When I first started thinking seriously about startup naming, I did what any reasonable person does: I looked at the existing options and hated all of them.
Option one was hiring a naming agency. You've seen these firms. They have names like "Lexicon" or "Igor" or "A Hundred Monkeys" — which is either a self-aware joke about the naming process or a confession, I was never sure. They do legitimate work. They bring in linguists, trademark lawyers, cultural consultants. They run focus groups. They produce a 40-page deck that tells you why "Zenith" is the right name for your logistics company.
They also charge between $5,000 and $50,000 for the privilege. Sometimes more. A friend of mine got a quote from a boutique branding shop for $28,000 to name her B2B SaaS startup. She had nine employees and was running on seed money. The irony of spending a significant chunk of your early runway on naming your company — before you've validated that anyone wants to buy the thing — is apparently lost on the people charging for it.
Option two was the random name generator. You know these. You type in a keyword and the tool produces a list of things like "Innovatech," "Nexigen," "Qualiflow," and "Synergix." These names share one quality: they sound exactly like what a computer would name a startup if the computer had read 10,000 startup names and learned nothing from any of them except the patterns. They're the audio equivalent of a LinkedIn post that starts "Excited to share that..." Nobody is excited. Nothing is being shared.
The random generators are bad not because they're using the wrong technology but because they're solving the wrong problem. They're optimizing for name generation volume. More names, faster, with keyword matching. What they are not doing is anything useful with those names after they generate them.
Which brings me to the specific gap.
The Specific Gap
Here is the thing that should be obvious and somehow wasn't: the name is only the beginning. A name you can't use is not a name — it's a rejection letter you haven't received yet.
A naming agency gives you one name (or a shortlist of five) after six weeks of process and $20,000 in fees. A random generator gives you 500 names in ten seconds. Neither of them tells you, before you fall in love, whether the .com is available. Whether the trademark space is clean. Whether the name already belongs to a company in your exact industry.
So what happens? You get attached. You build the mood board. You tell your co-founder. You start mentally writing the "how we got our name" blog post. And then you check the domain and discover that YourPerfectName.com was registered in 2011 by a parking company that wants $8,500 for it, there's a registered trademark in your category from a company in Delaware that shut down in 2017 but whose IP was acquired in bankruptcy proceedings, and there's a startup in Berlin with the same name that raised a seed round three months ago.
All of that work. All of that attachment. Gone.
The insight behind Kickass.Name is stupid-simple: a tool that gives you ten available names is worth infinitely more than a tool that gives you a thousand unavailable ones. The availability check has to be part of the generation loop, not an afterthought. Not "here are your names, now go check if they're taken." Built in. First pass. Non-negotiable.
Why a Tool and Not an Agency
I thought about building a service instead of a software product. Hire some linguists, do proper naming engagements, compete with the agencies at a lower price point. Maybe $500 per engagement instead of $5,000.
The problem is that a $500 naming engagement is neither fish nor fowl. It's too cheap to afford the process that makes naming agencies worth it (the research, the focus groups, the trademark screening). And it's not scalable — you're still trading hours for dollars, which means the product never gets better over time.
A tool compounds. Every generation we run makes the next one smarter. Every filter we add catches more problems upstream. Every founder who uses it and gives feedback shapes what we build next.
There's also something democratizing about a tool that I find genuinely compelling. The founder who raised $28 million in Series B can afford to hire Lexicon. The founder who raised $500,000 in pre-seed cannot. But that second founder probably cares just as much — maybe more — about getting the name right. They just can't pay agency prices for the privilege.
The goal was a tool that gives a solo founder with no budget access to the same quality of starting point that a well-funded team gets after a six-week agency engagement. Not the focus groups. Not the trademark opinion letter. But the raw candidates — real, available, phonetically sound, memorable — that you can take to the next step yourself.
What We Actually Built
Kickass.Name generates names that are already checked for domain availability before you see them. Not after. Before. You see only the names that are actually reachable.
It's not magic. It's just the right order of operations. Generate, filter, present — instead of generate, present, disappoint.
The name still matters. Picking still requires judgment. But at least you're picking from a real menu, not a wishlist.
That felt worth building.
