We all think we're naming our business. Mostly, we're copying each other.

Twenty years advising founders, and one habit shows up more than any other: the certainty that the name we chose was ours alone.

I almost registered a buzzword once. More than once, if I'm honest.

I'm a founder. I'm eager, I move fast, and when I'm excited about a new venture the name is the first thing I want to lock down. It feels like progress. It feels like the idea becoming real. And you feel it — that the idea is unique, the name is unique. The aha moment. I get it.

Until you realise you're on the same boat as everyone else.

That's the part most founders never get to see, and the part I now see every month. At BrandReadiy we read the entire Australian business names register, and I've spent twenty years and 250-plus businesses in agency work watching what happens next. The register shows the thing the aha moment hides: how many of us reach for the exact same word, in the exact same month, each of us certain we've landed on something no one else would.

We didn't. We landed on the same thing — at the same time, for the same reason.

The evidence is in the alphabet

Here is the clearest picture of it I know.

In July, 37,759 Australians registered a new business name. If naming were a free choice, the first letters would spread fairly evenly — roughly 4% per letter. They don't come close.

Six letters open 47% of every new business name in the country. S, T, A, C, B and M. The letter S alone opens nearly one in ten. Meanwhile X, Q and Z together open 1.2%.

Twenty-six letters. Six of them doing half the work.

No one decided this. Thirty-seven thousand people, most of whom will never meet, independently arrived at a narrow slice of the alphabet — because the words that sound like a business to us are the words we have already heard sounding like a business. Studio. Solutions. Services. Australia. Group. "Services" alone appeared in 1,620 names in a single month.

That isn't a failure of imagination. It's human. We reach for the words already in the air around us: the ones on our competitors, in our feeds, over the doors of the businesses we admire. By the time we sit down to name, the "good" words have been chosen for us by everything we've absorbed. What feels like a spark of originality is usually a room full of people catching the same spark at once.

And we're not doing it at our most considered

Here's the detail that stayed with me.

5,302 of July's new business names were registered on a Saturday or Sunday — 14% of the month. A Saturday runs at about half the volume of a Tuesday.

I can't tell you what those founders were thinking. But I know what a weekend registration usually means, because I've done it: it means the idea arrived outside work, it felt urgent, and locking the name down felt like the way to make it real before Monday.

I don't say that as a criticism. It's the most understandable impulse in business. But it does tell us something about when naming decisions get made — not at the end of a considered process, but at the front of an excited one. Before the purpose is settled. Before the product is defined. Often before anyone else has heard the idea at all.

That's the moment the herd is strongest. When you're moving fast and alone, you don't reach for an original word. You reach for the nearest one that sounds legitimate.

What I've learned to do instead

Here's the thing I most want to say founder to founder: when you're stuck on the name, the name usually isn't what's stuck.

The reach for a familiar word is almost always a symptom. It shows up when the purpose underneath isn't clear yet. When you're not certain what the business is for, the name has to do too much work — so you borrow certainty from whatever word the market is rewarding this quarter. The vocabulary of the moment becomes a substitute for a decision you haven't made.

I know this because I do it too, when I'm moving too fast. And I know it because I've spent two decades being called in after the fact — to fix the rebrand that didn't work, the repositioning that didn't hold. Most of those businesses didn't need a new name. They needed to be clear on their purpose, their product and their people first. The name was never the real problem. It was just the visible one.

So now, before I launch into anything, I do the boring part first. I get honest about what the thing actually is, and who it's actually for, before I fall in love with what to call it. The research comes before the name — not the other way around.

If you're naming something right now and you're reaching for the word everyone else is using: pause. Not because the word is wrong, but because the pull toward it is often a sign the foundation underneath isn't set yet. Get the purpose clear, and the right name gets a great deal easier to find — and a great deal easier to keep.

A name built on a trend has to be defended every time the trend moves. A name built on a clear purpose just has to be true.

Naming figures from the full ASIC business names register, July 2026 — 37,759 active trading registrations, each business counted once. Read the same way every month at BrandReadiy.