My Favorite Names on Product Hunt Right Now
Great product names, naming lessons worth stealing, and the rise of “vowel slop.”
Every week I spend time scanning new product launches looking for good names.
I track patterns, note the memorable arrivals, and file away ideas that might prove useful for future projects.
One of my favorite places to do this is Product Hunt — a site that lists new launches each day in a format naming people love: product name + one sentence of context.
That’s exactly the amount of information a name usually gets in the real world.
The best names do real work immediately. They communicate something, they stick, and they leave room to grow.
The worst ones feel like they were poured out of a generator.
This week’s launches had plenty of both.
Anything API
Anything API has technically been around since 2023, but their new launch gave me an excuse to publicly declare how much I like this name.
Anything is such a human, intuitive word. It captures the feeling of the product immediately.
In a world where many AI tools lean toward Latinate names — things like Perplexity or companies like Anthropic — Anything strips away the formalities and feels refreshingly direct.
It’s the naming equivalent of a handshake.
NothingHere
This is a MacOS panic button: one hotkey hides windows, mutes audio, and covers your screen.
The name immediately tells a story.
Instead of pretending the product isn’t slightly mischievous, NothingHere leans into the joke. That honesty makes it memorable — and helps turn users into fans.
Hermit
Hermit lets users migrate their saved memory and preferences from ChatGPT to Claude so they don’t have to reintroduce themselves to a new AI system.
The metaphor takes a moment to click — which is my only critique — but once it does, it works nicely.
What makes Hermit especially strong is its flexibility.
The metaphor can stretch as the product evolves. Today it might store conversations. Tomorrow it could manage memory, knowledge, or personal context.
That kind of conceptual elasticity is incredibly valuable in software, where products rarely stay the same for long.
Dottie
Private AI journal.
This was my favorite of the human-named AI tools I saw this week — and there were plenty.
Dottie works because it strikes a balance:
distinctive enough to stand out
warm enough to feel personal
It also carries a small wink toward the product itself. Writing, pens, dotting your i’s.
Other newly launched human-named tools — Hugo, Amara, Lindy — felt generic by comparison.
(Related: Claude, Grok, Gemini — The Hidden Rules Inside AI Names)
Monologue
Voice dictation software designed to help people work faster.
This is the kind of name that ticks nearly every box.
intuitive
memorable
easy to say
flexible enough to expand
The only thing it doesn’t quite nail is ownability.
A quick search reveals several other Monologue apps, which is likely why this one lives online at monologue.to.
Still, in software, domain flexibility is often worth it if the name itself is strong.
Timelaps
A clever piece of wordplay.
Timelaps blends time lapse with analytics, reinforcing the product’s core promise: helping teams see whether their marketing is working in real time.
Tradeoffs are involved here.
You lose perfect spelling.
You gain brandability.
Most of the time, that’s a worthwhile exchange.
The Rise of “Vowel Slop”
Not every name I saw this week was a winner.
A surprising number fell into what I’ve started calling vowel slop — invented words that look like they were poured directly out of a startup name generator.
Examples I spotted:
Coidex
Straion
Obooko
Normain
Names like these are usually trying to sound futuristic, disguise root words, or sneak an “AI” into the spelling.
But the result is often the same: names that are difficult to pronounce, spell, say aloud, and remember.
A tough starting point for a product launch.
And exactly the reason naming is one of the most important decisions to get right early.
Building something worth naming well?
I work with founders and product teams on naming strategy — no generators, no vowel slop.
This article was originally published on The Nameist Substack.