When you start a lot of things (projects, websites, companies), one of the problems you’ll face is giving them a good name. I think I’m better at this than most? (Mostly by virtue of having tried a lot of bad names). Here’s what I’ve learned:

Tips for good names

• Pick single words
  • You get to add stuff to it, eg “Manifold ⇒ Manifold Love” and that’s still a brand
  • “You get about 5 words”, so don’t spend too many of them on your name
  • It’s okay if your name doesn’t convey everything
    • As you build out your product/company/”brand”, people will associate the right feeling with your name
    • Descriptive names are for cowards
  • If you have a long name, people will shorten it anyways
    • Could have a long formal name; “Horizon Institute for Public Service” ⇒ “Horizon”
    • Early on I decided we should rebrand “Manifold Markets” ⇒ “Manifold”, since I saw some people calling it “MM” and that seemed bad
• Pick words with good vibes
  • Esp with some generally neutral to positive meaning
  • Ideally niche (so you can own it), but not that niche
    • “Manifold” = good, “Mantic” = bad
• Pronounceable

  • 2 syllables is great

    • think about trochees (2 syllables, accent on first), they’re catchy

      • Google, Facebook, Apple, Twitter, Cursor, Notion

      

  • And ideally spellable

    • For when you’re telling someone to google your thing

  • Real words are great for this

    • Okay to jam words together, or make up words, but do this carefully
• Avoid ambiguity
  • You want to be the only <name> in your field
  • Suspicious of “Apollo Airtech” b/c of existing “Apollo Research”
    • (though, “Airtech” is great!)
  • Relatedly, probably don’t make your name a reference to some other thing
    • You want to define yourself, not be defined in opposition to sth
    • One of the pitfalls of “e/acc”, and then “d/acc”
• Domains
  • Good domains are pretty important
  • You don’t have to have the .com/.org, contra Paul Graham
    • Notion and Cursor started on “.so”
    • You can buy the .com after you’re rich
    • More important to have a good name for starting out, than a bad name where you have the .com
  • practical: can bulk upload a list to Namecheap to look for available domains
• Don’t worry too much

  • You make your name great.

  • You’ll get used to it

  • You can change it. Paul Graham:

    There's nothing intrinsically great about your current name. Nearly all your attachment to it comes from it being attached to you.

Process for naming: brainstorm, then filter

aka “babble, then prune”

• Generate a long list of ideas
  • e.g. top 20% of names I’d considered for Mox
  • Be on the nose, but not too on the nose
  • Think a bunch of associated words
  • Ask an LLM for more
    • Me asking Claude on name suggestions for Mox (it wasn’t that helpful here though)
• Take a while to steep in them, idly think about it in the shower, look at it with fresh eyes
• Ask people what they think
  • Unlike many other product decisions, “what people think” is a good proxy for “how good a name is”
  • Also names are fun to bikeshed
    • e.g. this market for naming Manifold’s currency “mana” (which imo is also a great name)
  • Claude is pretty good too
    • Claude convinced me Mox was good
  • Though, extensive surveys might be overkill
• meta: you’ll get better with practice (by starting a lot of small projects)

Names I’m proud of naming

[TODO: expand on the process of arriving at these]

• Manifold
  • I liked that Manifold had many appropriate meanings:
    1. common English: “manifold” = plural, many
    2. mathy, space whatever
    3. if you bet well you’ll earn a “many fold” return
  • Manifest
    • also A++
  • Manifund
    • okay when it was tied to Manifold; might rename now
• Mox
  • Bit early to know for sure, but I think this one’s good