Spent almost a year stuck on a name for my original idea, a specialty coffee subscription. I had the roasters lined up, packaging mocked, but every name felt either too cute or too corporate. Eventually I got so frustrated I switched to a completely different concept: a small batch hot sauce line. The name came in ten minutes. Now I can't tell if that was a good decision or if I just took the easy way out.
Naming
I changed my business idea because I couldn't settle on a name
If the name is the only thing that stalled you, the idea probably wasn't the real problem problem. But ten minutes for hot sauce vs a year for coffee says something about where your head was at.
I did something similar with a meal prep service. Couldn't get past the name, switched to selling spice blends. The spice blends tanked.
Naming is a form of commitment. If you can't commit to a name, you usually can't commit to the business either. Not always, but oten.
How far along are you with the hot sauce? Have you sold any yet?
Three months in. Sold about 120 bottles at two local markets. It's going okay but I keep wondering about the coffee thing.
This is going to sound blunt but if you couldn't name a coffee subscription, running a coffee subscription—permits, supply chain, subscription churn—would probably have eaten you alive. The naming block might have been a useful filter.
Honestly the coffee subscription space is brutal right now. Regional roasters are already doing it and people default to them. Hot sauce is crowded too but there's more room for a small brand to stand out at markets. So maybe the pivot wasn't about the name at all.
You said the name came in ten minutes. Was it actually a good name or just a name you could live with?
It's fine. It's not great. It's a pepper reference that people get immediately. I don't love it but I don't hate it, which is more than I could say about any of the coffee names.
That's the tell. A name you don't love but don't hate is a name you can actually use. The ones you agonize over are usually too loaded.
I'd stop looking back at the coffee idea and focus on whether the hot sauce can scale past two markets. That's the real question. The name thing was a symptom.
The coffee idea is always going to seem better in retrospect because you never had to do the hard parts. That's true of any abandoned idea. It's not evidence.
120 bottles in three months is not bad at all for a hot sauce at local markets. Most people don't clear taht.
The margin is thin and the bottling is tedious. But I don't get stuck the way I did with the coffee stuff. I just do it. I don't know what that means yet.
It means you don't have the same emotional resistance. Whether that's about the name or the product is something only you can figure out. But from the outside, a business you actually execute on beats a perfect concept you never launched.