What a product name has to survive
Naming a product this week took four rounds and dozens of checks. A good name has to pass far more tests than sounding nice.
I spent part of this week naming the to-do app I have been building since August. It took four rounds. The name that won is Calmo, and it was nowhere near the first list.
What makes a product name work?
It should say how the product feels, more than what it does. The names I admire are ordinary words: Things, Craft, Superhuman, mymind. None of them describe a feature, and all of them describe a feeling or a person you become when you use them.
For an app whose whole promise is a calmer day, that pointed straight at the feeling. Calm is the thing people lose to their to-do lists, and the thing they are hoping to get back.
What does a name have to survive?
More than most people expect. Every candidate went through the same checks:
- Is it already an app in the store, in this category or a close one?
- Can we own a domain that sounds like the product, at a sensible price?
- Does someone else have it on GitHub, or as a company in a related field?
- Does it read well in a sentence, in a notification, on an icon?
- Does it mean something unfortunate in another language?
Most names died on the first two questions. Some lovely ones were taken years ago by apps nobody uses. A few were free only because they were hard to say. The trademark check is still to come, and it is a step I will not skip.
Why bother with all of it?
Because a name is the first piece of design anyone sees, and the hardest to change later. It ends up on the icon, in every message, in how people recommend the product to a friend. Spending a week on it is cheap compared with renaming in a year, after people have learned to look for it.