For a while my plugins shipped under the name CoreLabs. It was fine. It was also completely forgettable — the software equivalent of beige. There are probably a hundred CoreLabs out there, and that’s exactly the problem: a name that could belong to anyone tells a customer nothing about who you are. When I decided to take the studio seriously, the first thing I did was kill the name.
What I learned is that naming a real product isn’t a brainstorm. It’s a research project with hard constraints, and most of the “great” names you think of die the moment you check them against reality.
The constraints nobody warns you about
A studio name has to survive a checklist that has very little to do with whether it sounds cool:
- It has to be collision-free in your space. Not “is the .com taken” — is there already a plugin, a SaaS, a dev tool with that name? If so, you’ll spend forever fighting them for search results you’ll never win.
- It has to be ownable as a domain you can actually afford. The perfect name whose .com is parked at a five-figure asking price is not your name.
- It has to survive being heard, not just read. If I say it out loud and you can’t spell it back, it’s dead. Half of word-of-mouth happens over audio.
- It can’t read as a gimmick. In 2026, anything starting with “Ai-” reads as a company promising artificial intelligence it doesn’t have. I wanted none of that.
And there’s one more, specific to my world and genuinely unforgiving:
- On WordPress.org, the name is permanent. A plugin’s slug — the thing baked into its URL, its folder, its update channel — cannot be changed after the plugin is approved. Ever. Whatever I named these things, I’d be living with it for the life of the product. You don’t get to rename your way out of a bad first choice. So the name had to be right before I shipped.
The graveyard
I ran a proper search across a dozen candidates — checking domains, trademarks, and who already lived in the software space under each one. The graveyard was instructive.
One beautiful, craft-y word turned out to be an airline, a rapper, and an IT company all at once. A mythological firebird I loved was also a VPN app and, separately, a rocket. A clean Latin term was sitting on someone else’s trademark and a well-funded startup’s “Labs” division. A word I could spell perfectly, nobody could spell back from hearing it. Each one died for a different reason, and every death taught the same lesson: the name in your head has no idea how crowded the world already is.
I even had a near-miss with a domain hack — a cute spelling that resolved to a clever URL. Then I found out the spelling was established slang for “I love you” in another language, there was already a sound-alike AI startup, and the whole thing leaned on the “Ai-” gimmick I’d sworn off. Killed it too.
The one that stuck
The name that survived everything came from home.
Alov is the Azerbaijani word for flame. Azerbaijan is the Land of Fire — we have hillsides that have been burning on their own for centuries. It isn’t a marketing metaphor I reached for; it’s just where I’m from. A studio that forges small, sharp tools, named after fire, made by someone from the country of eternal flames. That’s a name with a story I don’t have to invent.
“Alov” on its own was a little bare and a little contested, so I added the ending every developer’s ear already trusts — the -io you know from a dozen tools you use daily. Alovio. It kept the root, it was clean in the software and WordPress space, it was spellable from hearing it, it carried no fake-AI baggage, and the domain was something I could actually own. It passed the whole checklist.
The tagline wrote itself: forged in the Land of Fire.
What it cost, and why it was worth it
Renaming wasn’t free. The two plugins I’d already shipped to WordPress.org keep their old slugs forever — that’s the permanence I just described, and there’s no undo. So under the hood, a couple of folders still carry the old name, locked in place, while everything a human sees says Alovio. I can live with that seam. What I couldn’t live with was building a studio I actually cared about on top of a name that said nothing.
A name is the cheapest part of a product to get right and one of the most expensive to get wrong, because by the time it’s wrong it’s everywhere — in your URLs, your invoices, your customers’ mouths. I’d rather spend a week of research up front than spend years apologizing for a beige one.
Alov is a flame. The studio is named after where I’m from. That’s the whole thing, and it’s enough.