The economics of weird startup names

Force one: the good names are already registered

Start with the constraint every founder meets on day one. Short, common English words in .com were claimed early and are overwhelmingly held today, many by owners running no product on them who will sell at a price a pre-revenue company cannot justify. That is what a fixed supply meeting thirty years of demand produces.

What makes it sharp is that domains are an exact-string market. There is no near miss: the registry answers a yes-or-no question about one precise sequence of characters. A founder who has fallen for a dictionary word therefore has three options, and all three move the name further from ordinary English.

• Coin something newBuild a word that has never existed, usually from fragments of real ones. Nothing competes for the exact string, so it is genuinely obtainable. The trade is that you start with zero meaning and must teach every customer what the word refers to.
• Blend two wordsFuse two real words into one string nobody has registered. The blend keeps a thread of meaning, which makes it cheaper to explain than a pure coinage, and that is why it is the most common shape in modern startup naming.
• Respell a real wordKeep the word you wanted and change its spelling so the string becomes unclaimed. This is the cheapest move and the one with a hidden bill attached, because every person who hears the name out loud will type the ordinary spelling first.

Every one of those options produces something a normal person would call weird. That is the mechanism in miniature: the founder wanted an obtainable name, and strangeness was the price. If you are at this fork now, the choices are in what to do when the .com is taken, and the third option, with its hidden costs, is in deliberately misspelled brand names.

Force two: the law pays you to leave the dictionary

The second force is quieter and arrives later, usually in the voice of a lawyer asking whether you have anything less descriptive. Trademark systems rank names on a spectrum of distinctiveness, and where a name sits on it determines how much protection you can get.

• GenericThe ordinary word for the thing being sold. These do not function as trademarks at all, because no trader gets a monopoly on the common name of a product.
• DescriptiveStates a quality or purpose of what you sell. Often registrable only once it has acquired distinctiveness through substantial use, which means years of trading first.
• SuggestiveHints at a benefit without stating it, so the listener makes a small leap. Generally protectable without proving acquired distinctiveness, which is where careful naming often lands.
• ArbitraryAn ordinary word applied to something it has nothing to do with. Strong as a mark, because it carries no descriptive meaning there. The good ones were claimed long ago.
• FancifulAn invented word that means nothing until you give it meaning. The strongest rung and the easiest kind of mark to defend, because nobody else has a legitimate reason to use it.

Read that ladder as an incentive structure and startup naming stops looking like a fashion and starts looking like a rational response. The further you move from ordinary description, the stronger and cheaper your mark is to defend, and the harder it is for a competitor to argue they were only describing their own product. An invented word is the top rung by construction, so counsel nudges toward the weird end, and thousands of sensible nudges add up to the strangeness you notice in aggregate.

This is the general shape of the doctrine, not advice on your situation, and a real conflict is a question for a lawyer. The longer version is in trademark basics for startup naming, and the style trade-off underneath it is in descriptive vs. abstract brand names. Worth stating plainly: Namoly runs no trademark search, so a good score here is never clearance.

Force three: it has to work in every market at once

A software company is international on the day it launches, which is a genuinely new condition. A regional business could once pick a name that worked in one language and forget about it. A company selling from a website has customers in dozens of countries before it has an office in two, and the name has to be sayable and free of embarrassment in all of them at once.

Apply that filter to a shortlist and watch what survives. Every real word carries meaning in other languages, and some of it is unfortunate. Cross out each collision and the survivors are disproportionately words belonging to no language in particular, which is another way of saying they look invented.

• ZapposThe shoe retailer launched as ShoeSite.com and renamed in 1999 after “zapatos”, Spanish for shoes. Founder Nick Swinmurn’s telling is that they added a second p to make it their own. A loan word, respelled: familiar enough to feel like something, foreign enough to be unclaimed.
• HuluThe streaming service has said its name references Mandarin, and then-CEO Jason Kilar described the gourd it names as a traditional holder of precious things. That is the company’s own telling, not an independent finding. A short string that means something somewhere and nothing awkward here.
• VerizonWhen Bell Atlantic and GTE merged in 2000, the combined company took a name built with a naming consultancy from “veritas” (Latin for truth) and “horizon”. Verizon is nobody’s native word, which is the property being bought: Latin roots read as vaguely meaningful everywhere and native nowhere.
• Häagen-DazsThe ancestor of the whole approach. The name is invented, the umlaut is decorative, and the Danish it evokes is not Danish. Manufactured foreignness has been a naming tactic for far longer than tech has existed.

The manufactured-foreignness story in full is in why it is called Häagen-Dazs. One caution before copying the pattern: a screen across target-market languages produces “no flags in the languages checked”, a useful signal and not a guarantee. A native speaker reading your last candidates catches things no list does.

Force four: workarounds harden into fashions

The first three forces are structural. The fourth is social, and it turns odd names into a genre. One company solves a real constraint visibly, succeeds for reasons unrelated to its name, other founders read the name’s shape as a cause rather than an accident, and within a few years the workaround is a look people adopt deliberately.

• The dropped vowelFlickr wanted flicker.com, and co-founder Caterina Fake’s account is that the owner would not sell, so the e came out. Tumblr and a long tail of imitators followed. One company routing around one stubborn domain owner became the visual signature of an era, adopted by founders with no domain problem to solve.
• The -ly suffixA short stem plus -ly produces a pronounceable, brandable string, and it has a domain-hack ancestor in the .ly country code. The suffix worked, so it spread, well past the point where it distinguished anyone from anyone.
• The -ify suffixSame mechanism, different ending, and this suffix carries real meaning in English: to make something into something. A couple of very large companies made it sound like software, and a decade of naming sessions queued up behind them.
• The .ai waveThe current one, and the clearest to watch as it happens. A country-code domain belonging to Anguilla became the default suffix for a whole product category, so a great many companies now share a signal that says less with every new arrival.

The sting in the tail is the date stamp. A name adopted at a wave’s peak carries that year forever. The dropped vowel now reads as roughly 2005 to 2012 whatever the company does, and today’s .ai suffix will read as its own narrow window soon enough. Why certain invented strings feel fast or premium or soft regardless of origin is a real research question, covered in sound symbolism in brand names.

The honest counterweights

An article that only explains why weird names happen quietly implies you should get one. That does not follow, and three things push the other way.

• Survivorship bias, first and loudestEvery weird name you can recall is a survivor. Thousands of equally weird names belonged to companies that failed, and you have never heard one of them, so they are missing from the pattern you think you see. The names did not cause the outcomes. Product, timing, and distribution did.
• Weird is a by-product, not a goalNobody sensible sets out to be weird. They set out to find something obtainable, protectable, and pronounceable in several markets, and weirdness is what is left once those filters remove every ordinary option. Treating the by-product as the target is how you get an unpronounceable string that solves no constraint you had.
• Plain wins more often than the internet admitsFor a local business, a marketplace-native product, or anything found through a category listing rather than a brand search, a plain name is a real advantage: it explains itself in half a second and costs nothing to spell. The naming internet under-argues this case, largely because the people writing about naming are selling naming.

The case for a plain name is argued properly, with the tests that tell you when plain has tipped into invisible, in is your brand name too generic. This page explains the pressure toward strangeness; that one explains what strangeness buys and when you need not buy it.

What to aim for instead of weird

The useful target was never weird or plain. It is a name that is ownable, sayable, and clear of bad meanings, and those three matter because all are checkable properties rather than matters of taste. Each can be settled with evidence in about a minute.

1. OwnableCan you get the exact string, in the places that matter, without a hyphen or a substitute spelling? Domain status is a live registry fact you can look up, not an opinion. Trademark is a separate question with a separate answer, and it is a lawyer’s job rather than a tool’s.
2. SayableCan a stranger repeat it after one hearing, and spell it after one hearing? Those are two different tests, and a respelled name routinely passes the first and fails the second. Say it in a sentence, spell it down a phone line, count the corrections.
3. Clear of bad meaningsDoes the string collide with anything unfortunate in the languages you sell in? The honest output of such a screen is “no flags in the languages checked”, never a guarantee, and a native speaker read on your last one or two candidates is still worth paying for.

A name that passes all three can be strange or ordinary, and it barely matters which. One that fails any of them is a bill you keep paying, however good it looks in a deck. If you are still generating candidates rather than testing them, start with tech startup brand name ideas.

Frequently asked questions

Why do startups have weird names?

Because the sensible names are already spoken for. Short common words are overwhelmingly registered as .com domains, so the exact string is rarely obtainable. Trademark law protects invented words far more easily than descriptive ones. And a name must be pronounceable and inoffensive in every market at once. Weirdness is what survives those three filters, and fashion does the rest.

Why do startups drop vowels from their names?

It started as a domain workaround. Flickr wanted flicker.com and, by co-founder Caterina Fake’s account, the owner would not sell, so the e came out and the string became obtainable. Tumblr and many others followed, and the dropped vowel stopped being a workaround and became a look. The cost is permanent: an unintuitively spelled name gets spelled out every time it is spoken.

Why do so many startup names end in -ly?

A short stem plus -ly reliably produces something pronounceable, brandable, and for a while obtainable, and it echoes the .ly country-code domain hack that made the shape popular. Once a few visible companies made it sound like a modern product, naming sessions everywhere converged on it. Like every wave, it now dates a name to the years it peaked.

Do weird startup names work better?

There is no honest evidence that they do, and the examples people cite are survivorship bias: the weird names you remember belong to companies that succeeded, while the far larger number attached to failed ones are invisible. A distinctive name is easier to find, protect, and repeat, which are real advantages. It does not cause success, and no name saves a product nobody wants.

How do I know if my startup name is too weird?

Test three properties instead of arguing about taste. Can a stranger spell it after one hearing? If not, you pay a spelling tax on every spoken mention forever. Is the exact string obtainable where it matters, or are you settling for a hyphen? And does it collide with anything unfortunate in your target-market languages? A name that fails the spelling test is not distinctive, it is expensive.