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

**Sam** (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.

**Shaan** (0:24)
I love right behind you. You have, for people who are just listening on audio, they can't see this, but if you're on YouTube, you see this. 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, Vercel, Windsurf. You've had the, I remember the Intel Pentium processor, Febreeze, Sonos.

**Sam** (0:50)
Sonos is crazy.

**Shaan** (0:52)
The hits go on and on. SlimFast. Oh my God. SlimFast. That is one of the greatest names ever. Microsoft Azure. You've done all these incredible names. So how lucky are we? We get to hear from you today because I suck at naming. I've always sucked at naming and it's bothered me because if you're going to pour your sweat and tears into something for five years, you want to have a name that you like, that you feel proud of, that gives you the best shot at success. And so I guess to Sam's initial question, which we said at the beginning here, which is he's like, I'm not sure that names are that important, change my mind, tell me I'm wrong.

**David** (1:27)
Well, let me start off with this. First off, nothing that you will do in your brand will be used more often or for longer than your name. And it's not so much 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 got to think through what the right name can do for you. Because if you get it right, first off, it's the highest frequency 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 OK name and the right name that actually creates a strategic advantage, we, our goal is to always create asymmetric advantage.
Impossible does that, Swiffer does that. I mean, I'll give you a very recent example. We changed Codium to Windsurf. Now, nobody knew about Codium, really. No one knew how to spell it. They couldn't search it. Their SEO was bad. We worked with them 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's an example of the power of a name. Doesn't do everything, but the right name can launch something. It does really three things for you. First off, you have to get attention. I mean, you had to get attention 50 years ago, but now it's almost impossible to do that. Secondly, you got to hold their attention. Here's a kind of a $10 phrase. 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. Not comfortable, not popular. There's something unexpected about it.

**Sam** (3:29)
I want to ask you about the comforter thing, because that's amazing. But can you set the stakes here? Can you give an example? Like, you know, it's crazy. You have Febreeze up here. So like, you've been doing this for 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?

**David** (3:52)
Look, Procter & Gamble came to us, right? They said, you know, we were really disappointed. We wanted pro-mop, we can't have it legally, and we want you to work with us on this.

**Sam** (4:04)
They had a mop, I guess, and they wanted to call it pro-mop.

**David** (4:08)
That's exactly right.

**Sam** (4:09)
Okay.

**David** (4:10)
So they sent out samples 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 really easy to use. We did some research and we found out, it turns out, whether you're a man or a woman, in housekeeping chores, there are things people really like to do. Some people love to polish their furniture, other people love washing windows. Nobody wants to mop. It's dirty, it's inefficient ulcers. So we went back to P&G and said, look, 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 was more efficient. So boom, Swiffer, right?