How to Name Your Startup When Your Team Can't Agree

The Google Doc with 200 names

Every startup has one. Someone creates it during the first week. Everyone adds names for a month. Then it sits there, growing occasionally, while the team quietly avoids the conversation about actually picking one.

The problem isn't generating options. Founders are good at that. The problem is converging. Going from 200 names to one requires a kind of decision-making that most teams have never practised, on a topic where everyone has opinions and nobody has data.

Why naming is uniquely hard for teams

Technical decisions have benchmarks. Design decisions have user testing. Naming decisions have nothing. There's no A/B test for a name you haven't launched yet. There's no framework that reliably predicts which name will "work." So what happens is: everyone argues from taste, nobody can prove anyone wrong, and the loudest voice wins — or worse, the team compromises on something nobody loves.

Paul Graham famously wrote that if you don't own your .com, you should change your name. He's partly right — the top YC companies all own their .com. But the HN comments on that essay are full of counterexamples. Google was BackRub. Apple is a fruit. The correlation between great names and great companies runs the other direction: successful companies make their names memorable, not the other way around.

This matters because it reframes the stakes. You're not searching for a perfect name. You're searching for a good enough name that your whole team can get behind. Perfection is the enemy of shipping, and that applies to naming too.

The two-session method

Time-box it. Seriously. Teams that treat naming as an ongoing background process spend months on it. Teams that give it two focused sessions spend days.

Session one: diverge (60 minutes, async)

Everyone generates names independently. No shared screen, no brainstorming aloud. Solo brainstorming consistently outperforms group brainstorming because it eliminates anchoring — the tendency to cluster around the first few ideas someone says out loud.

Give people constraints: the name should be two syllables or fewer. It should be spellable after hearing it once. It shouldn't require explanation. Constraints breed creativity better than blank canvases do.

Collect everything in one place. Duplicates are a signal, not a problem — if three people independently suggest similar names, that's worth paying attention to.

Session two: converge (90 minutes, live)

Start with a silent vote. Everyone gets ten votes, distributed across however many names they like. This surfaces the real contenders without anyone having to publicly champion or kill a name.

Take the top ten. Now check the practical filters:

• Domain: is the .com available, or available for under £1,000? If not, is a credible alternative (.co, .io, .dev) available?
• Trademark: search your country's trademark database. Five minutes now saves £50,000 later.
• Social handles: check the major platforms. Consistent handles matter more than you think.
• Search: Google the name. If page one is dominated by something else with strong brand equity, you'll be fighting for visibility forever.

The names that survive the practical filters are your finalists. You'll have three to five.

Making the final call

This is where teams stall. Three good names, no objective way to choose, and everyone has a favourite.

Two approaches that work:

The hat trick: write each finalist on paper, draw one at random. Check the room. If people look disappointed, that name is eliminated. If people look relieved or excited, you might be done. This is a decision-making shortcut that bypasses rational deliberation by testing emotional response.

The sleep test: everyone lives with each name for 48 hours. Use it in conversation. Say "I work at [name]" to a friend. Write an email with the signature. The name that stops feeling weird fastest is usually the right one.

What doesn't work: endless deliberation, seeking consensus through discussion, or letting the CEO override everyone. The first two waste time. The third creates resentment — and the people who felt overruled will never fully commit to the name.

One thing most naming guides won't tell you

You will have second thoughts. Everyone does. The week after you decide, someone will suggest a name that seems obviously better. Resist the urge to reopen the discussion. You're experiencing the same grass-is-greener effect that kept you in the Google Doc for months. The name you chose is fine. Ship it.

The companies we admire didn't succeed because of their names. They succeeded despite names that seemed strange at first. Your name will grow into your company, not the other way around.

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One more thing

Kabbo handles the solo-brainstorming and voting steps: everyone swipes through names independently, and the ones the whole team agrees on surface automatically. No Google Doc required. But honestly, the two-session method above works with a spreadsheet and sticky dots. The process matters more than the tool.