Your Company's Name Isn't a Branding Decision. It's a Positioning One.

Naming sessions tend to run the same way. A shortlist gets narrowed by whether the domain is available, whether it sounds good said out loud, and whether anyone in the room hates it. Somewhere in that process, the question of what the name actually tells a stranger gets dropped - because it’s the hardest one to answer and the easiest one to defer to the tagline.

That’s a mistake founders pay for on every piece of marketing that follows. A name that carries no information about the category or the promise means every ad, every deck, every cold email has to do double duty: introduce the name and explain what it means, every single time, forever. A name that does even a little of that work up front makes every subsequent sentence of marketing shorter.

Abstract names aren’t wrong. Unowned abstract names are.

This isn’t an argument for literal, descriptive names - “QuickBooks” and “generic” are not the only two options, and plenty of abstract names have gone on to mean exactly what their category needs them to mean. But that meaning was built, deliberately, with years of consistent association - the name became the shorthand because the company spent to make it one. A founder choosing an abstract name today is choosing to take on that cost. Most founders don’t realize they’re making that choice; they think they’re just picking something that sounds good.

The real test: what does the name cost you in the first sentence

Say the company name out loud to someone who has never heard it, with no other context. If the next sentence out of your mouth has to be “we’re a company that…” before you can say anything specific, the name isn’t carrying weight - the explanation is doing all the work the name should be sharing. That’s not disqualifying. It’s a cost, and founders should at least know they’re paying it, rather than discovering it eighteen months in when the sales deck still needs a slide just to explain what the company is called.

The fix is rarely a rename

Renaming is expensive and usually unnecessary - most of that gap can be closed by a tagline or category descriptor sitting permanently next to the name, doing the job the name doesn’t. The mistake isn’t picking an abstract name. It’s picking one and never noticing that something else now has to carry the weight the name didn’t.