This guy names billion dollar brands for a living, here’s his exact 3-step formula.

15:58David C. Baker:One guy who's a scientist develops, takes some sonar booms, and he goes, everybody is getting excited. They find a shipwreck down there, and there's a lot of shipwrecks because of the storms off the coast. And then they spend all their money on that shipwreck. He goes, I am going to map out the entire area here. I'm going to make some decisions about what pays off, and then I'm going to dive. He found Ship of Gold in the Deep Blue Sea. Okay. Wow. Now, same thing happens here. Just ordered. We're going to go, okay, what are Greek word units for lightness, for air, for less volume, for anti-gravity, those types of things.

16:41David C. Baker:We're going to look at expressions around, I'm feeling light, I'm feeling better. We're looking at aerodynamics. We would have someone for 15 minutes look at what makes an airplane lift up. Okay. And along the way, we would have all this stuff. We typically internally call that trash. You know, it's just things, just concepts. And we would start eliminating things. And along the way, you know.

17:07Shaan Puri:You're calling it trash, but you're not like disparaging it. You're like, this is necessary. It's the necessary things or why trash?

17:15David C. Baker:Because in this business, and it's very counterintuitive, quantity leads to quality. Quantity leads to quality. Often we will get a list from a client saying, you know, we're really stuck now. And I'll say, okay, well, how many names do you generate? We will get back a list of 50 or 100 names. And they got stuck and they stopped, right? We can't do that. We're looking at maybe 2 ,000 names, right? Again, these aren't all the right names. They aren't even good names. Some of them, there's something in there.

17:49Sam Parr:Like 2 ,000 written down? So, for example, pre-AI, it sounds like you have multiple categories where you go treasure hunting. So, Greek names is one. Maybe, like, I have one where it's like streets in my hometown. Like, I look at all the streets in my hometown. Or like, I'm sure you have, which I actually do want to ask you, like, what are the all categories? And you go through all of them, and you would literally sit there in a group and write them down?

18:12David C. Baker:Yes. Well, they're either written in a small, we work in small two-person teams here. We don't use brainstorming sessions. Oh, I like it.

18:21Shaan Puri:What's the problem with brainstorming?

18:23David C. Baker:Well, first off, you have, you know, and the classic ones, you have peer pressure, right? So, and then stopping that cascade of evaluation when you have, you know, four or five or six people, let alone 10 people, it's just, it's a slow, slow grind. And we really documented that. And this is going back now 30 years ago, doing research, because we used to do brainstorming here. and we used to have freelancers, right? And so the combination of that and over an 18 month period, I mean, we just asked this, you know, it's always in life, the questions you ask, right? And we said, where are our names really coming from, right?

19:03David C. Baker:And at the end of that 18 months, even though the collection was a little sloppy and a little crude, we said, this is really interesting. First off, it doesn't come from freelancers, not because they're not creative. It's just, they're not inside. They're not, they don't, they don't have that esprit de corps. It's not coming from brainstorming sessions. It's coming from individuals or people working in two-person teams. And so we stopped all that brainstorming, never hired a freelancer again, and we work in three teams now. So usually, it depends on the budget and the timing. One team knows everything about your fiber product, right?

19:41David C. Baker:Next team, we're still in fiber, but now with that team, we're going to say we're adding an ingredient to this. It's got energy in it, okay? Well, what happens there? It changes their perspective, and their names are going to be completely different than that first list. And the third team, we're not even talking about fiber. We're talking about probably something, an athletic performance. Now we've got three distinct types of names that we're generating.

20:15Shaan Puri:This is searching the deep blue sea, searching the whole ocean of possibilities. That's right. We're looking for a ball. I'm sorry, that second one was what? So they know it's fiber. They don't know everything about our product. And then you add something unrelated. Yeah, and it would have been like energy.

20:28David C. Baker:You know, this now has its fiber, so it's digestion. Plus, it's going to give you some energy. It might be a package of minerals. I mean, these things, I call it the blueprint for a program, what we're going to do. And then we try these things out. And, you know, there's a lot of failure in creativity. And, you know, everybody here has complete permission to fail. If we're not failing here, we're not doing our job, right? Because it's, again, you're looking for that ship in the deep blue sea. And so along the way, you know, we're going to uncover something like, you know, well, what's about lightness?

21:03David C. Baker:How do you feel light? Well, it's feather, all right? So then we'd say, well, what would this feel like if I walked into Walgreens and there's Fiber Plus and there's Metamucil and now in a new package, there's a brand called Feather, right? And now there's got to be copy that supports it, right? So you got to figure, can we create a sentence or a little phrase where people get it? I get it. It's going to have fiber on the label. Okay. So, you know, it could be feather the lightweight fiber you need or something like that. All right, I got it, right? You know, consumers aren't stupid, right? This is like the Swiffer.

21:47Shaan Puri:Swiffer, it's not called a mop, but it's the quicker picker upper.

21:51David C. Baker:Exactly. So we would go through that drill and eventually we would have, you know, a list of 10, sometimes 15 names. Now it goes to our trademark group here, which we have paralegals and a trademark attorney. And they're looking at, I'm going to stick with Feather for now, is Feather available? Probably would be in this category, right? And so now what do we have? We have something original. We have something that's easy to process because it's a real word and it's familiar. But all of a sudden in Fiverr, it becomes surprising.

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22:52Sam Parr:Right away, you said, you know you said light and we both lit up and uh you were like now let's look at the the greek words for light you said that very quickly as if this is just one of the many um the many uh places where you go treasure hunting what are the other handful of places that you'd like to dig

23:13David C. Baker:yeah so um in terms of databases that anybody would have access to we we do look at latin roots Greek roots, Roman mythology, Greek mythology, those really basic things, which sometimes yield things. I mean, Pentium came out of, you know, we have a database not only of the periodic table, but lots of information about the periodic table.

23:39Sam Parr:You said lots of those basic things. They're not basic to us. You know, we're dummies. We're a few brain cells away from being just talking monkeys. So like, what are some of the, what are the other few, what are the other simple databases? Yeah.

23:55David C. Baker:Okay. So, so there's your periodic table, but you got to go, you have to have databases where we built, have built them out. It's not anybody can just, you know, okay, I'm going to go and look at the, the periodic table. We've taken that table and then we've loaded it up with other articles and information about it. So now it's a richer base of words relating to that periodic table. And that's where kind of the gold can be. Then what we've done is when we have an assignment, let's say it's a small car for a Nissan, right? All those names go into a database not called small cars, but small things, okay?

24:36David C. Baker:And a processor for Intel, that's small, that would go into that. So now what's happening is that gives us, I'm a real believer in the synchronicity, right? The connecting of seemingly irrelevant things, right? That's the fundamental layer of creativity. Impossible is seemingly irrelevant to what they're doing, but look how it performs in the marketplace, right?

25:02Shaan Puri:What would have been the comfortable name for the Impossible Burger?

25:05David C. Baker:It would have been like when we came to the client and they said, yeah, we want to fit into Whole Foods. It would be something like Natural Farms. Right.

25:15Shaan Puri:Okay, so you, I don't know if you still come up with names yourself or you're king of the kingdom and you let the scribes do that. But how do you get in flow? So like, what do you do? Let's say it's a name day and you need to get into a creative mindset flow. What do you actually, do you do anything in your routine?

25:32David C. Baker:It's more difficult to keep in the flow because of interruptions here, right? But what I really try to do is I first sit down with a pad and a pen. And I just start kind of free associating thoughts about where to go with this. You know, I sometimes might draw a treasure map with a grid and put ideas down there. And, you know, we use the, I mean, everybody's addicted somehow to the web. I'll use, I mean, we use all the AI things, Claude, Cowork, you know, ChatGBT, you know, all these things. And I'll start asking questions. I don't ask it for names, but I'll ask about different things relative, in your case, to fiber.

26:17David C. Baker:And I'll guess stuff like that. And then at a certain point, this is really like a 20-minute kind of thing. So it's not, you know, very arduous for me. So I'll just start generating names. And I'll write down other directions. And then I'll pursue that. It might be, okay, I think Greek would be a good thing to look at. I think aviation and aircraft for things that are lighter, right? I would go and I would look at other words for light, and then that would lead to sunshine and soul and, you know, S-O-L, things like that. And then I just start crafting names.

26:56Sam Parr:So my guess is that I'm just, we've only talked to you for 30 minutes, and I've already gleaned from you that, A, you're probably just incredibly talented at this, but you seem very process-driven. You seem like you're a creative and then you've made this into a skill, which implies it's somewhat teachable. When Sean and I are trying to... We both have companies. When we're trying to manage creative people to come up with these bits of brilliance, whether it's just a name or it's anything else that's creative, you seem really good at this because you just seem like you know what you're doing. What mistakes do you think that we are making with our team or a lot of our listeners are making with their employees on managing people when you're asking them to come up with something unique or creative or dangerous a little bit, you know, things like that?

27:42David C. Baker:It's a little bit of search for the Holy Grail of how to manage creative people. And that's where your kind of first mistake is or clients make this mistake is I try to lead everybody here. And I really try to encourage people. And, you know, the root word of encouragement is courage, right? And so it may be that you're not giving the people you're asking these things to do that you're not actually letting them just flow free. I mean, here when people develop a list and they give it to me, right, because I'm still a creative director here and I still generate names every week. They know that I'm not going to look at that harshly, that I'm not going to evaluate it.

28:32David C. Baker:I'm going to speculate with it, right? And now eventually we do have to evaluate things. We're working for clients and we've got to do the right thing for them. But, you know, go back and look at how you're communicating with your team and see if you can't move it from leading versus managing and encouragement versus evaluating.

28:56Shaan Puri:It seems like one important part of having people have courage is to not get smacked down on their first bad idea. And you talked about separating when you judge an idea versus when you're generating an idea. And doing both at the same time, you know, everything I've read about creativity tells you that basically that's one of the most key things you could do. I think Disney had three different rooms in his office. One to dream ideas, one to plan out which ideas to do, and then one to judge the result. And you don't judge when you're in the dreaming room, right? Because that would sort of kill the creative flow.

29:28Shaan Puri:Do you guys do something similar or do you have any rules around when you judge? And then also, how do you judge? Like, how do we know if Feather's a good name? How are we going to know? Is it just, we just go on our gut, or do we have some testing?

29:37David C. Baker:We do have testing. I'll talk about that in a moment. But going back to your issue with your creatives, there's two things that we do, and these are kind of magical phrases. I mean, just trust me on this. I know you don't know me very well. I'll coach people to say, listen, when you have trouble, when you feel yourself leaning into the urge to say, that's too expensive, or that'll never pass legal. Say something like, I wish we could make that so it wasn't expensive. Or how do we modify that word so it's legally available? What you've done there is you've given someone a problem-solving proposition.

30:20David C. Baker:You haven't slammed a name down. You're getting people to think about, okay, well, Well, let me think about, because humans love to solve problems. We do. That's in our DNA. It's how we survive. And so try those things. Someone comes to you with an idea and go, you know, that's an interesting idea. That's the first thing I say. Okay, it's interesting. Or I'll say, I would not have thought of that. Okay. Which is just being honest.

30:45Shaan Puri:Which is code for. I, as a smart person, would not have thought of that. But, you know. I would say it that way.

30:55Sam Parr:The other day, I met this guy at a conference, and he was making his argument about why AI, we've peaked. And I was like, well, I understand your argument. I'm not low IQ, so I don't agree with you, but I totally get your argument.

31:09Shaan Puri:He was like, what? Okay, so you don't do that. You just say, you give them credit. I wouldn't have thought of that. And then you sort of redirect towards the problem?

31:19David C. Baker:Yeah, we try to redirect. Correct. And then there's a certain point where, you know, you do start just eliminating things, but you have to give, there's a moment, there's a period where things just live in our system, right? And then we start pairing them down. And of course, trademark pairs things down automatically.

31:37Shaan Puri:It's very precise, right? When you're going to switch gears, like do you tell the team or you wait till tomorrow and you say, okay, now we're going to narrow down? Or like, how do you switch gears from the divergent phase to maybe converging on an idea?

31:49David C. Baker:Yeah. In our process, we're going through a cycle. There's an initial cycle where we're just trying to figure out, were these assignments right? Did we get anything out of fiber plus energy? Did we get anything out of this sports medicine thing that we had over here? Should we redial? But after we've gone through really about two cycles, which is a two, two-and-a-half-week period, because people are working not on this one project for two-and-a-half weeks. They might have three or four things that they're working on, right? Then it's time to really look and say, where are we? Of course, we go back and we look now at the objectives we call the creative framework.

32:34David C. Baker:And there's a reason for that because we want more of a window for people to walk through and create as opposed to conform to these five things. So we'll look at that creative framework and we'll say, hey, I think we're getting there. Let's ship this off to legal. Most of our products or projects have to do with two or three or four or five markets that our clients want to do, you know, global in a sense, right? And so we have linguists that work for us around the world and we're shipping those out. We also have software that we built here that takes certain language principles and certain cognitive science principles and that's all been in there into software and now it's AI powered so that I can put a name in and it will come back and it will talk about processing fluency, memorability.

33:31David C. Baker:The famous thing is CV-CV, constant vowel, constant vowel. That's how children learn language. That's the only thing a child will pronounce. That's like mama. You got it. That's it. He'll never hear anything until about a little bit past the age of two.

33:47Shaan Puri:That's like Sonos. Are there other names that you might have had? What are the other power letters? Aren't there some letters that have like, you know, just like, you know, not all letters are created equal. If all the letters are in a bar and one letter walks in, everything. Who's the author? He's here? Okay. Oh, my God. What are the key letters?

34:09David C. Baker:Yeah. Well, you're really talking about an area that we know a lot about, which is sound symbolism. And so you just said K, and that actually is one of the power letters. So I don't know. Maybe you want to work for us at some point. But so those letters that are strong, I mean, this is in many ways just intuitive. But think about something. You can call them plosives. There's other technical terms. But you talk about P and K and B, those sounds are, if you want something reliable and fast, you're going to at least formulate that into your names. So in our software now, I mean, we used to do this hand-to-high coordination, but now we just say, you know, to our platform, which is called Predict, we say, okay, for this project, this name has to move fast.

35:06David C. Baker:Sort these 10 names out as to which one's faster, right? And it's looking at all of the research we've done on sound symbolism. And it's going, well, D is fast, P is fast, Z is really fast. And it's looking for those letters. It's not commenting really on the semantics of the word or even on the project. It's just saying, okay, this is faster than that. And that's really helpful to us.

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36:25Sam Parr:So I'm a self-taught copywriter, which means I'm pretty good, but I'm not world-class. But I have a process. And I would like to explain my process to you. And then maybe you can give me a process that I can use at home to be a better namer. So when I write, up top, I have general knowledge, which means I'm reading books constantly and they're on any topic that I like and I just am learning. I'm generally learning. Then when I have a project, I get specific knowledge. So I dive deep on that one thing so I can learn. Then I get my draft out. And my draft, I know it's going to be horrible. And I say, I don't care.

37:01Sam Parr:I'm just going to get horribleness out there. Then I do what's called the incubation period. So I drop it and I go for a walk. It could be a one-hour walk or it could be a 24 hours or I could come back to it in a week, but some amount of period. Because that's like when those weird shower thoughts happen. And I think there's like a reason for those shower thoughts. And then finally, I'll do the edit. And the edit is where brilliance comes up. And this process I just stole. I think I stole from David Ogilvie, where he said like, I'm not even a good writer, but I'm a world-class editor. Is there a process?

37:28Sam Parr:Let's say I have a new company. I have a fiber company. Is there a process that I could do in five days that you could like bullet point out of like, if you do this, this, this, and this, you'll be 80 % ahead of where most people are. You may not be as good as me, but you'll be pretty good.

37:44David C. Baker:Okay, yeah. There's at least one thing I would add, maybe two. And I'll go back to what I said earlier, that I'm a real believer in synchronicity, right? You know, looking for connections from things that are seemingly irrelevant. So as you get to, before you go to that final draft, and if this was, you know, we'll stick with, if this is helpful, Fiber, for you writing this article on Fiber, I would go to a bookstore and I would either get a book or it'd be easier to get a couple magazines that you never have read before, right? And I would spend 30 minutes on those two magazines just looking for connections that might be moved into your article.

38:34David C. Baker:And I guarantee you that at least 30 % of the time, by doing that, you will find a new perspective or you'll put a new spin on that article that you're writing or a new insight that will be in the article because you've gone out and you've suspended. You've got to suspend logic and evaluation and just speculate. What could these two magazines or what, you know, I've never read a book on Thomas Edison. So what can he teach me about this particular project? Does that make sense to you? I love that. Yeah.

39:11Sam Parr:What names did you present to clients that they turned down because they were fearful of that you think was a big miss?

39:19David C. Baker:Every name behind me has been rejected by clients. Every single one.

39:24Sam Parr:So I see BlackBerry, Impossible, Sonos, Toro, Febreze, Swiffer. They all were turned down at first? BlackBerry is an interesting one. Is there a good BlackBerry story?

39:35David C. Baker:Yes, there is. So when we named BlackBerry, so we're in Sausalito. You may or may not know this, but during World War II, Sausalito was a shipbuilding area. I mean, lots of people worked here. And we were in another naval building built by the U.S. Navy. And part of our office was in a vault where they stored the plans for these ships. So these Canadians come from Waterloo, Canada, and they're sitting down in a vault. So right away they're going like, what? God, we're here in Sausalito, we're in California. And then we present to them Blackberry. Okay. And one of the clients, I can't even remember his name, just said, he goes, man, this is something else.

40:24David C. Baker:I'm here in a vault. I'm in Sausalito. There's no windows. And I'm looking at BlackBerry. And so that was off the table. But one of the things I said there in that conference room was, hold on, let's take it off the table for now, but I'm going to bring it back, right? Because there's things in this that are of real value. And that was, it was just fortuitous for us, our first wave of research on sound symbolism, where we went out and we did testing in about six different languages, six different countries, by the way, it wasn't inexpensive. I said, I can tell you that B is one of the most reliable sounds in the English alphabet.

41:12David C. Baker:That's number one. Two, black is going to be, you know, recognized across multiple languages. And not all, but some people will recognize berry, right? And a black berry is kind of a delightful thing. And I said, there's one other quality here. And they were, they weren't, you know, their arms were crossed. They were, you were kind of listening, but not. I said, your current competitors who are all big companies would never have the courage to put BlackBerry on a device. Then the arms dropped and you could see people going, okay, maybe this guy knows something I don't know. And then I had to fly to Waterloo, Canada a couple times just for extra sessions and talk to them about this.

42:00David C. Baker:And then finally, they went with BlackBerry, which was the best decision that they ever made. I mean, talk about a name that just took off, right?

42:08Shaan Puri:Can I give you, can we play a little game where I give you the name of current tech companies, and I want you to give me a 1 to 10 score as the naming guy. Just your gut reaction. You love the name, it's a 10. You hate the name, it's a 1, all right? Here's the rule. One more rule. No 7s. No 7s.

42:26David C. Baker:7s are for wimps. Okay, all right. I'll give you one rule I don't know anything about these companies so it's just going to be sort of a based on it's arbitrary and on my creative judgment yeah fire away alright

42:37Shaan Puri:open AI

42:39David C. Baker:hmm okay that's that's a four okay good anthropic well it's better than open AI let me start there okay so we're making progress at a moment in time when that was out I'm going to give that I'm going to give that an eight I'm going to give it an eight

42:57Shaan Puri:okay Eight. That's a strong score. I like it. Grok.

43:04David C. Baker:That's a four. Maybe a three. Very unpleasant. Very unpleasant. Agreed. SpaceX. Oh, okay. That's a 10. 10. All right. Why is that one a 10? Do you want to give us a little quick why on that one? Totally expected. They make spaceships and rockets space, but boom. Now I know something about the letter X, right? Okay. and X always says innovation to people. It doesn't, you put it in a car, you put it on a tech device, whatever. So that's a 10. Thought is a 10.

43:35Shaan Puri:So now we're going to compare to, you tell me which name you like better, X.com or the old name, Twitter.

43:41David C. Baker:Yeah. That's, you know, I get that question a lot. You know, people, the setup is always, don't you think Elon Musk, you know, made a mistake? And I always say, I don't know what he was thinking. So I can't say he's making a mistake. But I'm going to say that Twitter was probably the better choice to stick with, right?

44:00Sam Parr:How about our podcast, My First Million?

44:03David C. Baker:Oh, I think it's a good name. And I'm not saying that because I'm on your show. It's just intriguing, right? It's a good title for something, right? Sean named it.

44:13Shaan Puri:Thanks, we hate it. All right, here we go. HubSpot.

44:18David C. Baker:I'm going to give it an eight because there's alliteration there. HubSpot. It's memorable, yeah.

44:23Shaan Puri:What are names you were jealous of that you didn't get to name? You saw it, you're like, ah, well done, perfect.

44:30David C. Baker:Yeah, well, there's two, really. DreamWorks, the film entertainment. I think that's a beautiful name, right? Yeah. And I think the car Lexus is just perfect structure. That X in the middle, there's that X again. So yeah, they did a fabulous job, yeah.

44:46Sam Parr:You know how, so like in our internet world, there's like this niche of person. Sean and I have a bunch of these buddies where they will acquire domain names and sometimes jokingly, but not always jokingly, sometimes they actually do it. They'll start a company just around a domain name. Do you have a list of names where you're like, you know, you should start a company just around this name? You know, we had, Sean and I had this guy named Eric Ryan on the podcast and he started Ollie, wait, is it Ollie Band-Aids? Is that what it's called, Sean?

45:17Shaan Puri:Ollie Gummies, Welly Band-Aids.

45:18Sam Parr:Yeah, Welly Band-Aids and Ollie Gummies. And then he had like three more amazing companies, Method Soap is one of them. And he was like, I'll start companies just around what form of the bottle I can get the soap bottle. Method Soap is a famous bottle. Are there names where you think are company worthy?

45:35David C. Baker:Well, I'll tell you, one that we had, and we now have a small little venture, just an LLC, where we make investments with our clients. and we had phase change, which is a lovely, you know, phase change, water to ice, ice to water, those types of things. And boom, we, we, we use that. Yeah, it is a cool name.

45:59Shaan Puri:Yeah. You had this cool slide in one of your decks that I really liked, which was that you don't just give the clients like a list of names. You know, here's 40 things on a spreadsheet, pick your favorite. You kind of present it in context. You show it, I don't know, is this what you actually do? You show it in a news headline or on a shirt or like in motion on a bus somewhere and that gives you the feel for it very differently. Is that right? Yeah, we call that a proof of concept, right?

46:23David C. Baker:So we look at this internally, right? Before we would show it to a client, we would look at this, you know, two or three of us and we would say, and there's just really one rule, which is, okay, is that believable, right? Because that's really the most important thing is in that first less than a second, they have to lean towards, wow, I think I believe this, right? I think Microsoft could have a brand called Azure for clouds. I think there's something interesting and believable, though. So we're typically putting it in things like the Wall Street Journal. We'll take a famous actor or a famous tennis player and in a kind of beautiful photograph, black and white, we'll say, you know, companies that run well run on blank.

47:12David C. Baker:So there's a sponsor, if you will. And then if we say, yeah, that's believable, then we show it to the clients. And there's a psychological reason for doing it. Most of the people we work with don't have a lot of practice in making creative decisions. And so you have to make these things come alive, right? You have to give them an advantage to sort these things out.

47:35Sam Parr:I want to ask you about this. This was like the most brilliant slide because I'm pretty obsessed right now with, at my company, like getting people to be creative. because a lot of times the founder is the creative person, but that doesn't particularly scale past a certain size. You need to empower others. You have this really cool slide and you call it the comfort trap. And it basically says, there's the tension zone. This is where half the team hates what you're doing or hates the name. The energy is high, but it's very polarizing. And then below that, when things get incredibly familiar but have very little distinctiveness, that's when things get invisible.

48:09Sam Parr:You're in the invisible zone. There's a lot of consensus. It's a safe choice. And basically, it's not remarkable at all. This makes a lot of sense. How do you, A, convince people just to go with it? Like, I know you think this is a bad idea because it's dangerous or it's different, but just go with it. And how do you convince yourself, maybe, to, like, release things that are polarizing?

48:32David C. Baker:I will never forget. I learned a lot from working with Andy Grove on the Pentium Project and Xeon and, you know, other things.

48:38Sam Parr:Andy Grove being the former CEO of Intel, and he wrote the book on management.

48:44David C. Baker:Yeah, he did. Still used his Stanford GSB and he wrote the book, Only the Paranoises Survive. I was in a meeting with him. Now there's another thing. It was not ProMop, but ProChip, the engineers at Intel. Hey, they're engineers and they want to, what is this? It's a professional chip. It's got more powerless. What's the deal? And Andy, he had me present what we'd found and why Pentium worked. And we'd done a lot of research with consumers on this. And he said, listen, this is a good name because it is so polarizing. That means it has energy to it. There's energy inside. And I remember thinking, man, that guy is so smart.

49:27David C. Baker:And that's where I began this kind of the value of, and we encourage people. We say, listen, this is polarizing for your organization. That's good. You may not decide to use it, but let's really think about what's going on in that word that's creating that kind of energy. What do you say to a founder who kind of wakes up and realizes we don't love our name?

49:51Shaan Puri:Yeah. But obviously switching is a dangerous thing. It's a time-consuming thing. It's an expensive thing to read. You get to market sometimes. You're taking some personal risk doing it. I mean, do you have a framework for kind of the when to do it, when to not do it in terms of changing your name?

50:09David C. Baker:Well, the simple answer is, and you heard this from me earlier, you know, the advantage of the right name is it's compounds, right? Names give you cumulative advantage. The longer it's in the marketplace, the more advantage you will have because it becomes familiar with people. So that's why it's really important to get it right from the very beginning, not just, you know, have that Friday afternoon session and do it. But when people come to us, and we spend time making sure they should change their name. Like, you know, now if they're being sued, okay, it's a simple decision. But we'll figure out the pluses and minuses.

50:45David C. Baker:We don't want to work on a project where they're just kind of, I really want to keep this name. I want to keep it. And so at that point, and here this is really counterintuitive because the biggest reason people don't change their name is they think they're going to lose whatever equities they have and they're going to lose momentum. We have never seen that as evidence in the marketplace. Never. I want to emphasize that. Provided that their launch is done with enthusiasm and they have a story to tell that we were here and now we're going this way and the benefits for you are A, B, and C. people know that they're not losing that technology or the software they're using the name is changing and they're going to add stuff to it and so rather than struggle with something bad names create friction right they just do and and so why put up with that friction when over a six-month period or a nine-month period you have to devote extra resources and And particularly if it's a young company in a Series A or B, it's not traumatic.

52:00David C. Baker:If you're Coca-Cola, that's a different story. And then you really have to have a compelling reason to change your name.

52:07Sam Parr:If you were to run for president, do you think that you could take your naming ability and come up with cool slogans? And do you think that those slogans could meaningly impact the outcome of an election?

52:21David C. Baker:Yes, without any hesitancy.

52:23Sam Parr:so what's can you give an example uh of uh of this done well or uh an example of a candidate that could have done it better had they tightened up some of their stuff well the the slogan that

52:36David C. Baker:i think is the best slogan certainly in uh american politics is written uh and developed by hal reiney uh here in san francisco is morning in america the reagan campaign i mean that in a world where there was a lot of negativity in the stock market and, you know, fuel costs and all that sort of stuff. He gave people not false hope, real hope. It's Morning in America. Tremendous commercial.

53:03Shaan Puri:If we wanted to go down the rabbit hole and learn this stuff, what would be the couple of books you would point people to to really start to master the art of marketing and positioning and thinking differently? You know, what are the best books that would get us going? one?

53:19David C. Baker:One, David Ogilvie on advertising is a simple book. It's just good. I mean, you can read it, you know, over, well, not, I mean, maybe a couple glasses of wine or something like that, but there's a lot of great principle in there. I mean, he truly was an advertising genius.

53:35Sam Parr:I love his second book, Confessions of an Ad Man, I think is equally as good. Have you read that one, Sean?

53:41David C. Baker:Yeah.

53:42Sam Parr:I have for sure. Yeah, it's brilliant.

53:44David C. Baker:then i i'll switch and i and i uh i would recommend simply because it's about creative curiosity and it's the book on leonardo da vinci written by the uh you know the famous guy that wrote the one on steve jobs yes yeah i think that's a great book and it's it really is creativity takes a lot of persistence and tenacity. You have to keep going, right? And that's exactly what Da Vinci did. And the third, from a marketing standpoint, I like reading the books by Roger Martin. He wrote a book called New Ways to Think. I am familiar with him because we've done so much work at Procter & Gamble. And he, you know, I don't know if he still is, but he was a very close consultant to A.G.

54:34David C. Baker:Lafley, who was, you know, one of their great presidents. And he's written two or three books, one of them with Lafley, which is called Playing to Win. And I think those are really good. They're very direct. There's no BS about them. There's no word salad throughout his books. You know, there's a lot of marketing books out there that it's just a bunch of word salad spun different ways.

55:00Sam Parr:Are you happy or angry at the rise of AI? Like, is there any type of thing where you're like, this is going to put us out of business? Or are you thinking this helps us so much?

55:11David C. Baker:I'm happy about it for a couple reasons. One, it does, I mean, anybody now can generate, you know, 200, 300 names using chat or Claude. so it does move our competitive advantage to our ability to judge names to separate the right names from the good names and the okay names because we have a lot of data that we've invested in and that software which is now you know we spent the last 16 months integrating ai into that so and then that so that's the first reason second reason is you know we we have uh We have 12 projects in here now, or 13. Six of them are AI-driven. And, I mean, we are seeing the future.

56:00David C. Baker:And some of this future is really very, very positive.

56:04Sam Parr:How much does it cost to work with you?

56:06David C. Baker:There's a range of things that it really depends. Most of our projects are somewhere between a low of 75 to a high of about 150. big corporate name will go to maybe 200 and when you give the name you gave it to swiffer you said

56:23Sam Parr:all right here you go have at it or are they like asking you for further slogans and things like

56:28David C. Baker:that yeah sometimes with uh we'll do the what's called the nomenclature around it you know what is this how do you define it what's the positioning line we'll help them write a short story um we'll do commonly called tracking research. So, you know, we'll look at how it's going over the next 90 days, 120 days, small quantitative study. We have a small research group here that does that. So, but basically it's, you know, we're giving them the name, which is one of their most valuable things they will ever have. And now I know I've convinced you of that.

57:07Shaan Puri:You have. Yeah, Sam, you changed your mind? Yeah, man.

57:10Sam Parr:You've convinced me that I would love to be your friend if you would be okay with being friends with me. And yeah, man, I totally am bought in. Yeah, I mean, my premise was always that like, a bad name is no excuse to fail. But yeah, like you've convinced me to take way more thought into this process.

57:33David C. Baker:Well, I'm going to give you, I know you want, and by the way, happy to be your friend, happy to talk more about your creative process and if we can make it better, I certainly will. There's a little chart I'm going to get or a little, it's a, just draw a line on it. And on one side put bizarre, absurd, illegal ideas. And on the other side, put safe, workable ideas, right? In the middle, write the word approximate thinking, right? And if you show that to your teams who are doing creative work for you and say, you know what? As we start this thing, you can move from bizarre through approximate. And then let's just stop there.

58:18David C. Baker:Let's look at these approximate ideas. They're not baked out. They're not full. They may be bad. If you give people permission to do that, you will see that your creativity will spike. Wow. I like that.

58:31Shaan Puri:Wonderful. David, thank you for coming on.

58:34David C. Baker:You're very welcome. It's been my pleasure, really. It's really been a privilege, to be totally honest. And ours, too. We learned a lot today.

58:41Sam Parr:Yeah, man. You're just wonderful. Thank you so much, and we appreciate you. All right, that's it. That's the pod.

58:48Shaan Puri:I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.

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