On Naming a Company

LVII

2024.07.28

Early last week, my separation with my last company was finalized. I am grateful for the opportunity I had to create value for that company and it’s customers and supporters.

Now, Jack & I have begun working on a new venture. 

Step One? Naming the damn thing. 

What’s in a Name?

Naming a company is hard. So hard that we’re already changing the name after publicly committing to one a few days ago.

Earlier this week, Jack cataloged some of the difficulties of picking a name. There was one problem he didn’t include, though: we, or more so I, really wanted to name the company something “epic.” Some contenders below.

• Lambda Terminal - In homage to functional programming.

• Fractal Intel - Gotta love Fractals.

• Voyant - Clairvoyant, but shorter.

These are all objectively cool and you won’t change my mind on that account. They’re so cool that I already own domains for Lambda Terminal & Fractal Intel. As a matter of fact, Fractal Intel is so so so cool that we even also made a logo for it, set up a g suite, name the git org after it, and revealed it to everyone on LinkedIn:

There’s two quite big problems with this name: 1) it fails the “name test,” described below; 2) it diverges from the status quo with no good reason. 

Both of these problems stem from the same underlying issue: We (I) were (was) trying to prove how smart we (I) are (am) with the name.

Proving how smart you are is not what you should be optimizing for when you’re picking a name for a business. After all, proving how smart you are is not what you should be optimizing for when you start a business. In our case, the point of starting a business is to create value and make money.

Knowing that, you have to ask, will the name help with that goal or hurt it?

Of course, the cool names were not without alleged utility; part of me claimed that having a mathy name or a nod to functional programming might help attract cracked engineers later, which would be good for the business. Really, though, that is far less important than the purpose of the name as a tool to get customers now. 

We used two heuristics to help us reframe our options for a name: the name test and emulating winners.

Name Test

Something Jack kept bringing up is the name test. Effectively, it’s the idea that if you were in a crowded and moderately noisy space and said your company name, would an arbitrary average individual understand what you said and be able to spell it later?

Unfortunately, the epic math names didn’t fare too well here. Lambda isn’t impossible to spell, but it’s also not immediately obvious, either. Fractal is easy to spell, but based on testing, it can be heard as “Factor” or “Fracture.” That’s not great. And Voyant… is it voyant, voient, voyiant, voiant, or something else? Once you see it written out, it seems obvious, but before you do, it’s really not. 

Some of the other proposed names (all from Jack)  work a lot better in regards to the name test:

• Boondocker

• BirdDog

• Intel Miner

• Signal Scout

Boondocker sounds silly and somewhat absurd, but that’s really not a bad thing. These names are all simple, which should actually be the goal. Do you think Signal Scout or anything up there would fail the name test?

Emulate as a Default

Another important consideration here is to look at what successful companies in the broad sales enablement space have named themselves. Some tools have names like Sales Navigator, Zoom Info, SignalHire, RB2B, and 6Sense. 

As much as I want to copy absolutely epic names like Palantir or Anduril, both of those companies started as defense contractors. They have cool names, but they certainly don’t fit into the sales enablement space, which is where this new venture will be operating. 

So, why are the other sales tools named as they are? I could postulate a dozen reasons, some might be right, some might be wrong. It doesn’t really matter, though; clearly, there is a “vibe” to these names that works. Despite my innate temptation to be contrarian, we don’t have a good reason to diverge from this status quo. So, we won’t.

The other companies in our space are making money. A LOT of money. The default response to success should be emulation. You should not divert from mean just to do it; you should divert from mean when you have a strong hypothesis that you are willing to accept the cost of and take the risk of testing. 

We’ll be doing plenty of hypothesis tests elsewhere.

As an example, the first part of our codebase, our crawler, Shelob, is in rust. That's an “unconventional” decision, but I made it because I’m familiar with other scripts that have leveraged the language very successfully for this sort of application. Additionally, I can easily see Python’s performance being a bottleneck for the scale of crawling & scraping we intend to do.

However, as I start interfacing with AI tools this week, I’d need a pretty damn good reason to use anything other than Python. Given the AI ecosystem built up around the language and my experience with the language, it is most likely the best tool for the job. As much as I’d love to write everything in Lisp for funsies, I won’t write something in a quirky language without a good reason. And, if I need to later, I can either rewrite or just write some Hy on top of it.

Re: naming our crawler something bizarre like Shelob, I can name internal pieces of our tech stack whatever I want–we’re not marketing them. Here, the utility of me thinking the name is cool is far greater than the need for a customer to understand it. In line with that, the AI Python bit I’m writing this week is internally named Haderach. 

Egoless

The mission overrides your ego. 

Since the name test and emulating winners both are better metrics for a “good” name than what we think is cool, we’ll go with those two metrics. Selecting a name abiding by these heuristics is more aligned with the goal than flattering my ego is.

Already, I’ve rewritten Shelob once, and it hasn’t even been a week since I started it. And, of course, I’ll rewrite it again and again. My ego is not attached to the first artifact of my labor; I care much more about whether or not the thing does what it needs to do.

The long term goal of this new venture is creating an inordinate amount of value for users over the long run. In the mid term, that means hitting $100K ARR by the end of the year. In the short term, that means getting our first paying customer by the end of August.

One of our parameters that will keep us on the track of hitting the long term goal is that we won’t build or sell anything that isn’t valuable. This is a bit self correcting, in the sense that it’s actually very hard for either of us to sell something we don't believe is valuable. It’s a pretty good built-in feedback loop. 

All of that is to say that decisions are subservient to the goal, bounded by certain principles. My ego, too, must be subservient to the goal. Creating value is more important than a “cool” name.

Genesis

Naming a company feels like the start of a journey. 

In a way it is, and in a way it isn’t. 

It isn’t in the sense that really, I started my entrepreneurial journey when I was 18 and self published and selling my poetry books. Or, maybe I started it when I was 9 or 10 and won a candy bar selling contest to be “teacher of the day.” It could have even started when I was 7 or 8 and started voraciously reading. You could even argue it started when I was born to an entrepreneur.

You spend a lifetime building yourself; each action is a beautiful symphony, a culmination of every step before it. 

In another way, this really is the beginning. Some advice I got from an entrepreneur last week, slightly paraphrased:

I am grateful to everyone who's helped to build me into the person I am with the skills, connections, and resources I have now. That’s informed and impacted what “next” can plausibly look like.

That being said, it’s on me to take all of that and my own experience and make it even more meaningful by taking the steps necessary to bring what I believe could be next into the real world.

Funny–this post is about naming a company, and I didn’t actually tell you what we’re going to name it. 

No spoilers… you’ll hear soon.

Live Deeply,