What Twelve Years of Naming Things Has Taught Me
XenneX. Redinfinite. Dealery. Game Night. Some of those names came fast. Some went through embarrassing intermediate versions nobody will ever see again unless I tell you about them. Here's what I've actually learned.
XenneX. Redinfinite. Dealery. Game Night. Four products, four names, and if you'd shown me the actual whiteboards from when we were naming any of them, you'd understand why "there are only two hard problems in computer science" jokes always skip the actual hardest one, which is naming things well enough that you're not embarrassed by them in five years.
Here's what twelve years of doing this has actually taught me.
The Good Names Came Fast. The Bad Ones Took Forever.
This is the part that surprised me most, in hindsight: the names we're happiest with today mostly arrived quickly, in the first session, with something close to consensus in the room. Game Night took about ten minutes — it's exactly what the product is, said plainly, and plain turned out to be exactly right for something meant to feel casual and inviting.
The names that took weeks, went through six rounds of feedback, and generated genuine arguments? Almost all of them got scrapped eventually, usually because the extended process was a symptom of the underlying idea not being clear enough yet, not a sign we were being appropriately careful. If you're fighting hard over a name, the more useful question is usually whether you've actually nailed down what the product is, not whether you've found the right word for it.
Descriptive Beats Clever, More Often Than Feels Comfortable
Every naming session I've ever run starts with someone (often me) wanting something clever — a wordplay, an invented term, something that sounds like it belongs in a much bigger company's brand deck. And almost every time, the name that actually works better in practice is the boring, descriptive one that tells you what the thing does.
Dealery does this specifically — deal aggregation, "dealery" like a dealership but for deals. It's not clever. It's also instantly legible in a way that a more invented name wouldn't be, and legibility turns out to matter more than cleverness for a product that needs to explain itself in a three-second glance.
The exception is when the product itself is abstract enough that a descriptive name doesn't have anything to grab onto — which is roughly the story behind XenneX and Redinfinite, where there wasn't an obvious plain-English descriptor and an invented name filled the gap intentionally.
The Embarrassing Early Names, Briefly
I'm not going to reconstruct every rejected name in detail, because some of them deserve to stay buried. But the pattern across almost all of them: they tried too hard. Overwrought portmanteaus. Names that required a tagline to explain what they meant. A genuinely unfortunate attempt at a pun that someone (me) thought was clever for about eighteen hours before everyone else in the room gently explained why it wasn't.
The through-line: when a name needs a paragraph of justification for why it's clever, it's usually not going to read as clever to anyone who didn't sit through the brainstorm. Good names survive being said out loud to someone with zero context. That's the actual test, and it's a more useful one than "does everyone in the room think this is smart."
What I Actually Check Now
After enough rounds of this, I've settled into checking four things before a name survives past the first cut: Can you say it out loud without it sounding like you're reading a stock ticker? Does it mean something (or nothing) rather than something slightly wrong? Is the domain and handle actually available, checked before you fall in love with it? And — the one that's saved us the most pain — does it still sound right after you've said it fifty times, not just the first three?
That last one matters more than people expect. Names that sound great once and start grating by the twentieth repetition are a real, specific failure mode, and you don't find out until you've actually been living with the name for a while — which is exactly why the fast, consensus-early names have held up better. There was less time for the grating to happen before we'd already committed.