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
- 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
- Though, extensive surveys might be overkill
- meta: you’ll get better with practice (by starting a lot of small projects)
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Names I’m proud of naming
[TODO: expand on the process of arriving at these]
- Manifold
- I liked that Manifold had many appropriate meanings:
- common English: “manifold” = plural, many
- mathy, space whatever
- 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
- yield.sh
- openbook.fyi
- Ada Astra When
- scanlate.io
Other good names
- Epoch
- Stripe
- Cursor
- Notion
- Anthropic
(some are just products I like, but I think the names are pretty good too)
Bad names for good people
- Long Term Future Fund
- Giving What We Can
- OpenAI — 4 syllables to pronounce. (though at least it’s short to write and “open” has good vibes)
- LessOnline
- “AI for Epistemics”
- …
Caveat: what names are “good” depends on context
- Pick names in a style of names that are good, for your field
- Most of this advice applies to products, companies, orgs
- Naming blog posts or books is pretty different. There, you do want descriptive, pithy, 3-8 word things
- Taren: long institution names are more institutional, perhaps reputable. “AI Safety Institute” might be good
- (not sure I’m sold)
Resources
Paul Graham: 
Change Your Name
James Odene: 
It’s not effective to call everything effective and how (not) to name a new organisation — EA Forum