How to Come Up With Great Company Name Ideas

The 6-step framework

1. Write a one-page brief (15 minutes)

• Who are we, what we are meaning, what change do we create?

• 3 emotions to evoke (e.g., assured, inventive, warm).

• 3 competitors

• What to avoid (roots, clichés, colors, tropes).

2. Build a seed lexicon (25 minutes)

30–50 words from strategy, benefits, metaphors, materials, movements, adjacent arts/sciences.

Add phonetic “feels”: soft (m, l, v), sharp (k, t), bright (i, e), dark (o, u).

3. Generate by mechanics, not by vibes (40–60 minutes)

Run multiple tracks deliberately (5–10 per track):

Descriptive: Dollar Shave Club, General Assembly

Suggestive (real word): Apple, Stripe

Associative/Metaphoric: Torch, Darkroom, Keystone

Composite/Portmanteau: PowerBook, QuickBooks, Snapchat

Invented/Abstract: Kodak, Hulu, Sonos

Truncated/Clipped: Monzo, Zappos, Roku

Alliterative/Rhyming: PayPal, WeWork

Non-English roots: Latin/Greek/Japanese/etc. (only if relevant and respectful)

Rule: don’t mix tracks until you’ve covered each—breadth first, then depth.

4. Score and map (30 minutes)

Score each candidate 1–5 for: originality, fit, pronounceability, brandability, stretch, edge_factor. Plot survivors on a 2×2: Emotional↔Rational × Descriptive↔Associative to spot sameness and gaps.

5. Shortlist with narratives (20 minutes)

Keep 6–12. For each, write 2–3 lines:

Meaning/territory

Why it fits the brief

Early tagline/story angles If you can’t write a narrative, it’s not strong enough.

6. Quick validation (60–90 minutes total)

Pronunciation/recall: 5 people.

Collision scan: exact/near matches in your category; social handles; obvious domain patterns.

Cultural/profanity screen: multilingual checks if relevant.

Future stretch: does it still fit if you add a product line or change pricing?

Formal trademark/legal clearance comes after this cull.

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Quick validation protocol (checklist)

☐ Say it aloud 10×; record and play back.

☐ Spell-hear test: say it once on a call; can they spell it?

☐ Nearest neighbors: list 5 closest names in category—too close? kill.

☐ Domain pattern (not only exact .com): viable pattern like getname.com, nameapp.com, usen ame.com.

☐ International tripwires: meanings, transliteration, unfortunate initials.

☐ Early narrative: one sentence + one tagline. If you can’t write them, drop it.

Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old.

Now I'm going to show you an example of an unordered list to make sure that looks good, too:

• So here is the first item in this list.
• In this example we're keeping the items short.
• Later, we'll use longer, more complex list items.

And that's the end of this section.

Common traps (skip these)

• Suffix farms (-ly, -io, -ify) with no rationale

• Over-describing the first feature you plan to sunset

• Clever but unspellable novelty

• Falling in love before collision checks

• Choosing by internal vote without audience sanity checks

How Nameworm streamlines this

• Database-backed generation: large curated corpus to widen territories without cloning trends.

• Mechanics by design: parallel tracks ensure breadth and de-duplication.

• Scoring + 2×2 matrix: objective views on fit and distinctiveness.

• Human-in-the-loop: you steer taste; the system provides structure.

• Early filters: profanity/culture, near-match patterns, handle/domain heuristics (formal legal still required).

Want the system done for you? Run your brief through the Nameworm workflow and get rubric scores, matrix placement, and a narrative-ready shortlist.