Naming your business: a founder's field guide

We have named paint, fibre, fitness gear and a used-car marketplace. Here is the uncomfortable lesson from all of it: naming almost never stalls on creativity. It stalls on criteria nobody agreed to up front. So before we propose a single name, we get the founding team to sign off on what good actually means — on paper.

Three quiet ways naming goes wrong

The failures rhyme. First, no shared definition of success, so every review collapses into a debate about taste. Second, the hunt for a name that tries to say everything — which reliably produces names that say nothing. Third, a legal check that arrives last, long after the team has fallen in love.

Fix those three and the work gets faster and far calmer. You stop arguing and start judging fit against something you all agreed to.

“A name does not have to mean everything. It has to be yours, and it has to stick.”

Name for one job, not ten

A name cannot describe your product, signal your values, rank on search, work in three languages and still feel unlike anything else on the shelf. Ask it to do all of that and it does none of it. We pick the single job the name must do — usually be ownable and be memorable — and let the rest of the brand system carry the other loads.

The sprint, in five moves

1. 01Agree the brief — what the name must do, and the words it must never sound like.
2. 02Generate wide — hundreds of routes across descriptive, abstract and coined territories.
3. 03Cut hard against the criteria, never against taste.
4. 04Pressure-test the shortlist — say it on a call, read it on a sign, type the domain.
5. 05Clear it legally before anyone is allowed to fall in love.

The order is the whole trick. Running the trademark and domain search on the shortlist — not the winner — means there is always somewhere to go when your favourite turns out to be taken. And it usually is.

What you actually walk away with

A name you can defend, a domain you can use, and a one-line rationale the entire company can repeat. That last one is the most underrated: if your own team cannot explain the name in a sentence, your customers never will.

Naming is not the whole brand — positioning and message come first. But get the name right and everything downstream costs less and works harder. Get it wrong and you pay the tax on every ad you ever run.