A Founder’s Guide to Finding a Great Name

Today, we’re excited to share an essay and launch announcement from Willem Van Lancker, a designer and investor at Terrain, on the importance of naming your product. (Willem wrote one of our most popular Thesis essays, about the importance of friction to developing expertise.) After helping scores of founders navigate the messy process of finding a great name, he wanted to build a system anyone could go through in an afternoon. The result is a written guide to do just that, as well as Untitled, a software tool that helps guide founders through a rigorous process to find a name that will resonate.—Kate Lee

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Every maker and founder faces the same unavoidable decision: what to call the thing they're building. As attention spans shrink and new stories and brands proliferate with increasing speed, getting this right has become both harder and more consequential.

Your name ships first. Before anyone watches your launch video, lands on your website, or tries your product, they encounter your name. Names travel farther than features and last longer than campaigns. They either buy you trust—or burn it—before you’ve even said a word.

I have been working on making this process less chaotic, first by accident and now by design, starting almost a decade ago when I found myself repeatedly helping founders I backed with naming and eventually building Onym, a widely used naming resource.

After working with nearly a hundred startups, teams, and companies (helping create names that have sparked trends like The Browser Company of New York and Modern Life, evocative monikers like Imprint and Keeps, and brand foundations for breakout companies like Base Power), I've distilled the work of developing a successful name into something any focused founder can complete in an afternoon. It’s captured in a clear sequence: Orient, explore, distill, validate, commit, execute.

I'm sharing two free-to-use tools as part of our work at Terrain supporting early-stage founders:

“How to Name Anything in an Afternoon,” a comprehensive step-by-step guide to go from brand definition through naming and selection.

Untitled.new, an AI tool designed to guide you through a streamlined version of the same creative process.

So block off a few hours. Grab a small group you trust (or run solo). Follow the steps. By the end, you’ll have a better sense of what you’re building and a name to build around.

The act of naming

Before you begin using the guide, or Untitled.new, it’s worth going deeper into what makes a name really work, so you will know it when you see it. What you're looking for is a hook that sets itself into a person's mind, linking their brain back to your idea, product, and company. The act of naming has always symbolized the beginning of something: the moment the founder, the artist, the lawmaker, the developer, the parent, arrives at the name is the moment it becomes real.