Tag archive
naming
8 articles
Color, Sound, and Meaning: The Science of Naming
Lowrey & Shrum's JCR vowel study (2:1 preference for front/back vowels matching product size), bouba/kiki across 25 languages, and phoneme frequency in Fortune 500 names—naming is engineered perception.
Domain Hacks: When the Dot Is Part of the Word — and Who Actually Owns the Suffix
From del.icio.us to instagr.am: how domain hacks work, why .io and .tv are ccTLDs (not gTLDs), what Google’s generic-ccTLD list changes for SEO, and the registry risks most naming guides skip.
Memorable Brand Names: What Verified Naming Stories Actually Teach
A practical naming guide built on Slack, Kodak, Zillow, Stripe, Flickr, and Warby Parker—without the recycled myths about domains and backronyms.
Short Domains vs Descriptive Domains: What Works
Zoom (4 letters) vs Booking.com (descriptive)—both work at different price tiers. YC data: 36% brandable, 0.2% literal EMD. The split is budget × pivot risk × channel.
Using ChatGPT and Claude for Brand Naming
LLMs generate 50 names in 30 seconds—and 47 violate phonotactics or trademark. The fix: constraint-first prompts, batch verification, and human fluency gates from Alter/Oppenheimer research.
Case Studies: How Top Startups Named Themselves
Receipt-first patterns from Google, Dropbox ($300K for dropbox.com), Slack ($60K for slack.com), and YC data showing 87% brandable names—plus the domain compromises almost every unicorn made.
10 Startup Naming Mistakes That Cost Money (With Data, Not Anecdotes)
~46% of VC-backed startups use exact-match .com—but 0.2% use literal keyword domains. Rebrands cost $250K–$1M+. Here are the naming errors that trigger those bills.
AI Domain Generation in 2026: Why Availability-First Beats Brainstorming
With 166.6M .com names taken and ~94% of short domains gone, LLMs expand the idea space—but only pipelines that verify RDAP/DNS in real time produce names you can register.