Naming a child is the least scalable thing there is
I built a hundred thousand pages for a decision that only ever comes down to a name or two, chosen slowly and with enormous care. NameBayBay taught me — the hard way, with a lot of pages Google quietly ignored — that the things that matter aren't made in bulk.
By Andrew Pyle
When my wife and I were naming our twin boys — a little over three years ago now — I remember the strange, doubled weight of it. You're choosing not one word but two, each of which a person will carry his whole life, and they have to work on their own and also live side by side forever, introduced in the same breath. You say the two names out loud together and go quiet for a second, feeling whether they fit — each one, and both at once. It was one of the most loaded decisions we'd ever made, and we were making it twice at the same time.
That's actually where NameBayBay started. We were deep in it — the lists, the vetoes, the same twenty names said over and over — and I kept thinking every tool for this was built wrong. We've since lived it again, more recently, naming our baby girl, who's five and a half months old now. So I've been through this a few times, and the thing I kept noticing held every time: most baby-name sites are ad-choked lists you scroll alone, and naming a child is not a thing you do alone. It's a negotiation between two people who both care enormously. So I built NameBayBay for the two-people version — a real, comprehensive names database wrapped in a tool where partners can rate, veto, and shortlist together and actually land on something. It started from the real situation instead of the search-engine one.
01The 100k pages
The hundred thousand pages
But I want to be candid about the part that didn't work, because it's the more useful part. Behind the tool, I also built something like a hundred thousand pages — one for every name — because I'd convinced myself that comprehensiveness was the value. Cover every name there is, I figured, and you've built the definitive place for this. It felt like progress. It felt like the more, the better.
02Volume isn't value
Volume is not value
It wasn't. There was one bright week where the pages started showing up in search, and then, almost within a single week, it collapsed. Google indexed a tiny fraction and ignored the rest. I spent a long time assuming it was a bug — some technical plumbing I'd gotten wrong — and I fixed a lot of real things, and none of it summoned anyone back. The truth was simpler and harder than a bug: I had added a hundred thousand pages to the internet that nobody had asked for and nothing pointed to, in a space already served by people who'd spent years earning the right to be there. Volume, it turns out, is not the same thing as value. I'd mistaken one for the other.
03The product knew
The product understood what the strategy forgot
And the part that stings, in a way I've come to be grateful for, is that the product is about the opposite of that mistake. Naming a child is the least scalable act there is — and naming two at once only drove it home. You don't want a hundred thousand names. You want the right ones, arrived at slowly, argued over, said aloud in a quiet room until they fit. The worth was never in the count. It was in the care. I'd built a monument to comprehensiveness for a decision that is precious precisely because it refuses to be comprehensive.
Care and specificity can't be faked at scale — not by me, not by a template, and, it turns out, not past Google either. The one page written with real attention is worth more than the ninety-nine thousand generated to fill a sitemap, the same way the one name that's right is worth more than every name that isn't. I'd somehow built a product that understood this and a strategy that had completely forgotten it.
04The slower thing
The slower, honest thing
So I'm doing the slower thing now. Pruning instead of proliferating. Deepening the handful of pages that genuinely deserve to exist and letting go of the ones that were only ever there for the count. Earning attention the honest way instead of manufacturing it. It's far less impressive on a spreadsheet, and far more honest as a thing that actually exists in the world.
Mostly, though, I keep coming back to the moment the whole site is really for — two people, a short list, trying to agree on a word their child will carry forever. There is nothing scalable about it, and that's the entire point. The best thing I could build for that moment was never going to be the biggest thing; it was always going to be the most careful one. I built a hundred thousand pages to learn something that naming my own three kids could have told me plainly: the things worth keeping aren't made in bulk. They're chosen.