A founder will spend six weeks and a small fortune in workshop fees landing on the perfect startup name, then spend six minutes deciding what the product actually does. Investors will nod along on the name and ask hard questions about the second thing. The order of priorities is backwards more often than anyone admits.
What a name can and can’t do
A great name makes a company easier to remember and slightly easier to talk about. It cannot make a mediocre product succeed, and it cannot save a company that hasn’t figured out who’s actually going to pay for it. Plenty of category-defining companies launched under names their own founders later admitted were mediocre.
Where the obsession actually comes from
Naming is fun, it’s finishable, and it feels like real progress after weeks of unglamorous, ambiguous product work. Locking a name gives a founder a tidy sense of momentum that shipping an actual roadmap rarely offers this early. That feeling is seductive and mostly beside the point.
The one naming decision that actually matters early
Whether the name can be trademarked and whether a usable domain exists without a five-figure acquisition are the two things worth real time. Everything past that, the emotional resonance, the story behind it, how it “feels,” matters far less than founders think at the seed stage.
Investors have sat through hundreds of pitches. They’ve long since stopped judging companies by their names and started judging them by whether the founder can explain, in one sentence, why anyone would switch to this from what they use today.
Spend the six weeks on the second thing. The name can be fixed later for the cost of a registration fee. A product nobody wants can’t be.
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