We named a billion dollar “startup” with the guy that named BlackBerry, Febreeze and Swiffer.

- March 13, 2026 (2 days ago) • 57:45

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Sam Parr	"So listen, David, here's the deal: I don't believe that naming your company is that important. Over the next hour, I want you to convince me why I'm incredibly wrong — why picking a good name is going to help me build a $1 billion startup, and how to name a startup effectively."
00:22	Shaan Puri	Well, love — right behind you... [For people just listening on audio, they can't see this, but if you're on YouTube you can.] 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: Impossible Burger, BlackBerry, Swiffer, Vercel, Windsurf... I remember the Intel Pentium processor, Febreze, Sonos — Sonos, crazy. The hits go on and on: SlimFast — oh my God, SlimFast is one of the greatest names ever — and Microsoft Azure. You've done all these incredible names. So how lucky are we that we get to hear from you today? I suck at naming. I've always sucked at naming, and it's bothered me. If you're going to pour your sweat and tears into something for five years, you kind of want to have a name that you like, that you feel proud of, that gives you the best shot at success. So I guess, to Sam's initial question — we were talking about what you said at the beginning, which is he's like, "I'm not sure that names are that important." Could you change my mind? Tell me I'm wrong.
01:25	MFM	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. It's not so much whether one good name is better than another; it's about getting the right name. That's really what our success has been built on. You have to think through what the right name can do for you. If you get it right, first off it's the highest-frequency leverage — something that happens all the time — and the name compounds over time. The difference between an okay name and the right name actually creates a strategic advantage. Our goal is to always create an asymmetric advantage. Impossible — does that? Swiffer — does that? I'll give you a very recent example. We changed Codium to Windsurf. Nobody really knew Codium; 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 and changed it to Windsurf. There's a story behind that, but we don't need to get into it now. Boom — that brand took off. That's an example of the power of a name. It doesn't do everything, but the right name can launch something. It really does three things for you: 1. You have to get attention. You had to get attention fifty years ago, but now it's almost impossible to do that. 2. You have 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 pronounce it, but there's something in it that I can understand. 3. And this is what most people get wrong and why we have so many poor or okay names: it has to be surprising, not comfortable or popular. There's something unexpected about it.
03:27	Sam Parr	I want to ask you about the comfort of the thing, because that's amazing. But can you set the stakes here? Can you give an example? You know, it's crazy—you have Febreze up here. You've been doing this for a long time and you've had some amazing outcomes, it seems like. Are there examples where you can give us the price of success—where the product was the same, the team was the same, and you changed the name and there was a different outcome?
03:50	MFM	"Look, Procter & Gamble came to us, right? They said, 'You know, we were really disappointed. We wanted a promo, but we can't have it legally, and we want you to work with us on this.'"
04:02	Sam Parr	They had a mop, I guess, and they wanted to call it...
04:05	MFM	That's pro—exactly right.
04:07	Sam Parr	Okay, okay.
04:08	MFM	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 found out that, 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; others love washing windows. Nobody wants to mop — it's dirty, it's inefficient [unclear: "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 — it picked things up, so it was more efficient. So boom: Swiffer.
04:50	Sam Parr	"So you changed Promop to Swiffer." "That's right. Great decision." </FormattedResponse>
04:55	MFM	Almost the same time, The Clorox Company came out with Ready Mop. Okay — now that's a comfortable name. 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 mop." "We got it. We nailed it." Swiffer is a $55 billion brand. I think that Clorox's Ready Mop is a couple hundred million dollars. Do you... [trailing question]
05:20	Sam Parr	What percentage of the difference do you think was the name? </FormattedResponse>
05:24	MFM	I think the name makes all the difference in that first — I'm gonna say 90 to 120 [days] — the first twelve months. That's where you're getting interest. You're holding people's interest for a while and you're generating interest with retailers. 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 Swiffer," right? After that, all the other marketplace dynamics come into play. But our whole thing here is to provide value, to create value, and we want it to be instant value. Swiffer does that. Impossible — look at the press Impossible got when they launched that, right? At first, they really wanted something sort of "crunchy-hippie" — something that fits into the Whole Foods environment and that psyche. We said, "You're just gonna fit in — you can't do that. You have to make a claim here that you're better than the other guys." And we did it.
06:32	Shaan Puri	Hey — I got something pretty cool to share with you guys. If you're like me, you listen to podcasts and YouTube videos and you like to take notes. You're here to learn, and that can be a lot of effort. Sometimes you're on the go and you can't do it. The folks at HubSpot, who are sponsoring the podcast, have done something pretty cool for you: they created the MFM Vault. The MFM Vault is a place to find notes and resources pulled from the different episodes we do. If we have a guest on who shares their five-point framework, they write down those five points with the examples the guest gave and put the notes there for you. If you want to access the vault, it's totally free. All you have to do is click the link in the description below and you can access all the notes and the material in the vault. We're going to keep adding to this and trying to make it better over time. Thank you to HubSpot — this is a very cool way for them to sponsor the podcast. Instead of telling you to go buy their stuff, they're actually giving you something. I like it. So, you kinda hinted at two things just now. You said a good name versus... and instead of saying a great name you said the right name — I picked up on that. It sounds like you have some distinction there. You also said, "You know what I would normally ask is: what are the biggest mistakes founders make when it comes to their name?" It sounds like what you're saying is they choose something that's safe and comfortable, which causes them to be lost in a sea of sameness with everybody else. Is that the right way of thinking about it? Can you talk about those two things — the right name versus just saying a great name?
07:57	MFM	Yeah, so let me address the founder thing, because I think there's a sequence that people end up with: relatively comfortable names. A very common response when we ask the question, "Well, how'd you get this name that you have right now?" is: "Our attorney called and they said, 'Listen, we've got to put these documents together. We need a name. You guys go figure this.' We spent a few hours doing this, and there it is." And now they're spending the time and the money to do it again. For your first question — what's the difference between a right name, a good name, or an okay name — right names always do three things: - Original. They're original in the category or context. That doesn't mean they have to be coined words like Pentium, but you're on a slippery slope if you want something comfortable or popular, because humans like comfort. - Processing fluency. You have to know something about linguistics and how the brain processes information — this "processing fluency" thing — so there's something familiar and yet something surprising. Our creative strategy is to develop names that are "surprisingly familiar," because our brains are a little lazy: this is easy to process, but there's something interesting here. That's where you get attention. - Unexpected. You have to be unexpected. An unexpected word can mean something different for one company versus another. "Azure" for Microsoft — which typically has very descriptive and not-so-interesting words in their portfolio — got people's attention. If we had given that to Google, it wouldn't have been that attention-getting, because people would expect that from them.
09:54	Shaan Puri	Can we play a game to make this more real? I'm a founder—I'm listening to this, presumably because I want to be better at naming a company. We could talk generally about how to do it, or we could 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." If you look at the fiber market today, there's—what is it—Metamucil, which I think is an all-time worst name. What are the other big fiber brands?
10:23	Sam Parr	Fiber One — is that the one? </FormattedResponse>
10:25	Shaan Puri	Yeah—fiber. Yeah, Fiber One, which is very ready-made. Benefiber—that's what my mom's drinking. Benefiber's got some fiber benefits, I guess. And I say, "David, we can disrupt this market. We're gonna—we have something so much better, right?" "Yes." Step one: What are we gonna do?
10:40	MFM	Okay. Our process is driven really by two things — it's a combination thing. We call it, or I call it, "creative curiosity." So the first thing we would do for you is we'd say, "Okay, 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 not the way to go. Generally speaking, that would be our first hypothesis about this.
11:06	Sam Parr	So, you look at the landscape and put everything into a bucket. You say, "We just have to make sure that we aren't like that, or we aren't that."
11:13	Shaan Puri	"We don't know where we're going, but we know we're not going there." </FormattedResponse>
11:15	MFM	We know we're not going there right now. We may go back to that once we find out more about what your product is. So we would look hard at your product and have a list of the things you have. Then we would look to the consumers: why are they doing this? What is their need? What are their expectations? We'd go up that ladder to what's the ultimate benefit. Then we would step back — that's just kind of logical, practical stuff. After that we go through a little series of questions that there are almost no exceptions to; it pays off greatly. First, "How do you define winning here?" If you get in a room with six clients and you ask that question, I will tell you every client will have a different definition. Next, "What do you have to win?" Then you would start talking about how your fiber is made, how it's ground differently, those types of things. Then, "What do you need to win?" Well, we've got to break through. We've got to communicate to people that fiber done this way is better for you than fiber done that way. (I'm making this stuff up because we're just playing a game.) Finally, "What do we need to say?" That's the last sequence of questions. From there we begin to articulate with you a strategy for the name, because your fiber is going to do something on its own. Packaging and other things along the way will do other stuff, but we have to understand what you need to say.
12:53	Sam Parr	Sean, do you know enough about fiber to go through this exercise with him?
12:57	Shaan Puri	We could try. Actually, I think it's almost funny to assume that you don't have a magic bullet in the product, right? Let's say it's like most commodity products on the shelves — we think we're better, we have clean ingredients, we'll have cool packaging, we're going to be great at growth and go-to-market. We're going to try to do all those things. So let's assume for a second I don't have an absolutely innovative, novel solution. Yeah, I have a very good solution, but I'm looking to break into the market — just to increase the level of difficulty here — and say 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 an absolutely groundbreaking approach. Now, we might find something in the process — you know, what's the old Mad Men thing, like "cigarettes are toasted" or whatever — it's a version of that. But let's assume for a second I don't have a magic-bullet feature that nobody else has in efficacy or anything else. </FormattedResponse>
13:51	MFM	Alright, so 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'd say we're going to move away from that and we're going to talk about the ultimate benefit of that. So, let's just play the game here, Sean: what do you think is the ultimate benefit of me taking fiber on a daily or weekly basis?
14:20	Shaan Puri	You know, there are a couple of ways to do it. Some people would say gut health — "have a clean gut." Some people would say regular bowel movements, or "fix your bowel movements." There might even be an argument that — I think there's not a person I know on earth who doesn't want a better metabolism. Just, like, have a high metabolism; why wouldn't that be great? So maybe there's some way we could go there: that this is a metabolism booster that helps you process and digest your food better. </FormattedResponse>
14:44	MFM	So, one of the things you were talking about — I was thinking — is that one of the real benefits here would be that it feels lighter. Lighter, feels lighter, right? Okay. That's a rich area there, I think, and so we would go down that category.
14:57	Shaan Puri	Sam, how good is he? I didn't even say the words "no." He's good. You just saw that my posture changed, and I did an upward motion. He's like, "So what you're saying is, after all that, the real ultimate benefit would be you feel lighter." Great.
15:09	MFM	So, then we would explore that. We would look for— we have databases here and software that helps us. There are some really tactical things we would do, because for us this is really a treasure hunt. You need to look at all the possibilities of that, right? Have you ever read the book Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea? No? Oh—you guys would love it. Very quickly: a ship left San Francisco loaded with gold coins from the Gold Rush. This was in the 1850s. It sank off the coast of Southern California, estimated at over $1 billion in gold. Of course everybody tries to find it. One guy, who's a scientist, uses sonar and they get excited when they find a shipwreck down there. There are a lot of shipwrecks because of the storms off the coast, and then people spend all their money on that shipwreck. "I'm going to map out the entire area here; I'm going to make some decisions about what pays off, and then I'm going to dive." He found a ship of gold in the deep blue sea. Okay—now, wow. The same thing happens here.
16:25	Sam Parr	Disordered, so...
16:26	MFM	We're — we're going to go. Okay. What are Greek-word units for lightness? You know, for air, for less volume, for, you know, anti-gravity things — those types of things. We're going to look at expressions around "I'm feeling light," "I'm feeling better." We're looking at aerodynamics. We would have someone, for fifteen minutes, look at what makes an airplane lift up. Okay? Along the way, we would have all this stuff we typically internally call "trash" — you know, it's just things, just concepts — and we would start eliminating things. And along the way you...
17:05	Shaan Puri	I know you're calling it "trash," but you're not disparaging it. You're like, "This is necessary — it's the necessary things." Or why "trash"?
17:13	MFM	Because in this business — and it's very counterintuitive — quantity leads to quality. Quantity leads to quality. Often we will get a list from a client saying, "We're really stuck now." I'll say, "Okay, how many names did you generate?" We will get back a list of 50 or 100 names, and that's where they got stuck and stopped. They'll say, "Hey, we can't do that. We're... we're..." We're looking at maybe 2,000 names, right? Again, these aren't all the right names. They aren't even good names; some of them... like, if there's something 2,000 [unfinished sentence].
17:48	Sam Parr	It sounds like, before AI, you had multiple categories where you would go "treasure hunting." Greek names is one. Maybe I have one that's streets in my hometown — like, list all the streets in my hometown. Or, you know... I'm sure you have others. Which I actually do want to ask you: are they all categories that you go through? Do you go through all of them and literally sit there in a group and write them down?
18:10	MFM	Yes. Well, they're either written in a small... We work in small, two-person teams here. We don't use brainstorming sessions.
18:18	Shaan Puri	"Oh, I like it. What's the problem with brainstorming?"
18:21	MFM	Well, first off, you have—classically—peer pressure. Then there's the stopping of that cascade of evaluation when you have four, five, or six people, let alone 10. It's just a slow, slow grind. We really documented that. This goes back now 30 years, doing research. We used to do brainstorming here and we used to have freelancers. The combination of that, and over an 18‑month [period], we kept asking questions—because it's always the questions you ask, right? We asked, "Where are our names really coming from?" At the end of that 18 months, even though the collection was a little sloppy and 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 aren't inside; they don't have that esprit de corps. It's not coming from brainstorming sessions either. It comes from individuals or people working in two-person teams. So we stopped all that brainstorming, never hired a freelancer again, and now we work in three teams. Usually that depends on the budget and the timing. One team knows everything about your fiber product. The next team is still in fiber, but with that team we're going to say we're adding an ingredient—it's got energy in it. That changes their perspective, and their names are going to be completely different from that first list. The third team, we're not even talking about fiber—we're talking about something like athletic performance. Now we've got three distinct types of names that we're generating.
20:13	Shaan Puri	This is searching the deep blue sea — searching the whole ocean.
20:16	MFM	Oh, that's right.
20:17	Shaan Puri	We're looking.
20:17	MFM	For, that's right.
20:17	Shaan Puri	That second one was: see if they know it's fiber. They know everything about our product, and then you add something unrelated.
20:24	MFM	Yeah. And it would have been like energy, you know—this now has its fiber, so it's digestion-plus. It's gonna give you some energy. It might be a package of minerals. I mean, these things—I call it the blueprint for a program: what we're gonna do. Then we try these things out, and there's a lot of failure in creativity. Everybody here has complete permission to fail. If we're not failing here, we're not doing our job right, because, again, you're looking for that ship in the deep blue sea. Along the way we're gonna uncover something, like: what's about lightness? How do you feel? Like, "feather." Alright. So then we'd say, what would this feel like if I walked into Walgreens and there's Fiber+ and there's Metamucil, and now in a new package there's a brand called "Feather"? Now there's gotta be copy that supports it. You gotta figure out: can we create a sentence or a little phrase where people get it? "I get it—it's gonna have fiber on the label." Okay. So, you know, it could be "Feather: the lightweight fiber you need," or something like that. Right. Alright, I got it. You know, consumers aren't stupid, right?
21:44	Shaan Puri	This is like the Swiffer. Swiffer is not called a mop, but it's the "quicker picker upper."
21:48	MFM	Exactly. So we would go through that drill and, eventually, we would have — you know — a list of ten, sometimes fifteen, names. Now it goes to our trademark group here, which includes paralegals and a trademark attorney. They're looking at it and saying, "I'm gonna stick with Feather for now. Is Feather available?" That probably would be in this category, right? So 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.
22:23	Sam Parr	Right away you said, "light," and we both lit up. You were like, "Now let's look at the Greek words for 'light'." You said that very quickly, as if this is just one of the places where you go treasure-hunting. What are the other handful of places that you'd like to dig?
22:44	MFM	Yeah, so, in terms of databases that anybody would have access to, we do look at Latin roots, Greek roots, Roman mythology, Greek mythology — those really basic things which sometimes yield results. I mean, "Pentium" came out of... we have a database not only of the periodic table but also lots of information about the periodic table.
23:09	Sam Parr	You said lots of those basic things. They're not basic to us. Okay—no, we're dummies. We're a few brain cells away from being just talking monkeys. So, like, what are some of the... what are the other few? What are the other simple databases?
23:25	MFM	Yeah. Okay, so there's your periodic table, but you have to— you have to have databases where we've built them out. It's not that anybody can just say, "Okay, I'm gonna go and look at the periodic table." We've taken that table and then loaded it up with other articles and information about it. Now it's a richer base of words relating to that periodic table, and that's where the gold can be. Then, when we have an assignment—let's say it's a small car for Nissan— all those names go into a database not called small cars but small things. And a processor for Intel that's small would go into that, too. So now what's happening is that gives us... I'm a real believer in synchronicity—the connecting of seemingly irrelevant things. That's the fundamental layer of creativity: something that's seemingly irrelevant to what they're doing, but look how it performs in the marketplace, right?
24:32	Shaan Puri	"What... what would have been the comfortable name for the Impossible Burger?"
24:35	MFM	It would have been like: when we came to the client, they said, "Yeah, we want to fit into Whole Foods." It would be something like "Natural Farms," right? </FormattedResponse>
24:44	Shaan Puri	Okay, okay. So—I don't know if you still come up with names yourself, or if you're the king of the kingdom and you let the scribes do that. How do you get in flow? What do you do? Let's say it's a name day and you need to get into a creative mindset/flow. What do you do? Do you have anything in your routine?
25:03	MFM	It's more difficult to keep in the flow because of interruptions here, right? What I really try to do is first sit down with a pad and a pen and just start free-associating thoughts about where to go with this. I sometimes might draw a treasure map with a grid and put ideas down there. You know, we're all addicted somehow to the web, so I'll use all the AI things — Claude, ChatGPT, and other tools — and I'll start asking questions. "Don't ask it for names," but I'll ask about different things relative, in your case, to fiber, and I'll get stuff like that. At a certain point — this is really like a twenty-minute kind of thing, so it's not very arduous for me — I'll just start generating names and write down other directions, then pursue those. I might think, "Greek would be a good thing to look at." I might think aviation and aircraft for things that are lighter. I would go and look at other words for "light," and that would lead to sunshine and soul — "sol" — and then I just start crafting names.
26:26	Sam Parr	So, my guess is that—I've only talked to you for 30 minutes and I've already gleaned that, A, you're probably incredibly talented at this. But you seem very process-driven. You seem like you've acquired—you seem like you are creative, and then you've made this into a skill, which implies it's somewhat teachable. When Sean and I—man, we both have companies—when we're trying to manage creative people to come up with these "bits of brilliance," whether it's just a name or anything else that's creative, you seem really good at this because you just seem like you know what you're doing. What mistakes do you think we are making with our team, or that a lot of our listeners are making with their employees, when managing people and asking them to come up with something unique, creative, or a little bit dangerous?
27:12	MFM	It's a little bit of a search for the holy grail of how to manage creative people. That's where your first mistake — or where clients make this mistake — comes in: "I try to lead everybody." I really try to encourage people. The root word of encouragement is courage, right? It may be that you're not giving the people you're asking to do things the freedom to just flow. When people develop a list and give it to me — because I'm still a creative director here and I still generate names every week — they know I'm not going to look at it harshly or evaluate it. I'm going to speculate with it. Now, we do have to evaluate things; after all, we're working for clients and we have to do the right thing for them. But go back and look at how you're communicating with your team. See if you can't shift it away from leading versus managing and encouragement versus evaluating.
28:27	Shaan Puri	It seems like one important part of getting people to have courage is to not get smacked down on their first bad idea. You talked about separating when you judge an idea versus when you're generating an idea, and not doing both at the same time. Everything I've read about creativity says that's one of the most important things you can do. I think Disney had three different rooms in his office: one to dream ideas, one to plan which ideas to do, and one to judge the result. You don't judge when you're in the "dreaming" room, because that would kill the creative flow. Do you guys do something similar? Do you have any rules around when you judge? And also—how do you judge? How do we know if "Feather" is a good name? How are we going to know: do we just go on our gut, or do we have some testing?
29:08	MFM	We do have testing — I'll talk about that in a moment. But going back to your issue with your creatives, there are two things that we do, and these are kind of magical phrases that mean just trust me on this. I know you don't know me very well, so I'll coach people to say: 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 "I wish we could make that so it wasn't expensive," or "How do we modify that word so it's legally available?" What you've done there is you've given someone a problem-solving proposition; you haven't slammed a name down. You're getting people to think, "Okay, let me think about..." because humans love to solve problems. We do that — it's in our DNA; it's how we survive. So try those things. When someone comes to you with an idea, say, "That'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.
30:15	Shaan Puri	Which is code for: "As a smart person, I would not have thought of that."
30:23	MFM	I think I would say.
30:24	Shaan Puri	"It that way, the."
30:25	Sam Parr	The other day, Sean met this guy at a conference, and he was making his argument about why AI has peaked. I was like, "Well, I understand your argument—I'm not low IQ, so I don't agree with you, but I totally get your argument." And he was like, "What? Okay, okay."
30:43	Shaan Puri	So, you don't do that. You just say — you say, "Give them credit," right? Oh... I wouldn't have thought of that. And then you sort of redirect towards the problem.
30:49	MFM	Yeah, we try to redirect, and then there's a certain... where, you know, you do start just eliminating things. But you have to give—there's a moment. There's a... where things just live in our system, right? Then we start compressing them down, and our [unclear: "core/trade/trademark"] pares things down automatically. It's very precise, right? And then... </FormattedResponse>
31:10	Shaan Puri	When you're going to switch gears, do you tell the team or wait until tomorrow when you say, "Okay, now we're going to narrow down"? How do you switch gears from the divergent phase to converging on an idea?
31:20	MFM	Yeah — in our process we're going through a cycle. There's an initial cycle where we're just trying to figure out: were these assignments right? Did we get anything out of Fiber + Energy? Did we get anything out of this sports medicine thing that we had over here? Should we redial? But after we'd gone through really about two cycles, which is two to two-and-a-half weeks... people are not working on this one project for two-and-a-half weeks. They might have three or four things they're working on. Then it's time to really look and say, "Where are we? Are we...?" And, of course, we go back and we look now at the objectives. We call them the "creative framework", and there's a reason for that: we want more of a window for people to walk through and create, as opposed to conform to these five things. 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 ship this off to legal." Most of our products or projects have to do with two or three or four or five markets that our clients want to do — you know, global in a sense. So we have 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 in the software. Now it's AI-powered, so I can put a name in and it will come back and it will talk about processing fluency and memorability. The famous thing is CVCV — consonant-vowel, consonant-vowel. That's how children learn language. That's the only thing a child will pronounce at first: "mama." Got it? That's it. They won't say anything until a little bit past the age of two.
33:17	Shaan Puri	That's like Sonos — what names that you might have? What are the other, like, power letters? Aren't there some letters that have, like, you know, just— not all letters are created equal. If all the letters are in a bar and one letter walks in, everything goes, "ooh, he's here," "oh my God." Yeah. What are the key letters? </FormattedResponse>
33:39	MFM	Yeah. Well, you're really talking about an area that we know a lot about, which is sound symbolism. You just said "K" — and that actually is one of the power letters. So, I don't know, maybe you want to work for us at some point. Those letters that are strong are, in many ways, just intuitive. Think about it — you can call them plosives; there are other technical terms — but when you talk about "P," "K," and "B," those sounds suggest reliability and speed. If you want something to feel reliable and fast, you're going to at least formulate that into your names. Our software used to do this with hand-to-eye coordination, but now we just say to our platform, which is called Predict, "Okay, for this project this name has to move fast — sort these 10 names by which one's faster." It's looking at all the research we've done on sound symbolism: "D" is fast, "P" is fast, "Z" is really fast. It's looking for those letters. It's not really commenting on the semantics of the word or even on the project — it's just saying, "Okay, this is faster than that." That's really helpful to us, right?
35:04	Sam Parr	I'm a self-taught copywriter, which means I'm pretty good but not world-class. I have a process I'd like to explain, and maybe you can give me a process I can use at home to be a better namer. When I write, I always start with general knowledge: I'm reading books constantly on any topic I like — I'm generally learning. Then, when I have a project, I get specific knowledge: I dive deep on that one thing so I can learn it thoroughly. Next I produce a draft. I know it's going to be horrible, and I don't care — I'm just going to get the horribleness out there. Then I do what's called the incubation. I drop it and go for a walk. It could be a one-hour walk, 24 hours, or I might come back to it in a week — some amount of time. That's when those weird "shower thoughts" happen; I think there's a reason for those. Finally I do the edit, and the edit is where brilliance comes up. I think I stole this process from David Ogilvy, who said, "I'm not even a good writer, but I'm a world-class editor." Is there a process — say I have a new company, a fiber company — that I could do in five days that you could bullet?
36:14	Sam Parr	"Out of, like — if you do this, this, this, and this, you'll be 80% ahead of where most people are. You may not be as good as me, but you'll be pretty good."
36:23	MFM	Okay, yeah—there's at least one thing I would add, maybe two. I'll go back to what I said earlier: I'm a real believer in synchronicity—looking for connections between things that seem irrelevant. So, before you go to that final draft (and if this is helpful—let's stick with the example of you writing an article on fiber), I would go to a bookstore and either get a book or, easier, grab a couple of magazines you've never read before. Spend 30 minutes on those two magazines just looking for connections that might be moved into your article. I guarantee you that at least 30% of the time, by doing that you will find a new perspective, a new spin on the article you're writing, or a new insight that will belong in the article. You've gone out and, essentially, you "suspend logic and evaluation" and just speculate: what could these two magazines—what could a book I never read on Thomas Edison teach me about this particular project that makes a lot of sense to include?
37:48	Shaan Puri	Love
37:48	Sam Parr	That—yeah. What names did you present to clients that they turned down because they were fearful of, that you think were a big miss? </FormattedResponse>
37:58	MFM	Every name behind me has been rejected by clients — every...
38:02	Sam Parr	Single. Okay. One of—so I see: BlackBerry, Impossible, Sonos, Toro, Febreze, Swiffer. They were all turned down at first. </FormattedResponse>
38:10	Shaan Puri	BlackBerry is an interesting one. Is there a good BlackBerry story?
38:14	MFM	Yes, there is. When we named BlackBerry, we were in Sausalito. You may or may not know this, but during World War Two Sausalito was a shipbuilding area — lots of people worked here. We were in another naval building built by the U.S. Navy, and part of our office was in a vault where they stored the plans for these ships. So these Canadians came from Waterloo, Canada, and they were sitting down in the vault. Right away they were like, "What? We're in here in Sausalito — we're in California." Then we presented BlackBerry to them. One of the clients — I can't even remember his name — said, "Man, this is something else. I'm here in a vault in Sausalito, there's no windows, and I'm looking at BlackBerry." That was, you know, off the table right away. But one of the things I said in that conference room was: > "Hold on. Let's take it off the table for now, but I'm going to bring it back, right? Because there's things in this that are of real value." That was fortuitous for us. Our first wave of research on sound symbolism — we went out and did testing in about six different languages, six different countries. By the way, it wasn't inexpensive. I can tell you that "B" is one of the most reliable sounds in the English alphabet. Number two, "black" is going to be recognized across multiple languages. Not everyone, but some people will recognize "berry," and a blackberry is kind of a delightful thing. I said there was one other quality here. At first they weren't really listening — their arms were crossed — but then I said, "Your current competitors, who are all big companies, would never have the courage to put 'BlackBerry' on a device." Then the arms dropped, and you could see people thinking, "Okay, maybe this guy knows something I don't." I had to fly to Waterloo a couple of times for extra sessions to talk to them about it. Finally, they went with BlackBerry, which was the best decision they ever made. I mean — talk about a name that just took off.
40:47	Shaan Puri	"Can I give you—can we play a little game where I give you the names of current tech companies and I want you to give me a one-to-ten score as the naming guy? Just your gut, gut reaction. You love it, love the name—it's a 10. You hate the name—it's a one. Alright, here's the rule. One more rule: no sevens. No sevens—sevens are for wimps."
41:07	MFM	"Okay, alright. I'll give you one rule: I don't know anything about these companies, so it's just going to be sort of arbitrary and based on my creative judgment — yeah."
41:15	Shaan Puri	Fire away. Alright, OpenAI.
41:18	MFM	Okay, that's... that's a four.
41:22	Shaan Puri	Okay, good, Anthropic.
41:25	MFM	"Well, it's better than OpenAI. Let me start there. Okay. So, we're making progress. At the moment in time when that was out, I'm gonna give that an—I'm gonna give that an eight. I'm gonna give it an eight. Okay."
41:38	Shaan Puri	Eight — that's a strong score. I like it.
41:41	MFM	"Grok, that's a four—maybe a three. Okay. Very unpleasant. Very unpleasant."
41:49	Sam Parr	Agreed.
41:49	Shaan Puri	SpaceX
41:50	MFM	Oh, okay. That's — that's a 10.
41:53	Shaan Puri	10. Alright — why is that one a 10? Do you want to give us a quick why on that one?
41:57	MFM	Totally expected — they make spaceships and rockets, "space." But boom... now I know. I know something about the letter X, right? Okay. And X always says innovation to people. It does. You put it in a car, you put it on a tech device, whatever. So, right — that's a 10. That is so a...
42:14	Shaan Puri	Now we're going to compare. Tell me which name you like better: X.com or the old name, Twitter?
42:20	MFM	Yeah, that's… I get that question a lot. People set it up like, "Don't you think Elon Musk made a mistake?" I always say, "I don't know what he was thinking, so I can't say he's making a mistake." But I'm going to say that Twitter was probably the better choice to stick with, right?
42:39	Sam Parr	How about our podcast, "My First Million"?
42:42	MFM	"Oh, I think it's a good name. I'm not saying that because I'm on your show; it's just intriguing. It's a good title for something, right?"
42:51	Sam Parr	Sean named it.
42:52	Shaan Puri	Thanks — we hate it. Alright, here we go: HubSpot.
42:57	MFM	I'm going to give it an eight because there's alliteration there — HubSpot. It's memorable.
43:02	Shaan Puri	Yeah, what are names you were jealous of that you didn't get to — names you didn't get to give? You saw them and thought, "Ah, well done. Perfect."
43:09	MFM	Yeah, well, there's two, really. DreamWorks Film Entertainment — I think that's a beautiful name, right? Yeah. And I think the car, Lexus, is just, you know, perfect: that X in the middle — there's that X again. So yeah, they did a fabulous job. Yeah.
43:25	Sam Parr	You know how, in our internet world, there's this niche of person? Sean and I have a bunch of buddies who acquire domain names. Sometimes jokingly—but not always jokingly—they'll actually do it. They'll start a company just around a domain name. Do you have a list of names where you're like, "You should start a company just around this name"? We had Chad—and I had this guy named Eric Ryan—on the podcast, and he started Ollie... wait, is it Ollie Band-Aids? Is that what it is?
43:55	Shaan Puri	Called: Ollie, gummies, Welly Band-Aids.
43:57	Sam Parr	Yeah — Welly Band-Aids and Ollie Gummies. Then he had, like, three more amazing companies. Method soap is one of them. He was like, "I'll start companies just around what form of the bottle... I can, I can get the soap bottle, you know?" Method bottles — Method soap's a famous bottle. Are there names where you think are company-worthy? </FormattedResponse>
44:14	MFM	Well, I'll tell you one that we had. We now have a small venture—an LLC—where we make investments with our clients. We had Phase Change, which is a lovely concept: phase change—water to ice, ice to water—those types of things. Boom. We used that cool name; it is a cool name.
44:38	Shaan Puri	Yeah — you had this cool slide in one of your decks that I really liked, which is that you don't just give the clients a list of names. Like, "Here's 40 things on a spreadsheet — pick your favorite." You kind of present it in context. You show it, I don't know, as a news headline, on a shirt, or in motion on a bus somewhere. That gives you a very different feel. Is that right?
45:00	MFM	Yeah, we call that a proof of concept. So, we look at this internally before we show it to a client. Usually two or three of us will review it, and there's really one rule: is it believable? That's the most important thing. In that first less than a second, people have to lean toward, "Wow—I think I believe this." For example: "I think Microsoft could have a brand called Azure for clouds." There's something interesting and believable about that. So we're typically putting it in things like The Wall Street Journal. We'll take a famous actor or a famous tennis player and, in a kind of beautiful black-and-white photograph, we'll say, "Companies that run well run on ___." There's this—so there's an endo [endorser] or a sponsor, if you will. If we say, "Yeah, that's believable," then we show it to the clients. There's a psychological reason for doing it: most of the people we work with don't have a lot of practice making creative decisions. You have to make these things come alive. You have to give them an advantage to sort these things out.
46:14	Sam Parr	I want to ask you about this. This was, like, the most brilliant slide [the slide you showed]. Right now I'm pretty obsessed, at my company, with getting people to be creative. A lot of times the founder is the creative person, but that doesn't particularly scale. Past a certain size you need to empower others. You have this really cool slide and you call it the "comfort trap." It basically says there is the "tension zone" — this is where half the team hates what you're doing or hates the name. The energy is high, but it's very polarizing. Then below that, when things get incredibly familiar but have very little distinctiveness, that's when things get invisible. You're in the "invisible zone." There's a lot of consensus. It's a safe choice and, basically, it's not remarkable at all. This makes a lot of sense. How do you: 1. Convince people just to go with it — like, I know you think this is a bad idea because it's dangerous or different, but how do you get people to just go with it? 2. Commit yourself to release things that are polarizing — how do you personally commit to putting out work that will split opinion?
47:11	MFM	I will never forget. I learned a lot from working with Andy Grove on the Pentium project and on Xeon... and, you know, other things.
47:17	Sam Parr	Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, wrote the book on management.
47:23	MFM	Yeah. He did—he still used his stand for GSB, and he wrote the book Only the Paranoid Survive. I was in a meeting with him. Now, there's another thing: it was not "Promop" but "ProChip." The engineers at Intel— you know, they're engineers— and they wanted to know, "What is this? It's a professional chip? It's got more power—what's the deal?" And Andy had me present what we'd found and why Pentium worked. We'd done a lot of research with consumers on this. He said, "Listen, this is a good name because it is so polarizing. That means it has energy to it. There's energy inside." I remember thinking, "Man, that guy is so smart." And that's where I began to see the value of... and we encourage people. We say, "Listen, this is polarizing for your organization; that's good. You may not decide to use it, but let's really think about what's going on in that word that's creating that kind of energy."
48:24	Shaan Puri	What do you say to a founder who kind of wakes up and realizes, "We don't love our name"? Switching is obviously dangerous. It's time-consuming, and it's expensive to re-educate the market. Sometimes you're taking personal risk by doing it. Do you have a framework for when to change a name and when not to? In other words, when should you change your name and when should you keep it?
48:48	MFM	Well, the simple answer is — and you heard this from me earlier — the advantage of the right name is compounding. Names give you cumulative advantage. The longer it's in the marketplace, the more advantage you will have because it becomes familiar to people. That's why it's really important to get it right from the very beginning, not just have that Friday afternoon session and do it quickly. When people come to us and we spend time making sure they should change their name — if they're being sued, okay, it's a simple decision — we'll figure out the pluses and minuses. We don't want to work on a project where they're just kind of, "I really want to keep this name." And this is really counterintuitive: the biggest reason people don't change their name is they think they're going to lose whatever equities they have and they're going to lose momentum. We have never seen that as evidence in the marketplace — never. I want to emphasize that, provided their launch is done with enthusiasm and they have a story to tell: "we were here, and now we're going this way, and the benefits for you are A, B, and C." People know that they're not losing the technology or the software they're using; the name is changing and they're going to add stuff to it. So rather than struggle with something — bad names create friction. They just do. So why put up with that friction when, over a six month... [trails off]
50:30	MFM	Or a nine-month. You have to devote extra resources, and if—particularly if it's a young company in a Series A or B—it's not, it's not traumatic. If you're Coca-Cola, that's a different story. And then you really have to have a compelling reason to change your name.
50:46	Sam Parr	"If you were to run for president, do you think you could take your naming ability and come up with cool slogans? Do you think those slogans could meaningfully impact the outcome of an election?"
51:00	MFM	Yes, without any hesitancy.
51:03	Sam Parr	So, can you give an example of this done well? Or an example of a candidate who could have done it better had they tightened up some of their stuff?
51:14	MFM	Well, the slogan that I think is the best slogan—certainly in American politics—was written and developed by Hal Riney here in San Francisco. It's "Morning in America" for the Reagan campaign. I mean, in a world where there was a lot of negativity in the stock market, fuel costs, and all that sort of stuff, he gave people not false hope, but real hope. "Morning in America"—a tremendous commercial.
51:42	Shaan Puri	If we wanted to go down the rabbit hole and learn this stuff, what would be a couple of books you would recommend? What books would help people really start to master the art of marketing, positioning, and thinking differently? What are the best books that would get us going?
51:58	MFM	One: David Ogilvy's Ogilvy on Advertising is a simple book. It's just good. You can read it—well, maybe after a couple glasses of wine or something like that—but there are a lot of great principles in it. He truly was an advertising genius.
52:14	Sam Parr	I love his second book, Confessions of an Adman. I think it is equally as good. Have you read that one?
52:20	MFM	Sean—yeah. Oh, I have, for sure.
52:22	Sam Parr	Yeah, it's brilliant.
52:24	MFM	Then I'll switch, and I would recommend—simply because it's about creative curiosity—that book on Leonardo da Vinci written by the, you know, the famous guy who wrote the one on Steve. Yes. Yeah, I think that's a great book. It really shows that 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, I like reading books by Roger Martin. He wrote a book called New Ways to Think. I'm familiar with him because we've done so much work at Procter & Gamble, and he—I'm not sure if he still is—was a very close consultant to A.G. Lafley, who was one of their great presidents. He's written two or three books. One of them with Lafley is called Playing to Win. I think those are really good. They're very direct—there's no BS about them. There's no "word salad" throughout his books. There's a lot of marketing books out there that are just a bunch of word salad spun different ways.
53:39	Shaan Puri	Are
53:39	Sam Parr	"You happy or angry at the rise of AI? Is there any situation where you're like, 'this is gonna put us out of business,' or are you thinking, 'this has helped us so much'?"
53:50	MFM	I'm happy about it for a couple reasons. One: it does—anybody now can generate 200–300 names using ChatGPT or Claude, so it moves our competitive advantage to our ability to judge names: to separate the right names from the good names and the okay names. We have a lot of data that we've invested in and that software, which is now—we spent the last 16 months integrating AI into that. So that's the first reason. Second reason is we have 12 projects in here now—or 13. Six of them are AI-driven. I mean, we are seeing the future, and some of this future is really very, very positive.
54:43	Sam Parr	"How much does it cost to work with you?"
54:45	MFM	There's a range of things — it really depends. Most of our projects are somewhere between a low of 75 and a high of about 150. Big corporate names will go to maybe 200.
55:00	Sam Parr	And when you gave the name — you gave it to Swiffer — did you say, "Alright, here you go; have at it," or were they asking you for further slogans and things like that?
55:07	MFM	Yeah. Sometimes we'll do the what's-called "nomenclature" around it — you know: "What is this? How do you define it? What's the positioning line?" We'll help them write a short story. We'll do what's commonly called tracking research. So we'll look at how it's going over the next 90 days, 120 days — a small quantitative study. We have a small research group here that does that. But basically, we're giving them the name, which is one of the most valuable things they will ever have. And now, I know I've convinced you of that.
55:46	Shaan Puri	"You have—yes, Sam, you changed your mind."
55:49	Sam Parr	"Yeah, man — you've convinced me. I would love to be your friend, if you'd be okay with being friends with me too." "Yeah, man, I'm totally bought in. I... I mean, my premise was always that a bad name is no excuse to fail, but you've convinced me to take way more thought into this process." </FormattedResponse>
56:12	MFM	Well, gonna give you guys — I know you want. By the way, happy to be your friend. Happy to talk more about your creative process, and if we can make it better I certainly will. There's a little chart I'm gonna get, or a little — it's just to draw a line on it. On one side put "bizarre, absurd, illegal ideas," and on the other side put "safe, workable ideas." Right in the middle, write the words approximate thinking. 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 from bizarre through approximate..." — let's stop there. Let's look at these approximate ideas: they're not baked out, they're not full, and they may be bad. If you give people permission to do that, you will see that your creativity will spike.
57:09	Shaan Puri	Wow. I like that—wonderful, David. Thank you.
57:12	MFM	"For coming on. You're very welcome. It's been my pleasure, really. It's really been a privilege, to be totally honest. So..."
57:19	Shaan Puri	Ours too. We learned a lot today.
57:20	Sam Parr	Yeah, man — you're, you're, you're just wonderful. Thank you so much, and we appreciate you. Alright, that's it — that's the pod.

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We named a billion dollar “startup” with the guy that named BlackBerry, Febreeze and Swiffer.

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