---
title: "What's in a name"
date: 2025-01-27
tags: post
---

Guillermo [posted this](https://x.com/rauchg/status/1885006430727786868?s=12) recently:

> What you name your product matters more than people give it credit. It's your first and most universal UI to the world. Designing a good name requires multi-dimensional thinking and is full of edge cases, much like designing software.

I first will give credit where credit is due: I spent the first few years thinking "vercel" was phonetically interchangable with "volcel" and therefore fairly irredeemable as a name, but I've since come around to the name a bit as being (and I do _not_ mean this snarkily or negatively!) generically futuristic, like the name of an amoral corporation in a Philip K. Dick novel.

A few folks ask every year where the name for [Buttondown](https://buttondown.com) came from. The answer is unexciting:

1. Its killer feature was Markdown support, so I was trying to find a useful way to play off of that.
2. "Buttondown" evokes, at least for me, the scent and touch of a well-worn OCBD, and that kind of timeless bourgeois aesthetic was what I was going for with the general branding.

It was, in retrospect, a good-but-not-great name with two flaws:

1. It's a common term. Setting Google Alerts (et al) for "buttondown" meant a lot of menswear stuff and not a lot of email stuff.
2. Because it's a common term, the .com was an expensive purchase (see [[Notes on buttondown.com]] for more on that).

We will probably never change the name. It's hard for me to imagine the ROI on a total rebrand like that ever justifying its own cost, and I have a soft spot for it even after all of these years. But all of this is to say: I don't know of any projects that have failed or succeeded because of a name. I would just try to avoid any _obvious_ issues, and follow [Seth's advice from 2003](https://seths.blog/2003/06/naming_a_busine/).