A name is not a label. A name is a fence.

Most kids your age (and most adults) think of a name as a sticker you put on the finished product.

Backwards.

The right name is a fence around what you're allowed to build. It tells you, every Saturday morning when you sit down to work, what the thing IS and what the thing IS NOT. It limits the product. That's the whole point.

When the Notion founders named their product Notion in 2016, they were locking themselves into a flexible space for notes and pages. Notion could not later decide to "actually be a Slack" without renaming. Because the name forbade chat, they were forced to stay focused on notes-and-pages until they became the world leader in that one shape.

When the Linear founders named their product Linear, they were saying: this is for teams who move in straight lines. No Kanban-board chaos. No nested infinite hierarchies. A whole category of features were ruled out by five letters on the homepage.

A strong name forbids things. That forbidding is the gift the name gives the builder.

You can feel where this is going. Let's get more specific about what the name is actually doing.