About
What this is, and why I built it.
Your name does a lot of heavy lifting. It's the first thing a customer meets, and the word they use when they tell someone else about you. It's also the one brand decision you can't quietly undo later. All of that on one word, and most founders pick it in an afternoon, on a hunch.
The gap I kept running into.
Founders naming a brand today get two options. A generator that sprays out a thousand random words for free, or a naming agency that charges $100K and takes six months. Neither one gives you a reason to pick one name over another, and the reason is the thing you actually need. The name has to survive a trademark search, fit the category you're selling in, and come out of a customer's mouth right on the first try.
Meanwhile the best evidence was already out there. Liquid Death put a threat on a can of water and got remembered for it. Olipop built a soda brand on three round, friendly syllables. Brands in every category have made calls like those, and nobody had collected them anywhere a founder could see. So I went and read them, name by name.
How it works.
Tell me what you're building and the category it competes in. The system generates hundreds of candidates, and then I cut them against more than 5,000 real brand names, each one already studied for how it's built, how it sounds, and where it sits in its category. You end up with eight finalists, each with its reasoning and its risks in plain English, plus the one I'd pick and why.
We also talk, twice. Once before any names exist, so the search starts pointed at your brand and not a generic one. And once at the end, to walk through the pick until you can defend it to your co-founder without me in the room. All of it starts at $999, paid once.
What I won't promise you.
A magic formula. There's real science underneath this (sound symbolism, processing fluency, the way certain sounds carry certain feelings), and I even tried to turn it into one. I built a scoring engine that graded names on the science, and when I tested it against real winners it turned out to be excellent at catching broken names and useless at picking the winner. That test is why a person still makes the final read here. So what you get is the evidence with the risks named plainly, and a recommendation I put my name on. The final call stays yours.
Who I am.
I'm Neil Verma. My master's is in marketing and branding, and I spent twenty years putting it to work in corporate, leading digital strategy and managing $100M portfolios. In 2012 I walked out to build my own brands. The first two failed. I built and sold the next three. Along the way I wrote Checkout, an Amazon best-seller on brand strategy, and these days I teach founders through BrandOS.
BrandNames is the naming tool in the BrandOS family, the one for the decision everything else sits on. I built it because I kept watching smart founders make their hardest brand call with the least help.
Go look first.
You don't have to take any of this on faith. The essays take real names apart, for free, so you can see how the thinking works before the doors open. And if you have a question, write to hello@brandnames.so. It comes straight to me.