This guy names billion dollar brands for a living, here’s his exact 3-step formula.

0:00 So listen, David, here's the deal. I don't believe that naming your company is that important. And over the next hour, I want you to convince me why I'm incredibly wrong, why picking a good name is gonna help me build a billion dollar startup and how to name a startup effectively. I feel like I can rule the world I know But I want to I put my loud in it like a day song on a boat. I love right behind you you have uh for people who are just listening on audio, they can't see this, but if you're on YouTube, you see this.

0:30 Right behind you you have a Bunch of almost like a music artist would have platinum records. You have platinum records of names that you've created. So the impossible burger, Blackberry, Swiffer. Versel, Windsurf, you've had the I remember the Intel Pentium processor.

0:48 Uh Febreze. Sonos. Sonos is crazy. The hits go on and on. Slim fast. Oh my God. Slim fast. That is one of the greatest names ever. You know, Microsoft Azure. You've done all these incredible names. And so How lucky are we? We get to hear from you today.

1:04 Because I suck at naming. I've always sucked at naming. And it's bothered me because If you're gonna pour your sweat and you know tears into something for five years You kinda want to have a name that you feel that you like, that you feel proud of, that gives you the best shot of success. And so I guess to Sam's initial

1:21 question we w which we said at the beginning here, which is he's like, uh I'm not sure that names are that important. Can you know, tell c change my mind. Tell me I'm wrong. Well, let me start off with this. First off, nothing that you will do in your in your brand will be used more often or for longer than your name. It's not so much.

1:40 You know, is one good name better than another good name, it's getting the right name. And that's really what Our success has been built on or based on is You gotta think through what the right name can do for you because if you get it right, first off, it's the highest frequency

1:55 leverage, you know, something that happens all the time. That's leverage for you. And the name compounds over time. Right. So The difference between an okay name and the right name that

2:08 Actually creates a strategic advantage. We uh our goal is to always create asymmetric advantage. Impossible does that. Swifer. Does that.

2:20 May I'll give you a very recent example. We changed codium. To windsurf. No nobody knew about codium, really.

2:29 No one knew how to spell it. They couldn't search it. Their SEO was bad. We worked with him over a six week period. changed it to windsurf. I mean there's a story behind that, but we don't need to get into that now. And boom, that brand took off. Now that

2:43 That's an example of the power of a name. Doesn't do everything. But The n the right name can launch something. It does really three things for you. First off

2:55 You have to get attention. I mean he had to get attention fifty years ago, but now it's almost impossible to do that. Secondly. You gotta hold their attention. Here's a kind of a ten dollar phrase.

3:08 It has to be processing fluent. In other words, not only can I sort of pronounce it But there's something in it that I can understand. And the third thing is and this is what most people get wrong and why we have so many Poor or okay names. has to be surprising.

3:24 Not comfortable, not popular. There's something unexpected about it. I wanna ask you about the comfort of thing, because that's amazing, but can you set the stakes here? Can you give an example? Like You know, uh it's crazy. You have Febreze up here. So like you've been doing this for uh a long time and you've had some amazing outcomes, it seems like. Are there examples? Can you kind of give us like The price of success here, where the product was the same, the team was the same, and you changed the name and there was a different outcome.

3:52 Look. Yeah. Partron Gamble came to us, right? They said, you know, we we're really disappointed. We wanted Promop Uh we can't have it legally and we want you to work with us on on on this. They had a m a a mop, I guess, and they wanted to call it pro mop.

4:08 That's exactly right. Okay, so so they sent out samples uh to us and the first thing we said was first off, this isn't a mop. There's no stringy cotton on it. It was it was really easy to use and we did some research. And we found out it turns out Whether you're a man or a woman In housekeeping shores.

4:28 There are things people really like to do. Some people love to polish their furniture, others people love washing windows. Nobody Wants to mock. It's dirty. It's inefficient ulcers. So we went back to P and G and said

4:41 But Let let's bring this alive. Let's put some fun in this. It also had some materials and a little bit of magic so it picked things up so it's more efficient. So boom. Swifter, right?

4:52 Pro Mop to Swiffer. Yeah. That's great. Okay. Great decision. Almost the same time the Clorox company with came out with Ready Mop. Okay. Now That's a comfortable name. Okay.

5:04 That's probably a popular name. It probably did well in research because people said, What do you think this is? Well, I think it's a mob. Okay, we got it. We nailed it. Swift's a five. a a five billion dollar brand. I think The Clorox's ready mop is

5:21 A couple hundred million dollars. Do you think that the what percentage of the difference do you think was the name? I think the name of the three. makes all the difference in that First. I'm gonna say

5:32 Ninety to a hundred and twenty to the first twelve months because that's where you're getting interest. You're holding people's interest for a while. You're generating interest with retailers, right? They had to get into stores and say, Hey We're changing this business of Cleaning floors. It's not a mop, it's a swifer, right?

5:51 And so now after that All the other marketplace dynamics. Uh come into gear. Our whole thing here is To provide

6:01 Value. to create value and it's we want it to be instant value. Swifer does it. Impossible. Look at the press impossible God.

6:11 When they launched that. Right. And that was something where we started with They really wanted something sort of I you know, kind of crunchy, hippie, something that that fits into whole foods.

6:21 environment that psyche. You're just gonna fit in. You have to make a claim here that you're better than the other guys. And we did it. Hey, I got something pretty cool to share with you guys. So if you're like me, you listen to podcasts or YouTube videos, and you like to take notes, you're here to learn.

6:41 And that's a lot of effort. Sometimes you're on the go and you can't do it. And so the folks at Hubspot who are sponsoring the podcast have done something pretty cool for you. They have created the MFM Vault. It's a place to go find notes and resources that they pull. from the different episodes that we do. So if we have a guest on that shares their five point framework, they write down those five points with the examples that the guest gave and they put the notes there for you. So if you want to access the vault. It's totally free. All you got to do is click the link in the description below and you can access all the notes and the stuff in the vault. We're going to keep adding to this trying to make it better over time. Thank you to HubSpot. This is a very cool way for them to sponsor the podcast, but by instead of telling you To go buy their stuff, they're actually giving you something instead.

7:27 I like it. So we you kinda hinted at two things just now. You said a good name versus a And instead of saying great name, you said the right name. Picked up on that. Sounds like you have some distinction there. And then you also said um You know, what I would normally ask. Is

7:43 One of the biggest mistakes founders companies make when it comes to their name, and it sounds like what you're saying is they choose something that's safe and comfortable. Which causes them to be lost in the sea of sameness with everybody else. I is that the i right way of thinking about it? Can you talk about those two things the right name versus just saying a great name? Yeah. So so let me let me address the founder thing because uh I think that Th there's a sequence that people end up with relatively comfortable names.

8:08 A a very common response when we ask the question, Well how'd you get the this name that you have right now? They say well, you know, our attorney called and they said, Listen, we've got to put these documents together. We need a name. You guys gotta figure this out. So we spent a few hours doing this and th there it is, and now they're spending the the time, the money to to do it again. For your First question about you know w what's the difference between a right name and a a good name or an okay name. Right names always do three things. First they're original.

8:37 You know, in the category in the context. That doesn't mean they have to be original like a Pentium that something is coined. And Mm. You're on a slippery slope if you want something comfortable or popular because things that are original are You know, humans like comfort for sure.

8:55 Second thing is. You really do have to know something about linguistics and how the brain processes information. That's this processing fluency thing, so That is. There's something f familiar and yet something surprising. And that that's our creative strategy here is to really develop

9:12 Names that are surprisingly familiar. 'Cause the brains where our brains are a little Lazy, if you will. Uh this is gonna be easy for me to process, but oh there's something interesting here. That's where

9:24 You get that. So there those are those two things. And then I mentioned this before. You have to be unexpected, right? And an unexpected word can be something different.

9:36 for one company versus another. Azure for Microsoft that typically has very descriptive And not so interesting uh words in their portfolio. Azure

9:51 To Google It wouldn't have been that attention getting because people would expect that from F from then. Can we play a game to make this sort of real? So I'm a founder. I'm listening to this. If uh presumably if I'm listening to this because I want to be better at Naming a n naming a company.

10:05 And we could talk generally about how to do it, or we talk specifically. I like specifics. Okay. So let's pretend I came to you, David. And I said, Hey, I've got this great Fiber brand. I want to bring a new fiber brand to market. And if you look at the fiber market today. There's uh what is it? Metamucil, which I think is a all time worse name.

10:23 There's uh what are the b what are the other big fiber brands they're gonna be. Fiber one, is that one? Yeah, fiber. Yeah, fiber one. Which is a very ready mop. Ba fiber. That's what my mom's drinking beta fiber. It's got some benefits to fiber, I guess. Yeah. And I say, David, we can disrupt this market. We're gonna we have a We have something so much better. Right. Step one, what are we gonna do?

10:42 Okay. Our process is driven really by two things. It's a combination thing. It's cr we we call it or I call it creative curiosity. So the first thing we would do for you is we'd say, Okay, well let's look at the category. What's out there? What's the landscape? We would find a lot of fiber this or something fiber and we would say That's

11:03 Not the way to go. Generally speaking, that would be our first hypothesis about this. So you you you you you look at the landscape and you put everything into a bucket and you say, We just have to make sure that we aren't like that or we aren't. We don't know where we're going, but we know we're not going there. Uh once we find out more about what your pro so we would look now hard at

11:26 Your product. Right. And we would have a list, right? Uh uh of those things that You have.

11:34 Then we would look to the consumers, right? Well why are they doing this? What what is their need? What's their expectations We'd go up that ladder of what's the ultimate benefit, right? Okay. Then we would step back from that. That's just kinda logical

11:49 Practical stuff. Then we say okay. We go through A little series of questions that That

11:56 Yeah, uh there's almost no exception to this. It it it pays off greatly. First we say okay. How do you define winning here? Yeah. Now, if you get in a room with six clients and you ask that question, I will tell you that every client will have a different

12:11 uh uh definition. Then we say, Well what do you have to win? And you would start talking about How your fiber's made, how it's ground differently, those types of things. Then we say, Okay, what do you need to win? Well, we gotta break through, right? We gotta Communicate people that Fiber done this way is better for you than fiber done this way. I'm making this stuff up'cause we're playing a game here.

12:32 And then Well what do we need to say? That's the last sequence of questions, and so from there. We begin to Ar articulate with you a strategi.

12:43 For the name. Because your fiber is gonna do something on its own. Your packaging, things like that along the way will do other stuff. But we have to understand What you Need to say.

12:55 Sean do Do you do you know enough about fiber to go through this exercise with him? Um we could try. I actually I think it's kind of almost funny to s to assume That you don't have a magic bullet in the product. Right, let's say that the it's like most commodity products on the shelves where like

13:11 We think we're better, we have clean ingredients, we're gonna have cool packaging, we're gonna have we're gonna be great at grow go to market, you know, we're gonna try to do all those things. So let's assume for a second I don't have a Absolute innovative novel solution. Yeah. I have a very good solution, but I'm looking to break into the park. I didn't have some totally new out of left field angle because I think That does happen a lot. Most people are not coming out with a

13:37 Absolute groundbreaking approach. Now we might find something in the In the process that you know What's the old madmen thing, like our our cigarettes are toasted or whatever. It's like a version of that. But let's assume for a second I don't have a magic bullet feature that nobody else has of efficacy or anything else. All right. So

13:55 The the second hypothesis of mine would be that Everybody there is describing that they have fiber in this package. Right. And they're making the assumption that people know that fiber is good for them and has certain benefits. So I would say we're gonna We're gonna move away from that.

14:11 And we're gonna talk about the ultimate benefit of that. So then then you know let's just play the game here, Sean. So what do you think is the ultimate benefit of of me taking fiber on a daily or a weekly basis? Um, you know, there's a couple of ways to do it. Some people would say gut health. Okay, you have a clean gut. Some people would say yeah, regular bowel movements or you know, fix your bowel movements. There might even just be an argument that like I think there's not a person I know on earth that doesn't want to have better metabolism. You know, just like have high metabolism. Wow, wouldn't that be great? And so maybe there's some way we could go there that this is a metabolism booster that this helps you

14:44 Process, digest your food better. So one of the things as you were talking, I was thinking about is I think one of the real benefits here would be it's lighter. You you you feel lighter. Right. Okay. That's a rich area there, I I think. And so we would go down that category. I don't even say the words. You just saw that my posture change and I like did an upward motion and he's like So what you're saying is after all that, the real ultimate benefit would be you feel lighter. Great. So so then th then we would explore that and and we would look for

15:17 And we have databases here and we have software that helps us. We we we be the and there's some really tactical things that we would do just because This is really for us a treasure hunt. You need to look at The all the possibilities o of that. Right. Um

15:32 Uh have you ever read the book Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea? No. Oh you guys would love it. Um So very quickly.

15:41 A ship left. San Francisco loaded with gold. Gold coins. Right. From the gold rush. So this is in the eighteen fifties. It sank off the coast of Uh Southern California. Estimated at a over a billion dollars of gold.

15:55 Of course, everybody tries to find it. One guy who's a scientist. Develops. It takes some f sonar boons and he goes, Everybody is getting excited. They find a shipwreck down there. And there's a lot of shipwrecks because of the storms off the coast.

16:12 And then they spend all their money on that shipwreck'cause I am going to map out the entire area here. I'm gonna make some decisions about what pays off and then I'm gonna dive. He found Ship of gold in the deep blue sea. Okay. Yeah. Same thing happens here. Just we're we're gonna go, Okay, what are Greek word units for

16:32 Lightness. you know, uh for air, f for less volume, for you know, anti-gravity things. You know, th those types of things. We're we're gonna look at expressions around I'm feeling light, I'm feeling better. Um W uh we're looking at aerodynamics. I we would have someone for fifteen minutes look at What makes an airplane lift up. Okay. And along the way, we would have all this stuff. We typically internally call that trash. You know, it's just things, just concepts.

17:03 And we would start eliminating things. And along the way, you know, you're calling it trash. But you're not Like. Disparaging it. You're like this is necessary, it's the necessary things, or w why trash?

17:15 Because In this business, and it's very counterintuitive. Quantity leads to quality. Quantity leads to quality. Often we will get

17:26 a list from a client saying, You know, we're really stuck now. Uh uh and I'll say, Okay, well we uh how how many names do you generate? We will get l back a list of fifty or a hundred names. And that's where and then got stuck and they stopped, right? We we're we're looking at Maybe two thousand names, right? Again, these these are aren't all the right names. They aren't even good names. Some of them there's two things. You're y it sounds like you have like multiple categories where you go treasure hunting. So Greece Names is one.

17:59 Maybe like I have one where it's like streets in my hometown. Like I like look at all the streets of my hometown or like you know, you I'm sure you have like which I actually do want to ask you, like what are the all categories? And you go through all of'em and you would literally sit there in a group and write'em down. Yes. Small two person teams here. We don't use Brainstorming sessions. Oh, I like it. What what's the problem with brainstorming?

18:23 Well First up you have, you know, and the classic ones are you you have peer pressure, right? So so and then the you the stopping that cascade of evaluation when you have You know, four, five, or six people, let alone ten people. It's just it's a slow, slow grind. And We

18:41 really documented that and this is going back now. thirty years ago doing research'cause we used to do brainstorming here. And we used to have freelancers, right? And so the combination of that And over an eighteen month period. I mean, we just asked as you know, it's always in life the questions you ask, right? And and w we said, Where are our names really coming from, right?

19:03 And at the end of that eighteen months, even though the collection was a little sloppy and a little crude, We said this is really interesting. First off, it doesn't come from freelancers. Not because they're not creative, it's just they're not inside. They're not they don't they don't have that esprit de cor. It's not coming from brainstorming sessions, it's coming from individuals or people working in. Two person teams.

19:26 And so we stopped all that brainstorming never hired a freelancer again. And we work in Three teams now. So so usually. Uh it depends on the budget and the timing.

19:38 One team knows everything about your fiber product, right? Next team. We're still in fiber, but now with that team we're gonna say we're adding ingredient an ingredient to this. We're It's got energy in it. Okay. Well what happens there

19:53 It Change his Their perspective. And their names are gonna be completely different than that first list. And the third

20:00 Team. We're not even talking about fiber. We're talking about Uh n probably something a an athletic performance.

20:10 Now we've got Three distinct types of names that were generally This is searching the deep blue sea, searching the whole ocean of possibilities. Something unrelated? Yeah, and it would it would have been like uh energy. You know, the the this now has its it's Fiber, so it's digestion. Pus is gonna give you some Some energy. It might be a package of minerals. I mean we y you these things

20:37 I call it the the blueprint for a for for a a program, where what we're gonna do. And and then we try these things out and you know, so yeah, there's a lot of failure in creativity. And uh you know, everybody here has Complete permission to fail. Uh if we're not failing here, we're not doing our job, right? Because it's again You're looking for that ship in the deep blue sea.

20:57 And so along the way You know, we're gonna uncover something like You know, well, what's about lightness? How do you feel like well it feathered. All right. So And we'd say, Well, what would this

21:08 What would this feel like if I walked into Walgreens And there's Fiber plus and there's metamusle. And now in a new package. There's a brand called Feather, right?

21:20 And now there's gotta be Copy. that supports it, right? So you gotta figure can we Create a sentence or a little phrase Where people get it.

21:31 I get it. It's gonna have fiber on the label. Okay. So You know. It could be feather. But

21:38 The lightweight fiber you need or something like that. All right, I got it. Right. You know. Consumers aren't stupid, right? This is like a

21:48 Swipers picker upper. Exactly. So we would go through that drill and e eventually we would Have You know, a list of ten, sometimes fifteen names. Now it goes to our trademark group here. Which we have pair legals and a trademark attorney. And they're looking at I'm gonna stick with feather for now. Is feather available? Probably would be in this category, right?

22:13 And so now what do we have? We have something original, we have something that's easy to process because it's a real word. And it's familiar, but all of a sudden in Fiverr it becomes surprising. Today's episode is brought to you by HubSpot. Did you know that most businesses only use 20% of their data? That's like reading a book but then tearing out four fifths of the pages. Point is you miss a lot. And unless you're using HubSpot, the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business. The insights that are trapped in emails, call logs, transcripts, all that unstructured data makes all the difference because when you know more, you grow more. And so if you want to read the whole book instead of just reading part of it, visit hubspot.com.

22:52 Right away you said um You know You said light. And we both lit up and uh you were like now let's look at the the Greek words for light.

23:03 You said that very quickly as if this is just one of the many um the many uh places where you go treasure hunting. What are the other handful of places that you'd like to dig? Yeah. So um in terms of databases that anybody would have access to. We we we do look at Latin roots.

23:22 Greek roots. Roman mythology, Greek mythology. Uh those really basic things which sometimes heal things. I mean Pentium came out of, you know We have a data base not only of the periodic table. But lots of information about the periodic table. You said lots of those basic things.

23:41 They're not basic to us. You know, we're we're we're we're dummies. Uh we're we're a few brain cells away from being just talking monkeys. So like what are some of the what are the other few uh what are the other simple databases? Yeah. Okay. So so there's your periodic table, but you gotta go y you have to have databases where we built have built them out. It's not anybody can just you know, okay, I'm gonna go and look at the the periodic table. We've taken that table and then we've loaded it up with Other

24:11 articles and information about it. So now it's a richer base of words relating to that periodic table. And and that's where kind of the gold can be. Then what we've done. Um is when we have an assignment

24:26 Uh let's say it's a Uh it's a small car for uh Nissan, right. All those names. go into a database not called small cars, but small things. Okay.

24:37 And A processor for Intel that's small. that would go into that. So now what's happening is That gives us I'm a real believer in the synchronicity, right? the connecting of seemingly un uh uh irrelevant things, right? That that that's the fundamental layer of creativity.

24:55 Impossible. is seemingly irr irrelevant to what they're doing, but look how it performs in the marketplace, right? What what would have been the comfortable name for the impossible burger? It would have been uh like when we cl came to the client and they said, Yeah, we wanna fit into whole foods, it would be something like Natural farms. Right.

25:15 Okay, so so you uh I don't know if you still come up with names yourself or the king of the kingdom and you don't you you let the the scribes do that. But how do you get in flow? So like what do you do? Let's say it's a name day. And you need to you need to get into a creative mindset flow. What do you actually do you do anything in your routine? It's more difficult to Keep in the flow because of Because of interruptions here, right?

25:39 But what I really try to do is I first sit down with a pad and a and a pen and I just start kind of free associating thoughts about where to go with this. You know, I I sometimes might draw a treasure map with a grid and and put ideas down in there. And you know, we use the I mean everybody's addicted somehow to the web. I'll I'll use I mean we use all the AI things, Claude, co work, um, you know, chat GBT, uh you know, all these things and

26:08 I'll start asking questions. I I don't ask it for names. But I'll I'll ask about D different things relative in your case to fiber. Uh um And I'll

26:19 Yes, stuff like that. And then at a certain point This is really like a twenty minute kind of thing. So so it's not you know very arduous for me. So I'll just start j generating names and I'll write down other directions. And then I'll pursue that. It might be okay. I think this I think Greek would be a good thing to look at. Um I I think

26:40 aviation and aircraft for l things that are lighter, right? uh I would go and I would look at other words for light and then that would lead to sunshine and and and and soul and you know SOL things like that. And then I just start crafting names. So my g my guess is that um

26:59 I'm just We've only talked to you for thirty minutes. Uh and uh I've already gleaned from you that A, you're probably just incredibly talented at this, but You seem very process driven. You seem like you've acquired you seem like you were creative and then you've made this into a skill, which implies it's somewhat teachable. Well when we're trying to when Sean and I are trying to man we both have companies, when we're trying to manage creative people to come up with these uh It's a brilliance, whether it's just a name or it's anything else that's creative. You seem

27:25 really good at this because you you just seem like you know what you're doing. How what mistakes do you think that we are making with our team or a lot of our listeners are making with their employees on managing people when you're asking them to come up with something unique or creative or Dangerous a little bit, you know, uh things like that. It's a little bit of search for the holy grail of ha how how to Had him manage.

27:47 Creative people. And And Kinda. first mistake is or clients make this mistake is

27:55 I try to lead everybody here. And I really try to encourage people. And you know, the root word of encouragement is courage, right? And so

28:06 It may be that you're not giving the people you're asking these things to do. That You're not Actually letting them just flow free.

28:16 Here when people di develop a list. And they give it to me, right? Uh because I'm s I'm still the creative director here. And I still generate names every week. They know that I'm not gonna look at that.

28:30 I'm not gonna evaluate it. I'm gonna speculate with it, right? And now eventually we do have to evaluate. things, yeah. It all it all we we're working for clients and we gotta d do the right thing for them. But you know, go back and look at how you're communicating with your team and

28:50 You can't move it from leading versus managing. And encouragement. versus evaluating. It seems like one important part of uh G having people have courage is to not get smacked down on their first bad idea. And you you talked about separating

29:05 When you judge an idea versus when you're generating an idea and put doing both at the same time, you know, everything I've read about creativity Tells you that based on this one of the most key things you can do. I think Disney had three different rooms in his office, one to dream ideas. One to plan out which ideas to do, and then one to judge. the the result at the and you don't you won't you don't judge when you're in the dreaming room, right? Because that would sort of kill to create a flow. Do you guys do something similar or do you have any rules around when you judge? And then also how do you judge? Like how do we know if feather's a good name? How are we gonna know? Is it just

29:35 We just go on our gut, or do we have some testing? We do have testing. I'll talk about that in a moment, but uh going back to your It's you with your uh your creators. There's Two things that we do, and these are kind of magical phrases. I mean, just trust me on this. I know you don't know me very well.

29:51 I I'll coach people to say, listen, when you have trouble, when you feel yourself leaning into the urge to say That's too expensive, or that'll never pass legal. Say something like that I wish we could make that So it wasn't expensive.

30:08 or How do we How do we legally available.

30:15 What you've done there is you've given someone a problem solving proposition. You haven't slammed a a name down. You're getting people to think about it, well let me think about'cause humans love To solve problems. We do. That that that's it's in our DNA is how we survive. And so try those things.

30:34 Someone comes to you with an idea and go You know. It's an interesting idea. That's the first thing I say. Okay, it's interesting. Or I'll say I would not have thought of that. Which is just being honest.

30:48 I as a smart person would not have thought of that. The other day I was uh I met this guy at a conference and he was making his argument about why AI we've peaked. And I was like Well I understand your argument. Uh I'm not low IQ, so I don't agree with you, but I I totally get your I totally get your argument. Like what Okay, okay, so you don't do that. You just say you give them credit, right? Oh, I wouldn't have thought of that. And then and then you sort of redirect towards the problem. Yeah, we try to re redirect. And and then there's a certain point where, you know, you you do start just eliminating things, but you have to give there's a moment, there's a period where things just live in our system, right? And then And then we start. comparing them down. And our course trade trademark

31:36 Divergent phase to maybe converging on an idea. Yeah. We we uh in our process there the we're we're going through a s uh a cycle. There there's an initial cycle Where we're just trying to figure out are are these were these

32:00 assignments right was did did we get anything out of fiber Plus energy. Do we get anything out of this sports medicine thing that we had over here? Should we redial? But after we gone through really about two cycles, which is a Two, two and a half week period. Is people are working not on

32:19 Not on this one project for two and a half weeks. They they might have three or four things that they're working on, right? Then it's time to really look and say, Wh where are we? Are we you know, and then of course we have we go back and we look now At the objectives, we call the creative framework. And there's a reason for that because we want more of a window for people to walk through and create as opposed to Conform to these five things.

32:43 So we'll look at that creative framework and we'll say, Hey, I think we're I think we're getting there. Let's sh ship this off to legal. Most of our products are Or uh uh projects. have to do with two or three or four or five markets that our c clients want to do, you know, global in a sense, right.

33:02 En so We have Uh ling linguists that work for us around the world and we're shipping those out. We also have software that we built here. that takes certain language principles and certain cognitive science principles and that's all

33:18 been in there into software and now it's AI. uh powered. So that I can put a name in the And it will come back and it will talk about processing fluency. memorability.

33:31 The famous thing is C V C V constant vow, constant vowel. Uh learn language. That's the only thing the a child will pronounce is Mama. You got it. That's it. About a little bit past the age of two. That's like Sonos.

33:48 Uh w are there other names that you you might have had. Wha what are the other like power letters? Aren't there some letters that have like You know just like you know, not all letters are created equal. You know, if some of the if there were all the letters are in a bar. And one letter walks in everything. Oh my God. Yeah. Well you're really talking about an area that we know a lot about, which is sound symbolism. So you're I don't know. But The those

34:24 Th letters that are s strong. I mean this is in s many ways just intuitive, but Think about in some some you know you can call them plosives, there's other technical terms, but Y you talk about Uh P and K and B. The those sounds are if you want something reliable and fast

34:43 You you're gonna at least Formulate that. into Um Y your names. So in our software now, well, I mean, we used to do this hand eye coordination, but now

34:55 We just say um you know to our platform Uh which is called uh Predict. Um we say okay for this project this name has to move fast. Sort these ten names out as to which ones. Faster.

35:09 Right. And it's looking at all of the research we've done on sound symbolism. And it's going well D is fast, P is fast, Z is really fast. And it's looking for those letters. It's not It's not

35:22 Commenting really on the semantics of the word or even on the project. It's just saying okay, this Is faster than that. And that's really helpful to us.

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36:25 So I'm um I'm a self taught copywriter, which means I'm pretty good, but I'm not world class. But I have a process and I would like to explain my process to you and then maybe you can give me a process that you can that I can use at home to be a better namer. So when I uh when I when I write I always ha up top I have general knowledge, which means I'm reading books constantly and they're on any topic that I like and I just I'm learning I'm generally learning. Then when I have a project, I d I get specific knowledge. So I dive deep on that one thing so I can I can learn.

36:54 Then I uh I get my draft out and my draft I know it's gonna be horrible and I just I say I don't care. I'm just gonna like just get horribleness out there. Then I do what's called the incubation period. So I drop it and I go for a walk. It could be a one hour walk or it could be a twenty four hours, or I could come back to it in a week, but some amount of period. And I think there's like a reason for those shower thoughts. And then finally I'll do the edit, and the edit is where Brilliance comes up. And this process I I just stole. I probably I think I stole from David Ogilvy, where he uh said, Like, I'm not even a good writer, but I'm a world class editor. Is there a process? Let's say I have a new company, I have a fiber company. Is there a process that I could do in five days that you could like bullet point out of like if you do this, this, this, and this, you'll be eighty percent ahead ahead of where most people are. You may not be as good as as me, but you'll be pretty good. Okay.

37:45 Yeah. There's at least one thing I would add, may may maybe two, and uh I'll I'll go back to what I said earlier. I'm a real believer in synchronicity, right? The you know, looking for connections from things that are seemingly irrelevant. So As you get to before you go to that final draft.

38:03 Uh in if this was You know, we'll stick with Uh if this is helpful fiber, uh for for you writing this article on fiber. I would go. to a bookstore and I would either get a book or uh

38:18 It'd be easier get a couple magazines that you never have read before. Right. And I would spend Thirty minutes. On those two magazines.

38:28 Just looking for Connections. That might be be moved into your article. And I guarantee you that

38:36 At least thirty percent of the time by doing that. Y you will find a new perspective or you'll put a new spin on that article that you're writing or a new insight that will be in the article. Because you've gone. Out.

38:53 And you suspended You gotta suspend logic and evaluation and just speculate. What what could these two magazines or what You know, I've never read a book on Thomas Edison, so what фan he teach me about this particular project? Mm. Has that make sense to you? Love that, yeah. Do you what um what names did you present to clients?

39:14 That they turn down. Because they were fearful of that you think was a big miss. Every Name behind me. has been rejected by clients. Every single one of them.

39:24 So I see Blackberry, Impossible, Sonos, Toro. For breeze. Swifer. They all were turned down at first. Is there a good Blackberry story? Yes, uh there there is. So so um When we name Blackberry

39:40 We so so we're in Sau Solito and i y you may or may not know this, but during World War Two, Sau Solido was a ship building I mean a lot of people worked here in We were in an another naval building built by the US Navy and Part of our office was in a vault. Where they stored the plans for these ships.

39:59 So these Canadians come from Waterloo, Canada. And they're sitting down in a vault. So so right away they're going like what Cowern. W here in Sas Lito, we're in California.

40:11 And Then we present to them Blackberry. Okay. Yeah. W one of the clients, I can't even remember his name, uh just said he goes, Man, this is

40:22 This is something else. You know, I'm here in a vault, I'm in Sausalito, there's no windows and You know, I'm looking at Blackberry. And so that That was

40:33 You know, off the table, right? Uh But one of the things I said there in that conference room Laz Hold on.

40:42 Uh you know, let's take it off the table for now, but I'm gonna bring it back. Right. Because there's things in this That That are of real value.

40:53 And that was Yeah, it was just fortuitous for us. Our first wave of research on sound symbolism where we went out and and we did testing in in about six different languages, six different countries, by the way. It wasn't inexpensive. I said I can tell you that B is one of the most reliable sounds in the English alphabet.

41:12 That's number one. Two black is going to be you know recognize across multiple languages. And N not all, but some people will recognize berry, right? And a black berry is kind of a delightful thing.

41:27 And I said there's one other quality here. And they were c they weren't you know, their arms were crossed. They were you were kinda listening, but not I said Your current c competitors. Who are all big companies. would never

41:41 Have the courage. to put Blackberry on the device. Then The arms dropped. And you could see people going, Okay, maybe this guy knows something I don't know.

41:51 And then I had to I had to fly to Waterloo uh Canada a couple of times just to For extra sessions and talk to them about this and then finally we will they went with Black Bear, which was the best decision. The they ever made. I mean talk talk about a name that just took off, right?

42:08 Can I give you can we play a little game? Where I give you the name of current tech companies and I want you to give me a one to ten score. As the naming guy. Y your your gut gut reaction. You love it love the name? It's a ten.

42:21 I hate the name. It's a one. Right. Here's the rule. One more rule. No sevens.

42:26 No seven. Sevens are for wimps. Okay. All right. I'll I'll give you one rule. I don't know anything about these companies, so it's just gonna be sort of a based on it's arbitrary and create on my creative judgment. Yeah. Fire away. Right. Open AI.

42:39 Mm. Okay, that's That's a four. Okay. Good. Anthropic.

42:46 Uh Well it's better than open AI. Let me start there. Okay. So we're making progress. At a moment in time when that was out, I I'm gonna give that an I'm gonna give that an eight. I'm gonna give it an eight. Okay.

42:59 Eight, that's a that's a strong score. I like it. Um Groc. Yeah. Yeah, it's a four, maybe a three.

43:07 Very unpleasant. Very unpleasant. SpaceX. Oh okay. That's that's a ten. All right.

43:15 Uh why is that one of 10? You wanna give us a little quick why on that one? Totally expected. They make spaceships and rockets space. But um We we uh you know, now I know I I know something about the letter X, right? Okay.

43:27 And and X always says innovation to people. It does you put it in a car, you put it on a a tech device, whatever. So that's a temp. That's so now we're gonna compare to you tell me which name you like better. X dot com. Or the old name. Twitter. Yeah.

43:43 It that's you know, we I get that question a lot, you know, people the setup is always don't you think Elon Musk You know, made a mistake. And I always say. I don't know what he was thinking, so I can't say he's making a mistake. But I'm gonna say that tw Twitter was probably uh the better choice to stick with, right?

44:00 How about our podcast, My First Million. Oh it's I think it's a good name and I'm not saying that because I'm uh I'm on your show. It's just intriguing, right? It's a good title uh for for for for something, right? Sean named it. Thanks, we hate it. All right, here we go. Hub spot. Yeah, I I'm gonna give it an eight because there's alliteration there. HubSpot. I I it's mem it's memorable. Yeah.

44:23 What are names you were jealous of that you didn't get to you didn't get to name? You saw it, you're like, ah, well done, perfect. Yeah, well there's two really. I uh uh DreamWorks, the film entertainment, I think I think that's a beautiful name, right? Yeah. Uh and I think the car Lexus is i is just yeah, perfect structure, that X in the middle, there's that X again. So yeah, they did did a f fa fabulous job. Yeah. You know how um so like in our internet world, there's like this niche of person. Uh, Sean and I have a bunch of these buddies where they will acquire domain names and sometimes jokingly, but not always jokingly, sometimes they actually do it, they'll start a company just around a domain name. Do you have a list of names where you're like

45:06 You know, you should start a company just around this name. Um, you know, we ha shot and I had this guy named Eric Ryan on the podcast and he uh Started Ali. Uh wait, is it Ali Bandades? Is that what it's called, Sean? Ali gummies, welly band aids. Yeah, Wellie Band Aids and Ollie Gummies. And then he had like three more amazing companies. Method Soap is one of them. And he was like, I'll start companies just around like what form of the bottle I can I can like get the soap bottle, you know, method bottles, uh method soap's a famous bottle. Are there names where you think are uh company worthy? Well I I I tell you one one that we uh we had uh and w we now have a s small little, you know, venture uh just an LLC where we make investments with w with our our our clients.

45:49 And We had phase change, which I is a lovely I you know, phase change, water to ice, ice to water, those types of things. And boom, we we we use that. Yeah, it is a cool name. Yeah. You had this cool slide in one of your decks that I I I really liked, which was that you don't just give the clients like a a list of names. Yeah, here's forty things on a spreadsheet, pick your favorite. You kind of present it in context. You show it I don't is this what you actually do? You show it in a news headline or on a shirt. Or like emotion on a bus somewhere and and that gives you the feel for it very differently. Is that right? Yeah, we call that uh proof of concept, right? So so

46:24 Well we We look at this internally, right? We uh before we would show it to a client, we would look at this, you know, two or three of us and we would say And there's just really one rule, which is Okay. Is that believable?

46:37 Yeah. Be because that's really the most important thing is In that first Less than a second, they have to s some f lean towards Ah, this

46:45 I think I believe. I think I believe this, right? I think Microsoft could have a brand called Azure For clouds I think there's something interesting and believable though. So we're typically putting it in you know, things like the Wall Street Journal. Um w we'll take a famous actor or a tennis

47:03 famous tennis player and in a m kind of beautiful photograph black and white will say You know. companies that run well run on blank and there's this you know so there's an indo a sponsor, if you will. And then if we say yeah, that's believable, then we show it to the clients. And and there's a

47:20 Psychological reason for doing it. Yeah. Most of the people we work with don't have a lot of practice in making creative decisions, and so you have to make these things come alive, right? Uh. Sort these things out.

47:35 I wanna uh ask you about this. This was like the most brilliant slide. because I'm pretty obsessed right now with at my company like getting people to be creative because a lot of times the founder's the creative person, but That doesn't particularly scale past a certain size. You need to like empower others. You have this really cool slide and you call it the comfort trap.

47:53 And it basically says like there's the tension zone. This is where Uh half the team hates what you're doing. Or the hates the name. The energy is high. Uh but it's very polarizing and then below that

48:04 When things get incredibly uh familiar but have very little distinctiveness, that's when things get invisible. You're in the invisible zone. There's a lot of consensus, there's a lot of s uh it's a safe choice and basically it's not remarkable at all. This makes a lot of sense. How do you A convince people Just to go with it. Like I know you think this is a bad idea because it's dangerous or it's different.

48:26 But just go with it. And how do you convince yourself, maybe, to like release things that are polarizing? I will never forget I I learned a lot from working with Andy Grove on the Pentium project and Xeon and uh you know other things. Andy Grove being uh the former CE CEO of Intel and he like wrote the book on like management. Yeah, he did still used his stand for uh G S B and uh wrote the book Only the Paranoise to S um Survive. I was in a meeting with him.

48:53 Now there's another thing. It was not not ProMop, but Pro Chip, the engineers at Intel, the you know, hey, they're engineers and they wanna di what what is this? It's a professional chip, it's got more powerless you know, what's the deal? And Andy Uh he gave he Had me present.

49:10 uh what we'd found and why Pentium worked and we'd done if we'd done a lot of research uh with consumers on this. And he said, Listen This is a good name because it is so polarizing. That means it has energy to it. There's energy inside. And I I remember thinking, man, that guy is so smart. And that's that's where I began this kind of the value of

49:31 Oh and we encourage people, we say listen This is polarizing for your organization. decide to use it, but let's really think about What's going on in that word that's creating that kind of energy.

49:45 W what do you say to A founder who Kind of wakes up and realizes We don't love our name. Yeah.

49:52 And uh but obviously switching is a dangerous thing. It's a time consuming thing, it's an expensive thing to re educate the market sometimes. You're taking some personal risk doing it. I mean Do you have a framework for kind of the when to do it, when to not do it in terms of changing your name? Well the simple answer is

50:11 And you heard this from me earlier, you know, the advantage of the right name is it's compounds, right? It's it it uh names give you cumulative advantage. The longer it's in the marketplace, the more advantage you will have because it becomes familiar with people. So That's why it's really important to get it right from the very beginning, not not just be you know, have that Friday afternoon session and and and do it. But when people come to us and and we spend time Making sure they should change their name. Like you know you know, now if they're being sued, okay, it's a simple decision. But

50:43 We'll figure out the pluses and minuses. We don't wanna work on a project Where they're just kinda I really want to keep this name, I wanna keep it. And so at that point And here is this is really counterintuitive because the biggest The biggest comp

50:58 Yeah, reason people don't change their name. Is they think They're gonna lose whatever equities they have and they're gonna lose momentum. We have never seen that. as evidence in the marketplace.

51:11 Never. I want to emphasize that. Provided Provided that their launch is done with enthusiasm and they And they have a story to tell that we were here and now we're going this way and the benefits for you are

51:25 A, B, and C People know That they're not losing that technology or the software they're using. Th the name is changing and they're gonna add stuff to it. And so uh rather than struggle with something, uh bad names create friction, right?

51:44 Uh th they just do. And and so why put up with that friction when Over a six month period or a nine month period you have to Devote

51:53 Ekstra resources And if it particularly if it's a young company, a series A or B. It's not it's not traumatic. If you're Coca Cola. That's a different story.

52:03 You know, and then you really have to have a compelling reason to change your name. Right. If you were to run for president Do you think that you could take your naming ability and come up with cool slogans and do you think that those slogans could meaningly impact the outcome of an election? Yes.

52:22 Without Any hesitancy. So what's can you give an example uh of uh of this done well? Or Uh an example of a candidate that could have done it better had they tightened up some of their stuff? Well the the slogan that I think is the best slogan it certainly in uh American politics is uh written uh and uh developed by Hal Reine uh uh here in San Francisco. It's Morning in America, the Reagan campaign.

52:48 I mean that In a world where There was a lot of negativity in the stock market and, you know, fuel costs and all that sort of stuff. Uh uh not false hope. Real hope.

53:01 It's morning in America. Tremendous commercial. If uh if we wanted to go down the rabbit hole and learn the stuff, what would be the couple of books you would point people to to to really start to master the the art of marketing and positioning and um thinking differently? You know, what are what are the best books that would get us Get us going. One, uh David Ogilvy on advertising is a simple book. Uh it it's it's it's just good. I mean you can read it w you know over well not I mean maybe a couple glasses of wine or something like that, but there's a lot of great principle in there. He mean he truly

53:32 was an advertising Genius. I love his second book, Confessions Confessions of an Adman, I think is Equally as good. Have you read that one, Sean? Yeah. Oh I have, for sure. Yeah, it's brilliant. Th then I I I'll I'll switch and uh and I uh I would recommend simply because it's a

53:51 About creative curiosity. And it's The book on Leonardo uh Da Vinci written by the Uh the you know the famous guy that wrote the one on Steve Jobs. Yes. Yeah.

54:04 I think that's a great book and it's it it really is Creativity. Takes a lot of persistence and tenacity. You have to keep going, right? And that's exactly what Da Vinci did. And the third from a marketing standpoint

54:18 I like reading Books by Roger Martin. He wrote a book called New Ways to Think. Um I am familiar with him because we've done so much work at Procter and Gamble and he w you know, I don't know if he still is, but he he was a very close consultant to A. G. Laughley, who was, you know, one of their great presidents and Uh he's he's written two or three books, uh one of them with

54:42 Laughley, which is called Pla Playing to Win. Um And I I think those are are are really good. They're very direct. There's no BS about them. Th there's no word salad throughout his books. You know, there's there's a lot of marketing books out there that It's just a bunch of word salad. Spun different ways.

55:00 Are you uh Happy or angry. at the rise of AI. Like is there any type of thing where you're like Uh, this is gonna put us out of business, or are you thinking this has helps us so much? I'm happy about it. Uh for a couple of reasons. One

55:15 It does. I mean anybody now can generate Uh you know, two hundred, three hundred names, uh using Cha chap or Claude. So it does Move.

55:26 Our competit advantage to our ability to judge names to separate the right names from the good names and the okay names, because we have a lot of data that we've invested in and that software, which is now You know, we spent the last sixteen months integrating AI into that. So and then that that so that's the first reason. Second reason is

55:47 You know, we we we have Uh we have twelve projects in here now or thirteen. Six of them are AI driven. You know, and I mean

55:58 We We are seeing the future, and some of the future is really very, very positive. How much does it uh cost to work with you? There's a range of things that it really depends. Um most of our our projects are somewhere between

56:13 You know, a low of Seventy five to a high of about one hundred and fifty. Um big corporate name will go to maybe two hundred. And when you give the name, you gave it to Swiffer, you said, All right, here you go, have at it or are they like asking you for further slogans and things like that? Y yeah, s sometimes w the uh we'll we'll do the n the what's called the nomenclature around it, you know, w w what is this? How do you define it? What's the positioning line?

56:39 We'll help them write a short story. Um we'll do Yeah, commonly called tracking research. So, you know, we'll look at how it's going over the the next Ninety days, a hundred and twenty days, s small quantitative study. We have a small research group here that does that. So but basically it's it's you know, we're we're giving them

56:58 The name of the yeah. Which is Uh one of their most valuable things they will ever have. And now I know I've convinced you of that. You have. Yes, Sam. Yeah, man. You've you've convinced me that I would love to be your your friend if you would uh if you would be okay with being friends with me. And uh yeah, man, I I I totally am bought in. I

57:19 Yeah, I mean my premise was always that like Uh a n a a bad name is no excuse to s to fail. Uh but um Yeah, like you you've convinced me.

57:30 Take way more uh thought into this process. Well I'm gonna give you gu I know you you want Uh by the way. Happen. Happy to be your friend, happy to talk more about your creative process and if we can make it better.

57:42 I I certainly will. There's a little chart. I'm gonna get or a little it's a just draw a line on it and on one side to it. bizarre absurd illegal ideas. And on the other side Put safe

57:57 Workable ideas, right? In the middle write the word Approximate thinking. Right. And

58:05 If you show that to your Teams who are doing creative work for you and say You know what? As we start this thing. You can move

58:13 From Bizarre. through approximate and then we'll let let's just stop there. Let's let's let's look at these approximate ideas. They're not baked out. They're not full. They may be bad and If you give people permission to do that, you will see that your creativity will spike. Wow.

58:30 Like that. Uh wonderful. David, thank you for coming on. You're very welcome. It's been my pleasure, really. I it's really been a privilege to it to to be Totally honest. So and ours too. We we learned a lot today. Yeah, man. You're you're you're just wonderful. Thank you so much. And uh we appreciate you.

58:46 Alright, that's it. That's the pod. I feel like I can root Well I know. But I want to I put my all in it like my day's off On the roadless travel never looking back

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