Guillermo posted this 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 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.

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About the author

I'm Justin Duke — a software engineer, writer, and founder. I currently work as the CEO of Buttondown, the best way to start and grow your newsletter, and as a partner at Third South Capital.

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