My First Million This guy names billion dollar brands for a living, here’s his exact 3-step formula.
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Mar 13, 2026 A branding expert breaks down how names like BlackBerry and Swiffer went from risky ideas to massive hits. There’s a live naming exercise for a fiber company, a fast critique of tech brands, and a look at why bold, strange-sounding names often win. They also dig into rebrands, power letters, slogans, and how AI fits into creative naming.
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How To Manage Creative People Without Killing Ideas
- Lead creative teams with encouragement and problem-solving prompts instead of immediate judgment or hard managerial control.
- David replaces shutdowns like that is too expensive with prompts like I wish we could do that or how do we modify it.
How To Shift From Diverging To Judging Names
- Separate idea generation from evaluation, then narrow only after multiple cycles against a loose creative framework.
- David also scores names with linguistic rules like processing fluency and consonant-vowel patterns, citing Sonos as an easy CV-CV structure.
Add Strange Inputs Before The Final Naming Draft
- Use a five-day style process of general research, topic research, ugly drafts, incubation, and then deliberate editing when naming or writing.
- David adds one twist browse unfamiliar books or magazines to force irrelevant connections that spark new angles about 30% of the time.
