Finally, we have a name

Written May 18, 2011

It's been said more than once that naming this company is harder than actually building the darn thing. Fact. We've known since incorporating under our original name that we would have to come up with something better and we've been tossing around ideas for months now. Some have been decent but lacked spark, others were awkward or terrible in an obvious way, and then there were the mostly-joking-but-maybe-5%-serious suggestions (e.g. Tap That Ad). None, however, were more controversial than the one we finally landed on today.

I wish I could say that this name has a higher intellectual meaning or perhaps a touch of personal significance, but this is not the case. We found it on a pre-branded domain site, tested it with users, and it came out as the undeniable favorite. Was that enough to convince us to adopt such a ridiculous name? Nope. In fact, I believe at one point the words "I kind of hate it" came out of my mouth.

We debated this one to death until the evidence in favor of it was too great to ignore. Even the few users who said they didn't like it still remembered it two weeks later. Despite positioning the name negatively in conversation, people would push back saying they actually liked it.

At the end of the day, we're a data company, and numbers talk. That, and we're all pretty pragmatic individuals that make extremely calculated decisions (which can turned a routine coffee run into an unreasonably lengthy process). Knowing when to invoke that kind of decision-making process is a valuable skill and I think we'll look back on this process and wonder why it took us over a month to accept the truth that was in front of us the whole time.

It might not make for a prepackaged PR story, but it's a reflection of who we are and what we're building. There will inevitably be haters (though, it has genuinely grown on me, so perhaps it will for those folks as well), but according to Fred Wilson's naming conventions I think we made the right choice.