Give it a name

0:00Welcome to Rework, a podcast by 37signals, about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Kimberly Rhodes from the 37 Signals team, joined by the co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier-Hansen. If you have followed 37 Signals at all, you know we have many products, all with creative and unique names. I thought we'd talk a little bit about how some of those things have gotten their names. Not only our products, but then open source projects that we've worked on as well. Maybe we start with the most recent being Fizzy. That one has had a couple of names during the building process.

0:29Was Fizzy, was renamed, back to Fizzy. Let's start with that one and then we'll kind of dive into some of our other product namings and kind of where this process comes from. Jason, do you want to start? Sure. I mean, I'll just say that for me, it doesn't start until there's a name. I just like kind of have to find the name first. That actually is the fuel that fuels the rocket for me. Like at the very beginning, like I have this idea and I want to name it. Yeah. A name either comes first or in conjunction with the root of the idea. But if I can't find a name for something early, it's actually kind of a sign to me that like, maybe there's something that's not here.

1:02Something's missing. That's just how it is for me. I just like finding that first name. And when you get the name, when the name feels right, it's just this really great anchor that you can like use to step up or grab onto and pull yourself through. Right. So with Fizzy, it started out as Splat because the idea initially began as a bug tracker and someone had brought up at a meetup that it'd be cool. Like the bug tracking idea came after the name actually, but the idea was bugs hitting a windshield. And then I'm like, oh, that's a cool way to think about like bug tracking is like looking at a windshield and having all these splats of dead bugs on the windshield.

1:34And so just splat came out of that naturally. And that sort of, we got excited about like splat, that's a cool product name. And it also tied in with the design idea that we had initially with the bugs in the windshield. And that's where we started. Now, at some point along the way, the splat concept sort of ran out of legs because the splat shapes literally was like splats, like shape, like you could imagine like throwing water at a window or color at a window and like just paint splatters, right? And the shapes were so complex, there wasn't enough room to write text, and it kind of got messy at a certain point.

2:04We're like, this doesn't work anymore. So we've changed to like bubbles, like more rounded shapes. And that's where fizzy came from. Splat didn't make sense anymore because these weren't splats. They were more like carbonated bubbles rising in a glass, kind of bubbling up. And the interface initially was like bugs a lot of activity would bubble up. And so fizzy came from that. And then eventually Fizzy, like we kind of went away from the bubbles, but there's still some bubbles in Fizzy. And so it's still kind of stuck. And then we actually tried to rename it at the end to Boxcar, which is another name we came up with sort of at the end, which I still have affinity for.

2:36But I agree it has this like slightly awkward sound to it. It's not quite as elegant in a sense. It's like Fizzy. Fizzy is, again, more fun. The interface is very colorful. We did go to Boxcar. Tell us how you got to Boxcar, though, because you had a reason for becoming Boxcar. I was like, Fizzy doesn't work for this product anymore because now we're like using rectangles, cards. I was like thinking about things. And Chicago used to be a big train city. It still is. But downtown where there's currently a Millennium Park used to be a huge convergence of tracks and used to be able to walk over this bridge and look down on it.

3:10And if you look down on it, you'd see all these colorful boxcars on these tracks. and I just started thinking like, well, these cards are like colorful and you move them along the stage, like kind of moving in transportation style down tracks, which we kind of had these thin columns and it all kind of looked to me like this idea of colorful train cars, which if you look at train cars, they typically are painted in bright colors, blues and yellows and reds and burgundies and greens oftentimes. And if you look at like a cargo ship, you'll see all these colorful containers on the ship. The ratio of the car to the container size is kind of similar.

3:45So it kind of just made sense in a way. But like before we were actually going to really finalize it, Dave's like, I don't know if I like boxcar or like, I forget what you said, but it's something like I prefer fizzy or whatever. And it was sort of in the back of my head too, that even though I like boxcar a lot, I kept saying fizzy. Sometimes that's just momentum, but also just, it comes out in a cleaner way. The word just sounds better. It's more fluid in a sense. And so we fell back to Fizzy again. And I'm glad we did. I still like Boxcar, but Fizzy's a better name, I think, ultimate for the product.

4:16And so that's what stuck. And it still kind of has these bubbles that bubble up and attach to cards as they're about to expire. So I feel like there's still enough justification, even though it doesn't need any anyway, but there's still some of that there in the product name itself. And I think this is one of the traps occasionally around naming, is that you believe that the concept has to be 100 % congruent. It's not always you're that lucky. Basecamp perhaps is the most idealized perfect name where everything does come together. The sound is just beautiful. The iconography is just perfect for it.

4:52And the concept of coming together around a basecamp is wonderful. You're not going to be that lucky every time. And if you have to choose between something that sounds pleasant versus something that is conceptually slightly more on point. I prefer sounds. I prefer something that is pleasant to say. And I think fizzy really falls into that category. It's just, it's a fun word. And so much of the design around fizzy is about fun, is about more color. Boxcar had a really cool conceptual tie-in. And I love as Jason's telling it, not just a conceptual tie-in, but a personal one. In Chicago, 30-Semines Signals founded there, seeing these train tracks that connected to the Fizzy.

5:36But these are a lot of steps. You're not going to explain that entire lineage of how that name came to be to someone who just sees it in his spirit of the moment. And Fizzy, not as perfect, not as conceptually tight, just fun. It just has some of that. It's funny because when Jason originally said boxcar, I was like, boxcar. I almost feel like you're running into something like box car. I get two punches of it. I'm like, all right, let me give you five minutes. One of my favorite Jason essays. Give us five minutes. I think we gave it probably two months. No, not two months. Six weeks or something.

6:13Seven weeks. I kept thinking, I don't want to say the word. I actually like how the characters look. We had this fun idea that since you couldn't get or we couldn't get box car.com, we could get box-car.com. And there's an even greater conceptual, like little train links between the carriages here. They're linked together. And it just became, I think for me, all the payoff was in the cleverness and on the high-minded conceptualism. And fizzy was just like a very more lowbrow. It just sounds fun. It just sounds nice. It's just got fizzy. It's got that to it. And a lot of the names that I've come up with in open source are very similar in many ways omachi for example is a funny one because first of all the way i pronounce it is not how most people read it right first of all i like just cut off the r where does that go when i say omachi like left to be but most people actually when they read they read omaki and i don't like how that sounds at all i don't freaking care if that's what you read like i don't like that sound umachi like that almost has like a european flow and sing to it right like omaki like no no no that's not right so some of the times you can even come up with the right word or phrasing for it and the magic is in the pronunciation again maybe this is one where i'm gonna end up like the creator of uh gif who wants it to be called jif and like literally no one else in the world except for the guy who came up with it calls it Jif, right?

7:51Because we all just decided that that sounded wrong. But that massaging and experimenting and trying with it, I think is a huge part of the satisfaction of starting new projects. I completely agree with Jason that until there is a name, there's just ideas. Like the name is the banner. That's what we can carry forward, rally people around, and you seem to have something to address it as when you're discussing it with teammates. And a nice banner is half the morale. If your banner looks shit, who's going to want to fight for that? Who's going to want to charge up the hill with that? No one. That's who.

8:27So I love finding these words. And I love finding also words, as you can say, like we had a streak with base camp, backpack, campfire. Those were the three, I think that came right in a row, where you have perfect unity of naming. And I still look back upon that and go like, hot damn, that was really good, right? Like they all fit together. They describe their individual products very well, but then taken together, it's a whole symphony. We don't have a symphony anymore. And I think also that's totally fine. Like we don't have the Apple uniform aesthetic. We have a lot of different experiments.

9:01This is the same thing I found with Kamal, which is the name for our deployment tool. And I just thought it's a fun word from Arabic that I hadn't tapped into that vibe before. And then it also just happened to be this navigational tool that I thought conceptually applied very well. But just the fun of it and the different domain of it really worked well. So I think you should actually take that seriously. And I'd actually take it so seriously that getting the clean domain is not even that important. Like when we picked Basecamp, when Jason came up with Basecamp, we didn't have Basecamp.com. I think it took 10 years, maybe, of Basecamp HQ.com having enough success with Basecamp that we could afford the Basecamp.com.

9:47But I wouldn't have wanted some other name just so we could have gotten the.com. I think oftentimes there's an over-indexing on, can I get the domain? Otherwise, I can't use the name. Now, sometimes that's true because there's something else in your category that's called that. It's going to be confusing. You don't want that. but otherwise i'd bias towards having that beautiful banner that you can rally around and you just feel like motivated to show up and make this thing real i want to release come all i want to release omachi i want to release busy because in part because they're just fun words that should exist in little mental spaces in people's head by the way the first four products the domains none of them were the exact domains.

10:29It was BasecampHQ.com. It was BackpackIt.com. It was CampfireNow.com and HighRiseHQ.com. Obviously, we went in a different direction later on. We finally got Basecamp.com. And with Hey.com, we felt like that was very important. The primary reason was, first of all, I thought it was a perfect name for an email system. But also, because we're giving out domain names and email addresses, we want a really short three-letter domain, which is an amazing thing to be able to have, like David at hey.com or whatever it would be, or Bill at hey.com. So like heyhq.com would not have been a desirable email address, but hey.com was.

11:05So we have spent some money. Once was another place we spent some money on a domain name. So we've done it, but it's a luxury now. We can afford to do it. It wouldn't make any sense to do that early on. Okay. And Fizzy is fizzy.do. Tell me about that. Did we try to buy fizzy.com? No, didn't try to buy it. Someone had it and they weren't, I don't know, maybe they would sell it. It didn't seem like they would. It was like, I think a hair care product or something like that. I can't quite remember actually what it was. It was some beauty product, I think, maybe. Someone have to double check. I think that's right.

11:34For frizzy hair? Fizzy for frizzy? I don't know. I don't know. Maybe it's because I have fizzy hair, frizzy hair. I don't know what it was. Someone check it out. Maybe I'm off on this, but it was something like that. It's hair clips, actually, to hold up your hair. So I knew it was a hair thing. Okay, hair clips. Anyway, like it, I don't know. It also just like, I think it just didn't seem worth it. Fizzy do is actually kind of fun. Now, the reason it's fizzy.do is because for a long time, we had an AI feature kind of thing in fizzy called fizzy.do. And that's sort of where the domain came from.

12:04But it's kind of also action oriented, which is kind of fun. And it was just available. So we doesn't mean a whole lot beyond that. Okay, are there any names over the course of this 25 year history where you've been like, yeah, we don't love that one. You might not, you might love them all well i'm gonna go in the opposite direction i think base camp i think campfire campfire is maybe one of those perfect product names like i think we've ever had and i think it has ever been honestly it's like a chat tool sitting on a campfire a group of people talking it's like the perfect name for a product like that i don't know i'm not sure if there's any names i didn't really like that much i mean now i'll tell you like for high rise we originally wanted to use sunrise which would have been sort of in line with the campfire backpack base camp kind of thing, but we were afraid of Sun Microsystems.

12:53Remember at the time, like suing everybody. They were like suing everyone if you use the word Sun in your product. So then we came up with HighRise, which is like, you know, it's a CRM tool for businesses and contacts and like, you know, a skyline has like kind of a vibe and like a HighRise is in a skyline of like a businessy thing. So we went with that. I don't know. I like all of our names. I don't think there's anything that's like felt really off to me. David, you, anything? Well, what felt a little off to me was a name I came up with for Kamal. Before it was called Kamal, it was called MERSK, M-R-S-K.

13:28Oh. And that name, purely by circumstance or coincidence, happened to sound like a major shipping company based out of Denmark called MERSK. And when I picked that name, they didn't take too kindly to that. In fact, they took so poorly to that that when I showed up in Copenhagen Airport at one point, I was greeted by two very pleasant, but quite stern police officers who put me out of line in the passport line and served me with papers from Merce because they had a copyright case, which I was actually sort of impressed by that here you have this tentpole company of the Danish economy being so irked by this homage.

14:12if you want to look at it in that way, of a name for an open source tool, that they would literally get the Danish state to send the police to pick me up in the passport line, just clear me papers, which then turned into this long, or not even that long, turned into a legal thing where I got kind of indignant about it and flippant about it and realized that, you know what? These kinds of legal systems are very different. That even a company as important as Maersk, in Denmark had very limited ability to come after me, or rather they could get the police to show me some papers. But even if the most severe outcome of a legal battle should come to pass, I'd owe them like, I don't know,$7 ,000, which is nothing, but also is kind of pathetic compared to if this was America and someone sues you for lost damages or reputation or whatever, and suddenly you owe 192 million and$500 ,000, right?

15:15I just thought it was cute. It was such a cute thing. Oh, it's a little Denmark that's got these little laws. And the worst thing that could happen to you is you owe Maersk$7 ,000. Ended up changing the name anyway to Kamal, which I really enjoyed for the other reasons that we talked about. But that was a name that probably got me into the most trouble of any of the naming I've done in a long history. We've had other skirmishes, maybe, if you want to say. I'm trying to remember. Oh, yeah. You know what it was? It was Haystack. It was Haystack. That's right. Wait, it was Haystack of products? Did they file against us?

15:47We just opposed our trademark registration? They sent us some letters, and I think at the end of the day, we're like, it's just not worth it. I forget. We changed. Actually, that's probably the product name I like the least. We changed it to Sortfolio. Okay. That's an unpleasant thing to say. Not a good one. Anyway, we ended up selling that business or selling that product. Maybe because of that. Maybe we would still have been running it if it was still called Haystack. But Sortfolio, yeah. But what we do have is we have haystack.com, which is by far our most in-demand domain name that people keep trying to buy from us.

16:21Oh. And we get emailed all the time about it. Did you get that far? What? Did you ever get far enough that someone made you an offer? People make offers of tens of thousands of dollars. But it's just fun to keep. What's your threshold? When would you actually consider it? Is it the hundreds of thousands? A billion dollars. I'll sell it for a billion. I don't know. It's fun to have something everyone wants and that you don't care, don't need the money for. Actually, I just kind of enjoy that. Like, it wouldn't affect the bottom line of the business. So I kind of like, let's just hang on to it. It's fun.

16:51Who knows? Maybe we'll use it for something else. Maybe not. We also have single file, which is how David and I kind of met really, in a sense. And that's still a great domain name, which we haven't really used again. We've got a bunch of good domain names, good product names sitting there. So when you come up with an idea for a new product, are you also then cross-referencing like what do we already own that's sitting around? Or is it like you're thinking about the product specifically and a name based on the product? Yeah, it's a product. I mean, Haystack could have been a good name for Fizzy too.

17:17It could have worked, but we didn't like, what's our inventory? What do we have? Because you can use whatever you want. So you don't need to go look at your own inventory of domain names. Okay. Let's talk really quick about Omachi because it's a mix of words. Tell me how you came up with that. People ask all the time, like, where did this name come from? I know there's a story behind it. Yeah, so Machi is essentially version two of Omakoup, which was the first stab I took at creating an opinionated Linux setup. And that was a combination of omakase, which is chef's choice in Japanese. Essentially, you go to a restaurant and you order an omakase meal, a tasting menu where the chef has just picked out everything.

18:02And I thought that fits very well for this. It's a concept that I've long talked about with Rails, that Rails is an Omikaze framework where I and the others who've worked on it have made a ton of decisions about how the initial layout of the menu is going to be. And if you don't do anything, you're just going to get a great meal. And if you don't do anything with Omikub, you're going to get a great Ubuntu mix. and then with Amachi I thought like I really like that Mikasi concept let's try to bake it into something that fits for this new distribution and the distribution was based on top of Arch which is one of the OG Linux distributions that have been around for 20 years that just happened to be perfect for what I wanted to build here and in Hyperland which is this tiling window manager And I thought, here are three words and they can fit together omachi.

18:53And it's actually funny because, as we talked about, a lot of people want to pronounce this at omaki. But the main word in the middle there, arch, no one seems to be confused about how to pronounce that. So I thought it was always kind of curious that this was difficult because I had arch right there in the middle. And it makes sense because this is a distribution built on top of arch. But it was very much just trying to string the words together and coming up with something that I like the pronunciation of and connecting to the other work that we've done earlier. Oftentimes these concepts come playing ping-ponging off other things you've done before and then trying to come up with an iteration that feels unique and special to what you're building now.

19:34And Omachi was really that. And then just the fun of coming up with a pronunciation that perhaps isn't entirely warranted by the letters that are actually in there that I get to chop something off. And I always thought that was a fun thing to do because the English language and the Danish language is full of that. Full of words that if you look how it's spelled, you go like, how do you get from that to how you guys say it? I'm like, well, someone came up with that idea. Why shouldn't that someone be me? Someone like me who just says like, this string of letters is going to produce this sound because I say so.

20:08The R is silent. Omachi. One of the things I've always thought about with names, which is interesting to me, I always think about this is like, you have names like, like I always think of Instagram as a name, which is kind of a stupid name. Like a stupid modern name is like, is an instant telegram. I don't know where it came from really necessarily. Right. And the thing I always think about is, Had it been called something else, so obviously hugely successful product with a name everyone knows, right? Had it been called something else and then they had a rebranding session 10 years later and someone pitched Instagram, there's no way they would have picked Instagram 10 years later.

20:46And I always think about this with all sorts of like Yahoo is another great example of that. Like what had it been called like, I don't know, Searchmaster or something like way back in the day. And then someone's like, how about we call it Yahoo 10 years later? The big hell no. Slack's probably another example. like Slack is a popular product. I had been called some other chat thing. And then someone's like 10 years later, let's rename it to Slack. They'd be like, what? Never. Yeah. So a lot of this is just like momentum. It's a word someone liked in the early days. WhatsApp is another one. Like what?

21:17Like what's up? WhatsApp? Like would they rename it to WhatsApp today? Had it been as successful as it has been and they renamed it, you know, 10 years later? No, no way would that fly. So these names are just like they become something. And they're kind of a product of the moment. And most of these things started, you know, when they were named, they were nothing, you know. And it's actually much harder to think about, like, naming something successful than it is to name something that's just a pet project. And you can have more fun with it. My point is, it's like, I wouldn't take any of the stuff that seriously.

21:47Find something that you like for your own project that just rings true to you, that you like saying, and that's enough. Who cares? That is a perfect place to wrap it up. Rework is a production of 37 Signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website at 37signals.com slash podcast. Full video episodes are on YouTube. And if you have a question for Jason or David about a better way to work and run your business, please leave us a video question. You can do that at 37signals.com slash podcast question, or send us an email to rework at 37signals.com.