Choose a bad name for your next project
How to deliberately sabotage yourself to get ahead afterwards
When I start coding on a new pet project, I usually start by creating a new Git repository. The first - and only thing - that’s really mandatory is entering a name:
My advice here: choose a bad name.
The story of picking my startup’s name
In 2019, I co-founded data startup Marple . We sat down around a whiteboard in the library of the University of Delft, and got inspired by Agatha Christie’s character “Miss Marple”. If you googled “Marple” at the time, she popped up. But we figured we would quickly take the #1 spot on Google once our startup took off.
Four years later, Miss Marple is still sitting stubbornly at the top of the “Marple” search results on Google, although we have quite some traction in our niche of automotive and aerospace R&D.
Our solution: we changed our domain to marpledata.com, and people now often refer to us as “Marple data”. It’s a bit like saying ReactJS instead of React, or Dunkin' Donuts instead of Dunkin'.
Marple is not a bad name, but that was exactly the problem.
So what’s worse than picking a bad name?
What can be worse than picking a bad name? Picking a mediocre name. And the danger of a mediocre name is that it might stick.
A name might be mediocre because of multiple reasons, but a few things to watch out for:
Something else has good SEO with this name
Easy to misspell
Obvious domain names are taken (.com, .co)
Hard to pronounce
So my advice is to start with a bad name on purpose - to force you to pick a good name when you actually start to care about branding.
For example, the guys at Stripe probably didn’t have a hard time getting rid of the SLASHDEVSLASHFINANCE company name. Having a bad name gave them the freedom to properly think about something good.
Getting inspired by music, climbing and movies
I used to be in a band, and we were really good at picking bad names. While we were working on a song, we would usually give it a funny working title. Upon releasing the track, we gave it a proper name.
On the setlist we would sometimes still use the old titles. You can spot some beauties on the picture below: He Hoe Ha (HHH), Biloba and Emma Watson. Although I’m not a 100% sure we ever had a proper name for that last song.
Climbers famously do the same thing. When they are trying to ascend a route that has never been climbed before, it’s usually nameless. Sometimes they pick a temporary name for the project, and once they complete the climb, it gets a definite name.
A famous example is “Project Hard”, an insanely hard route ascended by Adam Ondra in 2017. Once he reached the top, he went totally quiet, hence the name “Silence”. (See the silent moment in this incredible YouTube documentary)
For movies a similar thing is done. According to wikipedia, “Snakes on a plane” was a working title and should have been called “Pacific Air Flight 121” until Samuel L. Jackson argued against it.
A couple I know called their baby the temporary name “Petrus” while pregnant, because they conceived were fans of the historic site Petra in Jordan.
But what about hey.com?
If you read this far and you are Elon Musk, you’re probably thinking: was “x.com” a bad choice for my startup?1
No. For a person with this kind of reach, normal rules don’t apply.
They have a guaranteed press coverage, boosting the brand name. Another example would be Jason Fried’s hey.com2, a low-clutter email service.
Ironically, my reasoning also doesn’t apply if you’re starting a snack bar on a high school campus. I did this in 2016, copying a well-know name in Flemish culture. Our target audience was so focused that whatever name we were using, it would probably have worked.
Some “bad” inspiration
In case you have a natural tendency to choose mediocre names (like me), this can help you get started to pick a working title for your next project:
Use swear words, e.g. shit, fuck, ass, …
Weird flow of the tongue
Add “Project” in front of it
Use someones name: you surely won’t launch “Kim Jong Un-derpants“
If you’re curious who else owns a [a-z].com domain like x.com, dive in deeper here.
Jason has a fun write-up about how he acquired the domain name.