Rebranding in 3 Easy Steps

Originally published on Tumblr.

Just kidding. Rebranding is hell.

Until this week my company was called OP3Nvoice.

You like that name?

Let me ask you: “How do you pronounce it?”

“oh pee three en vois”.

Wrong. It’s “open voice”. Most people get it wrong the first time. And if they hear it pronounced, they lookup http://openvoice.com and find another company.

Not ideal.

So we decided to change it.

All we needed was a name that was short, described what we do, and had a free domain name. No problem. Except that it was.

It was a nightmare. We spent four weeks coming up with the perfect name: Nakaio.

Great name, no? Naka means “space between things” in Japanese, and that’s kind of what we do. We find words in audio and video files. They’re trapped there, between things. I’m not sure what those things are, but they’re definitely there. Nakaio doesn’t mean anything, but it comes from naka, which is Japanese, so it’s cool.

You like it?

What do you mean: “How do you pronounce it?”? It’s “na ‘kie oh”! If you spoke Japanese, you’d know.

If I told you the name, you’d remember it forever, and you’d know how to write it.

What? You wouldn’t know how to write it?

“Nakayo”? “Nacaio”? “Nacayo”? “Nakaio”?

Oh, I see what you mean. That’s OK, we got all those domains. We’ll redirect them all to nakaio.com. Except for nakayo.com. We couldn’t get that one. But we will one day, when we can afford to buy it from Domain Holdings.

Nakaio was perfect. Or at least, we convinced ourselves that it was. People did seem to have trouble remember it, but we figured they would eventually. They learned to remember Google, right?

So we were done. After making the final decision, and announcing it to the whole company, I went to an industry party and started telling people our new name. Most people said: “What?” The music was loud.

And then I met this skinny guy and told him. He gave me a funny look. Then a half smile. And then he said: “You’re about to ruin your life.”

“What?!” “And who the hell are you?” “You’re a marketing guy?” “You’re a branding guy?”

“Oh.”

He went on to tell me that if I was really convinced it was a good name, I should go up to 10 strangers in the bar, tell them what it was, and then go back and ask them again, 10 minutes later. I already knew the name wouldn’t pass that test. So I went back to a few people who had pretended not to hear me because of the loud music, and I told them what he’d said about the new name.

“What was it again?”

Shit.

I eventually found one of my mentors in the crowd, and I told him what Mr. Skinny-marketing-branding-guy had told me, and he answered: “Yea, I think he’s right. It sucks.”

Shit.

I almost never go back on a final decision. This had to be an exception.

We spent another three weeks getting input from everyone with a marketing bone in their body. I kept a spreadsheet of names that more than one person liked. I got to about 170 and one day our name came out of thin air.

No one remembers who came up with it. It was just there. We all knew it was right. And the domain was available. Well, not the dot com (this isn’t a fairytale), but the dot io was, and that’s fine. We’re an API company.

I didn’t have to go back to the skinny guy, because I knew we had it right. But I did anyway. I was completely confident, until I was standing in front of him, and then I thought: “What if I’m wrong?” But I wasn’t. He liked it. I was so happy, I gave him a hug, which is illegal in some parts of the State, but not in Austin. And then I told him I’d go register it.

“What?! You haven’t registered it yet?! Are you nuts?”

I knew I didn’t have to register it right away. The name was divinely inspired. It was our name, and no one else in the universe was going to take it. And no one did. When I got home, I registered clarify.io.