Naming expert shares the process behind creating billion-dollar brand names like Azure, Vercel, Windsurf, Sonos, Blackberry, and Impossible Burger | David Placek (Lexicon Branding)
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What final advice does David give for founders who need to name a product quickly and with limited resources?
Your brand name, nothing's gonna be used more often or for longer than that name. Design will change, message will change, products will change, but that name is there.
What's a name that you came up with that you have to fight super hard for that the client just hated?
When we presented Sonos, it was rejected because it's not entertainment like. We argued about that because I said, This is outside looking in, but I don't see you as an entertainment company. Humans do like to be comfortable. Part of our job here is to help people to give the confidence going bigger and being uncomfortable.
There's a quote that I found of yours. If your team is comfortable with the name, chances are you don't have the name yet.
We look for polarization. We look for tension in a team arguing about these things. Polarization is a sign of strength in the word. Most clients, they come to a naming project absolutely believing with full confidence that they're gonna know it when they see it. And the truth is it almost never happens.
Most people listening to this are founders, a lot of PMs on product teams. Let's say they have a couple weeks, gotta come up with a name. What should they do? Today, my guest is David Plasic. David is the founder of Lexicon Branding, which pioneered the field of brand naming and invented a few names that you may have heard of, including PowerBook, Pentium, Blackberry, Swiffer, The Impossible Burger, also Vercel, and Windsurf and CapCut and Azure. In our conversation, David opens up about the very specific process that he and his team go through to find winning names, including a simple exercise that you can do. Do with you and your team to help you find the right name in just a few weeks. We also talk about why a great name is worth spending your time on, why you won't know a great name when you see it, and why you need to feel uncomfortable about the name first.
Also, why big team brainstorms don't ever lead to great names, the stories behind names like Pentium and Sonos and Vercel and Windsurf. Also, such interesting insights about the feeling and energy of every letter of the alphabet. And so much more, this episode is designed for anyone trying to figure out a name for their product or company, and also just for anyone that's interested in hearing the stories of how some of the most iconic names came to be. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. And if you become a paid subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year-free of a bunch of amazing products, including Bolt, Linear, Superhuman, Notion, Perplexity, Granola.
and more, check it out at lenny's newsletter.com and click bundle. With that, I bring you David Plasic. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication and skim provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making it fast and painless to add enterprise features to your app. Their APIs are easy to understand so that you can ship quickly and get back to building other features. Today, hundreds of companies are already powered. By WorkOS, including ones you probably know, like Vercel, Webflow, and Loom. WorkOS also recently acquired Warrant, the fine grain authorization service. Warrant's product is based on a groundbreaking authorization system called Zanzibar, which was originally designed for Google to power Google Docs and YouTube.
This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining A flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases. If you're currently looking to build role-based access control or other enterprise features like single sign-on, skim, or user management, you should consider WorkOS. It's a drop-in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to 1 million monthly active users for free. Check it out at workos.com to learn more. That's work OS. Ask.com Last year, 1.3% of the global GDP flowed through Stripe. That's over $1.4 trillion.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What final advice does David give for founders who need to name a product quickly and with limited resources?
0:00–10:32
2
What is the story behind the creation of the Sonos brand name?
10:32–21:28
3
How does Lexicon’s three‑step process (identify, invent, implement) generate winning names?
21:28–32:54
4
What qualities do the best name‑creators at Lexicon possess and how long does a naming project usually take?
32:54–44:43
5
How does naming for AI‑focused products differ from traditional product naming?
44:43–55:41
6
Why do the sounds of individual letters matter when crafting a brand name?
55:41–1:05:16
7
What is the ‘diamond exercise’ and how does it help teams discover bold names?
1:05:16–1:15:53
8
Why is it important to suspend judgment and embrace polarization when evaluating name ideas?
1:15:53–1:22:40
Speakers
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