the brand can put some more work into:
- Anyone can sign up to be “a creative”.
Even though it’s great to have more people submitting their ideas for your contests, some entries in many Squadhelp contests don’t make any sense. They’re unrelated to your brief and only take room among your options.
- Trademarked submissions.
Squadhelp allows every entry to be submitted and after the contest ends, it runs each entry against the trademark databases. This is inconvenient as unavailable names shouldn’t even be considered for submission.
Squadhelp User Reviews
There’s an abundance of glowing online reviews about Squadhelp. Let’s read some of those testimonies:
“Exceeded my expectations ?
Having struggled with friends, family, and business associates for several weeks, and coming up with almost nothing that really suited me as I had a very clear idea of the desired outcome, I happened upon Squadhelp, opted for a managed contest, and will never regret that decision. The result exceeded my expectations. Thank you so much. You guys are just so supportive and incredible” – Noel D.
“It has been an insightful & educational experience for me (as I’m not remotely creative). One thing which I found confusing was when ‘new’ creatives submitted names which were very similar to ones which had already been suggested by a previous creative. As there were so many entries, I was worried about giving credit to a newer entry & overlooking the original idea. I hope this makes sense. All in all, I’m extremely happy with the naming contest & can’t wait to launch the logo & tagline contests. I’ve spread the word about your site & sung your praises plenty! Thank you.” – Pauline A.
“Buying a domain name from Squadhelp was such a great experience, we decided to run a quick logo contest too. We got tons of options and several people responded to our feedback with additional variations of one we liked. We ended up hiring a designer to make a final logo for us based off inspiration from the winner we selected from Squadhelp.” – Jenniegilbert Q.
The number of negative reviews is unremarkable, however, they still pop up here and there:
“Really big amount of ideas but the vast majority of them didn’t follow our demands and project description. Only about 5% usable but we finally have the winner! :)” – Michal J.
“My experience had issues because of the lack of ability to send pictures to creatives. They seem to not understand what I say in text. It’s a big issue to have to continue to try to explain what you want by text over and over and again, and continue to receive incorrect revisions. There’s a need to be able to send pictures in order to get EXACTLY what colors and design you want conveyed to your creative.
I paid to use one creatives color because most creatives didn’t use the correct color. Then two bonuses to another creative to use their design, but still didn’t get what I want because of the communication issue.” – Kirk W.
Conclusion
Time to wrap things up! We hope you liked our Squadhelp review and learned a lot about how this platform can help you discover the right name for your company.
In the features section, we explained how the rest of the tools offered by Squadhelp can extend your brand marketing by providing you with a logo, slogan, promotional video material, and premium domain selection.
To make things easier, Squadhelp employs branding specialists who will perform all the legwork for you regarding the development of your naming contests. The service also offers to protect your business name, logo, and tagline by filing for a trademark – all in cooperation with a skilled trademark attorney.
Ultimately, Squadhelp provides agency-quality products for prices that are up to 80% lower than what traditional creative agencies require. Similar options to this platform are scarce, so Squadhelp is our top recommendation for most business creative needs.