How I Think About Naming Products

Someone was showing me a product they were building and asking what I thought about the name. And honestly, this is where I think most founders get stuck.

They start trying to find one name that does everything.

Explains the product.
Sounds cool.
Feels premium.
Is memorable.
Can scale later.
Works for SEO.
Feels startup-y.

That usually leads to a bad name.
The way I see it, there are only two honest ways to name something.

1. Say what it is

This is the simple route.

If the product does X, call it something that tells me it does X.

A lot of SaaS products do this because they do not have the budget to educate the market. So the name has to do some of the work. Someone reads it and immediately gets the category, the use case, the promise. That is useful.

This route is boring sometimes, yes. But boring is not always bad. Boring is clear. And clear sells.

2. Name it like a brand

The second route is when the name has nothing directly to do with the product.

It comes from a feeling, a concept, a story, some weird word, some cultural reference, maybe even a Sanskrit word, whatever. The point is not literal meaning. The point is identity.

This works when you are trying to build something bigger than one feature or one product. You are not naming a tool. You are naming a world.

That is a very different game.

The biggest mistake: staying in the middle

What usually does not work is the middle.

Founders try to make the name half-clear and half-clever. They remove a vowel, add some random letter, force a mashup, and now it feels like some 2010 startup leftover.

Don’t do that.

If you want to go descriptive, go fully descriptive.
If you want to go abstract, go fully abstract.
Don’t sit in the middle trying to look smart.

That middle zone is where weak names are born.

Why this matters less in B2B than people think

Now this is where context changes everything.

If you are selling B2B, especially founder to founder, the name matters much less than people think.

You are doing the outreach.
You are getting on calls.
You are showing the product.
You are explaining the value.

The name is not closing the sale. You are.

In B2C, a name can do a lot more heavy lifting. It can create curiosity, memorability, searchability, vibes, all of that.

In B2B, especially early on, that is not what moves things.

So if you are still trying to get the first few customers, I would not obsess over the perfect name. First prove that the thing works. Get a few deployments. Get real usage. Then come back and name it properly if needed.

If the name has to explain the product, use a tagline

A lot of founders try to force the full product story into the name.

That is unnecessary.

The name does one job.
The tagline does another.

If your actual value is something like unified search for e-commerce stores, then say that in the tagline. Don’t torture the name trying to make it carry the whole pitch.

People are not seeing your name in isolation anyway. They are seeing it with context — a website, a deck, a cold DM, a demo, a line below the logo.

Use that.

My practical rule

If I am advising someone on naming, my rule is simple:

• go fully literal
• or go fully brand
• but do not try to fake originality in the middle

If it is descriptive, make it properly descriptive.

If it is conceptual, then at least make it interesting. Give it a story. Give it a point of view. Give me a reason it exists.

Because otherwise it is just another forgettable name trying too hard.

Final thought

A good name is not a name that does everything.It is a name that knows what job it is supposed to do.

That’s it.