How to name a product

The best product names do not come from a thesaurus or a domain availability checker. They come from finding the oldest, most human version of the problem you solve, and naming that. Start from the timeless problem, not from a list of cool words.

When we were naming the company, I kept pulling the team back to that idea instead of letting us brainstorm pretty words.

Start with the oldest version of the problem

My instinct during the naming process was not to ask what sounds good. It was to ask what we actually do, at the most basic human level. As I put it to the team, the problem we are solving is not a genuinely new one. It is one that has existed with humans for a long time. There is some way to break it down to the oldest version of the problem, and from there we can probably find a single word that describes it.

That reframe changes the whole exercise. You stop searching for clever and start searching for true. A name built on the timeless version of your problem will still make sense in five years, because the underlying problem is not going anywhere.

Name the core metaphor, not the feature

Once you are anchored on the real problem, you look for the metaphor at the center of it.

So I tested words against what we fundamentally were. I was thinking about words like door, because we were the gateway from inside a company to the outside world of its tools. Or gate, the same idea. Or center and middle, because we sat at the middle of everything a company runs on. Later we looked at Mimoto, which means identity in Japanese, because identity is at the center of everything. Everything you get access to flows through who you are.

Notice what those candidates have in common. None of them describe a feature. They describe our place in the customer’s world. A feature name ages out the moment the feature changes. A name built on your role in the customer’s life lasts.

How we actually landed on Talisman

Here is the part the framework leaves out. The winning name did not come from a spreadsheet of metaphors. It came from a long meeting where Chiko, Dan, and I were stuck. We were moving off our old name, Enkrypt, and we knew what we wanted the new one to do. We wanted something that meant something real to a business, something that would make a company feel like using us gave them powers.

I brought up talismans. Growing up in the early 2000s, I watched a cartoon on Kids WB called Jackie Chan Adventures, and in it there were talismans, and each one carried its own distinct power. That image stuck with me, and it fit exactly what we were trying to be. A customer would use Talisman to give their business powers. We even loved that it could scale into how we treated our own team, handing out talismans as people hit milestones and achievements.

What made it work was not just that it was a fun reference. It was that it passed the test I started this essay with. A talisman is one of the oldest ideas humans have, an object you carry that gives you power or protection. So the name came from a childhood cartoon, but it landed because it tapped the most ancient version of what we did. It was personal and specific to me, and at the same time it scaled to a real meaning for any business. That combination, something that is uniquely yours but means something universal, is what a great name is made of.

Why this beats chasing clever

It is tempting to name a product the way you would pick a clever tweet. Something punchy, something with an available domain. The problem is that clever-for-its-own-sake usually says nothing about what you do, so you spend years teaching the market what the name means.

A name rooted in the oldest version of the problem does some of that teaching for you. It carries meaning. When the metaphor is right, the name quietly reinforces what you are every time someone says it. That is a real advantage you get for free, but only if you earned it by starting from the problem instead of the wordplay.

The honest caveat

This is not a clean formula, and naming is partly taste. You will land on a metaphor that is right but already taken, or right in English but strange in another language. We ran into exactly that, where a word we liked translated oddly across markets. That is normal. The point of starting from the oldest version of the problem is not that it hands you the perfect word instantly. It is that it gives you a true north, so every candidate gets judged against what you actually are, not against what sounds nice in a meeting.

A name is not decoration. It is the shortest possible description of your place in the customer’s world, and you get to choose whether that description is meaningful or empty.

So do not start a naming session by listing cool words. Start by asking what the oldest, most human version of your problem is, and what single word sits at the center of it. Build outward from there. Ours came from a cartoon I loved as a kid, and it worked because underneath the cartoon was an idea as old as people. What is the timeless problem underneath the thing you are building right now?