A Founder’s Guide to Finding a Great Name

Today, we’re excited to share an essay and launch announcement from Willem Van Lancker, a designer and investor at Terrain, on the importance of naming your product. (Willem wrote one of our most popular Thesis essays, about the importance of friction to developing expertise.) After helping scores of founders navigate the messy process of finding a great name, he wanted to build a system anyone could go through in an afternoon. The result is a written guide to do just that, as well as Untitled, a software tool that helps guide founders through a rigorous process to find a name that will resonate.—Kate Lee

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Every maker and founder faces the same unavoidable decision: what to call the thing they're building. As attention spans shrink and new stories and brands proliferate with increasing speed, getting this right has become both harder and more consequential.

Your name ships first. Before anyone watches your launch video, lands on your website, or tries your product, they encounter your name. Names travel farther than features and last longer than campaigns. They either buy you trust—or burn it—before you’ve even said a word.

I have been working on making this process less chaotic, first by accident and now by design, starting almost a decade ago when I found myself repeatedly helping founders I backed with naming and eventually building Onym, a widely used naming resource.

After working with nearly a hundred startups, teams, and companies (helping create names that have sparked trends like The Browser Company of New York and Modern Life, evocative monikers like Imprint and Keeps, and brand foundations for breakout companies like Base Power), I've distilled the work of developing a successful name into something any focused founder can complete in an afternoon. It’s captured in a clear sequence: Orient, explore, distill, validate, commit, execute.

I'm sharing two free-to-use tools as part of our work at Terrain supporting early-stage founders:

1. “How to Name Anything in an Afternoon,” a comprehensive step-by-step guide to go from brand definition through naming and selection.

1. Untitled.new, an AI tool designed to guide you through a streamlined version of the same creative process.

So block off a few hours. Grab a small group you trust (or run solo). Follow the steps. By the end, you’ll have a better sense of what you’re building and a name to build around.

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The act of naming

Before you begin using the guide, or Untitled.new, it’s worth going deeper into what makes a name really work, so you will know it when you see it. What you're looking for is a hook that sets itself into a person's mind, linking their brain back to your idea, product, and company. The act of naming has always symbolized the beginning of something: the moment the founder, the artist, the lawmaker, the developer, the parent, arrives at the name is the moment it becomes real.

Despite this almost divine act, the process of naming is usually messy: Gather the team, throw words on a whiteboard, argue, and when the deadline looms, finally settle on “good enough.” Similarly, most naming advice remains stuck in a 2000s-era creativity workshop: cutesy contrived exercises, random walks through dictionaries, and tired ideas of what cutting-edge looks like. The recent explosion of AI-powered “name generators” has only highlighted the problem. These tools promise to solve naming in a single prompt, but they rely on models that have been trained on the same publicly available advice. Their outputs look plausible but lack spark, context, or wit.

While you may get caught up on a perfect name, in reality, the best names are first and foremost appropriate in their form and context. They both situate (where does this thing live in the world, what is its context, its category) and differentiate (what makes it unique, special). They give off a strong sense of who they are serving and the goals they want to achieve.

To achieve this, you need to know who you are—the more concrete you can articulate this, the better. It is easier to name a brand that knows exactly what audience they need to reach via what channels and what success looks like than it is to name a brand that aspires to be an abstract representation of a vision they do not yet fully understand.

What makes a name great

When done right, a great name actively propels a brand further. It compounds over time, growing richer, deeper, and more powerful with each repetition, embedding itself into culture, conversation, and memory. But how do you measure something so intangible? It is admittedly subjective, but I’ve found six dimensions that are the most relevant when evaluating a name:

1. Depth: Does it have layers of meaning? What's its tone, attitude, and character? Can it carry metaphorical significance without being cumbersome? Does it match your culture and customers' expectations? Virgin suggests rebellion and rule-breaking; Amazon moved from bookstore to boundless selection, signaling scale and possibility.
2. Temperature: Does it feel warm and inviting or cold and distant? Technical correctness isn't always optimal; approachability can matter more. Mailchimp feels approachable and human; Blackstone conveys stability and force; Anthropic bucks high-tech convention and opts the Greek word for “human” to convey a sort of high-brow warmth.
3. Voice: How does it sound aloud? Does it flow smoothly or create friction? Zoom sounds crisp and quick; Etsy is playful and cute. OpenAI, coined by Elon Musk, gives a unique mix of regular words and acronyms, creating a memorable rhythm (as a bonus, OpenAI also plays on one of Elon’s favorite naming tricks: contractions (SpaceX = Space Exploration Technologies Corporation).
4. Visual: How does it look on tiny screens or billboard signage? Does it have visual rhythm and balance? Do capitals or lowercase characters change the aesthetic? Slack looks concise and casual; SONOS is an elegant ambigram (readable when viewed from a different direction or perspective). Hewlett-Packard feels cluttered and traditional, but HP renders as fast-moving and tight.
5. Differentiation: Does it clearly stand out from competitors or blend into background noise? Is it viable from a trademark perspective? Amidst countless names like Cloudera or MongoDB, Snowflake immediately stood apart in data infrastructure.
6. Special Wrongness: The special ingredient. This phrase is borrowed from designer Ben Pieratt and author Peter Mendelsund. The concept that a name should have “an unforgettable newness. A new shape. 1+1=3,” and the idea that it can spark a new trend that “in the future, this will be done a lot.” It can manifest in many ways: a slight misspelling, a unique pronunciation, an unexpected word pairing, or an intriguing origin that makes it memorable yet accessible. It is what makes ChatGPT somehow work, why The Browser Company of New York felt fresh, and gives Teenage Engineering its distinctive edge.

Like with anything, some people are better at naming than others. There are professionals and agencies who can help you on that journey, but let’s be clear, there is no magic process. There is just the work. If you do it, especially a lot, I can guarantee you will get great results. But you have to put in the work and volume.

I’ve assembled these two resources to help you in your process. The guide is a thorough method you can use with your team in an afternoon or so to generate candidate names and methods to refine to select the one. Untitled.new speeds up this process further, taking you through a process that is stripped down to the essence of what I have found in both my research and practice. They both provide parameters and guidance to yield great outcomes—chiefly, the right set of names for your company or project.

The long game

Names that hit on most of the above qualities, and carry a touch of offness, become magnetic. They shine just enough to spark imagination, yet remain simple enough to travel the world unburdened. They feel both familiar and surprising, the combination that our brains (and hearts) find irresistible.

When naming your company, I have found it helpful to keep in mind two powerful forces that will pull at you:

1. Ego whispers for something ambitious, clever, impressive; a name that can endure for decades and satisfy your vanity.
2. Logic insists on something clear, direct, sufficient; a name easy to pronounce, remember, and type.

Tesla works because it feels visionary and bold enough to match Elon Musk’s grand ambitions and ties to historical greats (ego), yet remains crisp, clear, and approachable (it has a nice mix of hard and soft sounds; for instance, the -la ending leaves your mouth open) to customers worldwide (logic).

Bear in mind, also, that the name you choose will travel between two audiences:

1. External customers, investors, and the general public who will judge it based on snap decisions in a sea of other brands.
2. Internal team members who will look to it daily for meaning in their work and ways of expanding on your mission.

As you wrestle with these dichotomies, you notice details others overlook: how the name sounds when you're tired, how it looks in all caps, and whether it translates reasonably. You envision strangers pronouncing it: investors, customers, critics. You test it quietly against futures you can’t yet see.

Great names resonate across registers. They are felt as much as understood—emotional, visual, linguistic, cultural. On the surface, they are plain words, yet they carry hidden machinery, compressing stories and aspirations into something you can fit in your pocket.

And over time, great names deepen. Each repetition lays down another layer. A name gathers meaning the way a river gathers silt, slowly reshaping the landscape around it. Nike means victory not only by definition but by decades of triumph. Google came to mean search because of the company’s relentless investment in it (from their colorful logo to their geeky demonym: Googlers). Amazon was once puzzling; now it connects as everything, A to Z.

You don’t need the perfect name. Perfect names don’t exist, only names that work for what you’re building, for who you’re serving, and for how boldly you stand behind them. You need one you’ll use with conviction. The compounding of consistency and time will do the rest.

You can get the full “How to Name Anything in an Afternoon” guide and try Untitled for free.

Willem Van Lancker is a partner at Terrain, an early-stage technology investment firm. He previously founded Oyster (acquired by Google), led incubations at Thrive Capital, and designed products at Google Maps and Apple. He writes regularly on design and technology, and you can follow him on X at @vanlancker.

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