The Suffix Epidemic
Somewhere around 2012, a startup called Flowify launched. Nobody remembers it. But its ghost lives on — haunting every pitch deck, every Product Hunt listing, every VC slide deck that mentions engagement and synergy in the same sentence. Flowify is not a real company. It is every company.
We are living through a naming monoculture so severe it has become its own genre of comedy. The templates are etched in stone: take a verb (flow, sync, nest, link, spark), add a tech-flavored noun (hub, desk, base, stack, ify, io), and boom — you have a startup name that communicates absolutely nothing except we are a startup.
These names aren't just bland. They are actively harmful to your brand.
Why It Happens
It comes from a reasonable impulse: founders want a name that sounds startup-ish and professional. They want to fit in. They want investors to nod along. And so they reach for the vocabulary of the tech industry — words that signal seriousness, scalability, maybe a little innovation.
The problem is everyone does this simultaneously. The result is naming convergence: an industry where hundreds of companies speak in the same dialect and end up sounding like siblings. When everything sounds the same, nothing stands out.
There's also the safety trap. A name like Calendly sounds weird at first. Notion sounds like an abstract concept. Figma sounds like a made-up word. (It is.) These names feel risky because they don't sound "professional." So founders pick the safe option instead.
The safe option is the dangerous option.
What Calendly, Notion, and Figma Did Right
Let's be honest about why these names work.
Calendly is memorable because it's a play on calendar that rolls off the tongue. It doesn't describe the product — it evokes it. Say it ten times and it feels like it was always a word.
Notion is an abstract concept that maps beautifully to the product — the idea of a notion, a thought, a flexible mental model. It's expansive without being vague. You can put anything in Notion, and the name somehow captures that.
Figma has no literal meaning. But it sounds precise, slightly Italian, tool-like. It has two crisp syllables. Say it next to "DesignHub" and you'll immediately understand why Figma raised $12.5 billion.
What these names share: they don't try to describe the product. They create an emotional fingerprint. They are distinctive enough to own.
The Hub Problem, Specifically
Let me single out Hub because it deserves its own roast.
The word "hub" communicates: this is a central place for things. That's it. That's the entire semantic payload of the word. Every single product is a hub for something — notes, tasks, customer data, whatever. "Hub" is so generic it's essentially meaningless as a differentiator.
And yet. HubSpot, which got there early, owns the word through sheer brand repetition. Everyone who came after — TaskHub, DesignHub, ContentHub, SalesHub — just looks like a knockoff. You've associated yourself with a concept and then handed credit to a competitor.
The suffix game has the same problem. -ify peaked with Shopify, Spotify, and Zapier. -ly peaked with Calendly, Bitly, Grammarly. The early movers claimed the territory. Latecomers are squatters.
Memorable Names Are "Wrong" on Purpose
The names that endure are often the ones that feel slightly off, slightly unexpected, slightly too much.
Slack — a casual, almost lazy word to name an enterprise communication tool. That's exactly why it worked. It's disarming in an industry full of "SuiteWare Enterprise" vocabulary.
Stripe — clean, minimal, slightly abstract. Not PaymentHub. Not TransactionSync. Just Stripe.
Twilio — completely invented. No semantic baggage. Pure phonetics. You can say it, spell it, and Google it without getting three pages of unrelated results.
These names all share a quality: they feel inevitable in retrospect, but risky at launch. That's the sweet spot.
The Grandma Test Isn't the Test You Think
There's a popular naming heuristic called the Grandma Test: if your grandma can't understand the name, it's too weird. The idea is that accessibility matters.
This is backwards. Your grandma doesn't need to immediately understand what Dropbox does. She just needs to be able to remember it, say it, and tell her friend about it. "Oh, you should try Dropbox" is trivially easy. "Oh, you should try CloudSyncHub" is a mouthful and three follow-up questions.
The test isn't does it describe the product. The test is can someone remember and repeat it after hearing it once. Calendly passes. FlowifyDesk does not.
The Practical Takeaway
If your startup name ends in Hub, Sync, Nest, Flow, Base, Desk, or -ify, run the following checklist:
1. Is it already taken? Almost certainly yes. Thousands of companies got there first.
2. Is it Googleable? Search it. If you get pages of unrelated results, your SEO is dead on arrival.
3. Can you own the word? Notion owns the word notion in the startup context. Can you actually own yours, or are you competing with five companies for the same mental real estate?
4. Does it pass the cocktail party test? You tell someone your startup name at a party. Do they say "Oh cool, what does it do?" (great) or "Wait, how do you spell that?" or "Isn't that already a thing?" (not great).
5. Is it memorable in isolation? Strip away all context. Just the name, floating in space. Does it make you feel anything? Anything at all?
The good news: there are infinite interesting names. The English language is large. Invented words are free to create. Metaphors, animals, places, verbs, abstractions — all available, all underexplored.
Stop being a hub. Start being something.
