The Aim for a Name
In this podcast episode, Kimberly Rhodes talks with Jason Fried, CEO and co-founder of 37signals, about the process of naming products. He discusses practical considerations like domain availability, trademarks, and logo design.
Watch the full video episode on YouTube
Key Takeaways
- 00:28 - The process of naming a product
- 03:05 - Researching domain names and trademarks
- 07:14 - The style of a product name
- 10:04 - The journey from the working title to the official title
- 13:11 - Designing and updating branding logos
- 20:48 - Gathering input on the name
Links & Resources
- ONCE.com
- Books by 37signals
- HEY World
- The REWORK Podcast
- The REWORK Podcast on YouTube
- The 37signals Dev Blog
- 37signals on YouTube
- 37signals on X
Sign up for a 30-day free trial at Basecamp.com
Transcript
Kimberly (00:00): Welcome to Rework, a podcast by 37signals about the better way to work and run your business. I’m your host, Kimberly Rhodes, and this week I’m joined solo by Jason Fried, CEO and Co-founder of 37signals. This week I thought we would talk about naming products. Over the company’s 25 year history, we’ve named dozens of products, and Jason, I’m assuming you’re kind of the leader of product naming, so I thought we could kind of talk about how that works. Is there a process that you go through when you’re starting a new product?
Jason (00:28): Yeah, it’s not to try too hard. I think this is the thing I’ve learned. I remember when I first started doing this, I’d go to the Thesaurus immediately, this word and let’s go to Thesaurus and see what other words, and the harder you try, the worse the names are. So I try to just be as open as I can and let them come to me. Sometimes I think a little bit about a theme. With Basecamp… Basecamp was like, it kind of came out of this idea of you’re going on a journey and you have to stop and check in along the way, and that’s kind of like what a basecamp is. If you’re really climbing a mountain, you get to base camp and then you rest and then you get to base camp. So that was sort of the idea. And then from that backpack was a natural follow-up essentially.
Kimberly (01:15): So they intentionally kind of went together in their naming.
Jason (01:18): It kind of happened by accident, but it was a natural, you kind of carve out the space, then you play with that space, like Campfire, Backpack, Basecamp. Those were our first three. And then Highrise was originally going to be called Sunrise, but Sunrise was, there was a trademark issue with Sun Microsystems. They were very, very aggressive with anyone who used the word sun anywhere in their names and software. So we ended up going Highrise. That was the first break from that camping style pattern, and it’s not like we’re big campers, it just kind of happened, so we just rolled with it basically. I do tend to names that have two syllables if possible. There’s just something nice about it, unless you can find like ONCE was one syllable and it’s also the word one essentially. So that worked. But in general, two syllables seems to work pretty well.
(02:08): It’s not a requirement, but there’s a nice bounce to it. And I try for the most part, not to make up words, but sometimes you kind of have to like Writeboard, which is an early product of ours. There’s no such thing as a write board, but it kind of sounded like there could be, and so like, oh, a writeboard. Yeah, sure. It’s kind of like a whiteboard, but a writeboard. It’s like, yeah, okay. Sort of or a blackboard. Wherever it is, it sounds like it could be real, so let’s go with that. And I don’t like camel casing either, which is when you use a cap, a BaseCamp would be a capital B and a capital C. I don’t like that. I like single words that look like they’d be real words.
Kimberly (02:51): Okay. Let’s go back to the trademark issue with Highrise and it being something else. How often are you going to search trademarks as you’re coming up with names, and then also on that same note, domain names, when does that come into the process?
Jason (03:05): Well, domain, let’s start with that because that was interesting. When we first launched Basecamp, it was basecamphq.com. This was back in 2004, and we couldn’t get basecamp.com. It was taken, so we just said we didn’t even reach out to the guy. I don’t think whoever owned it, just like no. And Backpack was backpackit.com and Campfire was campfirehq.com and Highrise was, I think highrisehq.com. It didn’t matter that much really at the end of the day. I mean, once we ended up having some money in our pockets, and the company who was doing well, we ended up buying basecamp.com from the fellow who owned it. Hey.com of course is another single syllable word, which we launched with hey.com. We spent big money to get that domain. It felt like it really mattered because it was going to be somebody’s email address. So it does depend.
(03:55): We tend to try to want to get dot coms though. I don’t think we have any other alternate. We do have some that we don’t really use, but we don’t, like our main products are always dot coms. It just may be the era we were brought up in.com was the thing, and it still is the default in all the browsers, but I wouldn’t let it scare you away. I know a number of people who reach out to me like, hey, what do you think of this name? I like the name. They’re like, well, I couldn’t get the domain. Well then throw an HQ at the end or throw a something at the end. It doesn’t really matter that much. It’s not going to make or break anything probably, really. If you can get it, great. If you can’t, fine. Maybe one day you get it later, not a big deal.
(04:31): So that was that. As far as trademarks go, I don’t pay too much attention initially. I try to find a good name first and then we can look around and see. There’s only been a couple of cases where we couldn’t use a name. I think Highrise was one, or Sunrise was one. We turned to Highrise, which was fine. There was another one, haystack, I think, which we own the domain haystack.com. We launched something that was a website design finder, which we eventually renamed to Sortfolio, but it was originally called High or Haystack, and there was another product out there that had a directory listing style thing, and I think they pushed back at us, so we just kind of walked away from that and just renamed it to Sortfolio again, didn’t really matter in the end, but there’s certain things you do want to stay away from, especially big, big, big companies with lots of lawyers and unlimited deep pockets. Otherwise we’re going to probably roll with it and see what happens.
Kimberly (05:30): Well, and we just found out the Hey trademark just recently got approved or it’s been finalized, so it’s been a couple of years since that product launched to actually having it trademarked.
Jason (05:42): I mean, you can have a pending trademark. At the end of the day, if you have the domain name, you’re in pretty good shape anyway, kind of to some degree. Of course, if there’s a lawyer listening, someone could take your domain or not necessarily take your domain, but if you use the domain in a certain way and there’s trademark infringement, you can have a problem there. We’ve avoided that for 25 years for the most part, except for the Haystack situation, which wasn’t a big deal. We just renamed the thing and we’ve had to push back on a few other companies that have been using things similar to ours. There was a time when we should have pushed back. Garmin. Many people know Garmin, they make …
Kimberly (06:18): Fitness watches, yeah.
Jason (06:18): Trackers and GPS things. They have a product called Basecamp, which we should have pushed back on and we didn’t. So that ended up being a thing, but I mean technically, I don’t know if we would’ve been able to get away with pushing back on it because it was a very different product, but there has been some confusion in the market and we’d have to really have proven that it may not have been able to prove it at all in a court of law or whatever, trademark law or whatever it would be. So anyway, we didn’t do that, but we have pushback in other cases where someone’s really using our name in a very similar industry, and it’s fair game. You got to protect your trademarks, otherwise they don’t exist. And that’s the whole point of trademark law is you have to protect them, otherwise they’re basically invalid.
Kimberly (07:02): Yeah. Okay. So let’s go back to syllables. You said you typically prefer two syllables. HEY, obviously is one. Was that intentional because it would be an email address?
Jason (07:13): So Hey is kind of the way. I’ve always started almost all my emails since I’ve been writing email, which is like, Hey, person’s name and then a hyphen. That’s how I’ve always done it. So I’m like, it’d be kind of fun to get hey, as an email service name. I think initially it was something else, I can’t even quite remember what we initially called it, but then HEY kind of came into focus, but we’re only going to use it if we can get the domain name. And because the people who are going to be using this domain name, when they got a Hey account, it was very important to us to have a very, very short domain name, three letters, incredibly short. It’s very rare to get actual word that’s three letters, that’s kind of somewhat related to the thing you’re doing, like hey is how people communicate.
(07:53): So it kind of just was perfect. It costs us a lot of money. I can’t talk about how much money, but it costs us a lot of money to get the domain. And short, it just happens to be one syllable. It could be a three letter word with two syllables. I’m not sure how many of those exist, but perhaps there are a few. But it wasn’t the syllables in that case, it was the character count. Three was perfect. I don’t think you can get much shorter than that really realistically without spending buckets and buckets of money, which in some cases you couldn’t even get them at all. I don’t know how many two letter domain names even exist, frankly, but three letters, an actual word was a good fit, so we went for it.
Kimberly (08:28): Okay, cool. And then I’ve also noticed many of the product names play with capitalization, like, HEY, all caps, REWORK all caps, ONCE all caps. Tell me your thought process about that.
Jason (08:40): Yeah, when it’s short, I tend to like all caps. I dunno why. I’ve seen it, like Sony was all caps. There’s a handful of other companies that are all caps, short words. I just like the way it looks in all caps. I tend to write in all caps because I’m an idiot. I can’t write in lowercase anymore, so I write in all caps, but I like the blockiness of it. I think if it’s too long, it becomes too strong in a sense. But one of the things is when you have a word like, hey, which of course is an actual word and once is an actual word, capping it, making it all caps gives it a presence that doesn’t let it get lost in a sentence. That could also have a word like, hey in it or once in it. It sort of does something to it. It gives it more seriousness. More stability. It feels stronger and it can stand on its own in a sentence versus getting lost as just yet another word that is an actual English word.
Kimberly (09:46): Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. Let’s talk about working titles for products versus the actual finished products. We’re about to release our newest ONCE product Writebook, but we’ve talked about it previously as Workbook. Tell me kind of where that transition happened and why it happened.
Jason (10:04): Yeah. It was originally called Workbook. That was a working title, but also the intended title because initially the project was intended to be a business… We were using it internally for business books or employee handbooks or runbooks, which is what technical teams often use or things like that. And so it’s a work… it’s for work book. It’s a work book. Ah, Workbook, and there’s things called workbooks like, okay, this works, right?
Kimberly (10:28): It’s a word.
Jason (10:29): It’s a word, it’s a word. And it also worked really well. It fit with the idea of the product. But as we got into this and we decided we were going to make this a free product and it’s going to be more for personal publishing, we think that’s ultimately what more people are going to use it for. People might use it for work too, but it sort of began to expand beyond work, and it just felt like there was an opportunity here to tweak it.
(10:52): We hadn’t released it yet. So even though we talked about it as Workbook, who cares? This is the other thing, none of this stuff really matters. People are like, well, you already called it, yeah, whatever. And in three months, people forget what we called it before. It doesn’t matter. So you don’t really typically want to release a product, make a big deal about it, have it out on the market, and then change the name, but ahead of time, whatever, it doesn’t really matter. We used to have this product called Writeboard, which was way back in I think 2005, which was our first writing product. It was a way to write basically individual pages, just one page of text and collaborate with somebody else on it and keep versions and very, very, very early version control writing tool. So it’s called Writeboard, and this is essentially kind of that, but in a book format, not really that, but close enough. So Writebook. And it’s also kind of like caveman-y. It’s like I will write book. It’s just kind of fun and tight. Anyway, Writebook seems to be what we’re leaning towards right now. And I don’t know when this podcast is going to come out, but it’s probably going to be called Writebook and if not, we’ll have to record another podcast about changing the name again. But that’s the plan. It feels good. It’s still tight and short. It’s not a real word, but neither was Writeboard. So we kind of feel like have permission. We’ve given ourselves permission to follow the same pattern again. And we’ve got a cool logo. We’re working on a cool logo with the letter W, which happens if you look at the letter W, whatever. It looks like…
Kimberly (12:26): A book
Jason (12:27): Like pages. Well, it looks like a book. There’s one that’s true. It also looks like if you open a book and lay it flat, you’ll sometimes have these pages sticking up, which can make a W. So we’re playing with that. So W seems to work well. That would’ve worked well with Workbook as well. I do like the way Workbook looks better. I like that Workbook has, it’s a word made of two words that are, well, actually it is a full word, but it’s eight letters. So you’ve got work and book four each. There’s something nice about that write book is a little bit less balanced, but still at the end of the day we’re going to go with it.
Kimberly (12:59): Okay. And then since you started talking about the logo, let’s talk about logo design. I’m assuming the product name comes first, completely finished before any logo design happens. Is that part of the process?
Jason (13:12): Yes. So the plan is typically we make up a name, we feel good about the name, and then Sean, who’s currently Sean who we’ve had other people who have designed logos in the past, but Sean is our designer now. He starts getting to work on some ideas and he’ll do dozens of ideas. We’ll typically start with a sketch, we’ll work on it together. He’ll do kind of the actual design work, but we’ll play with the ideas. I’ll share some thoughts and then sometimes things take shape again along a certain line or a theme. For example, the ONCE logos are all scribbles. So the ONCE logo is kind of like a scribbled O, and then the Campfire logo is like a scribbled flame, all single line essentially. And the Writebook one is, we’re not done with it yet, but…
(14:02): It’s probably going to be a single line, two scribble based thing. So we’re just leaning into the scribble thing. That’s where we started. It’s kind of a fun thing to do and we play with that for a little bit. We don’t overplay with it. We don’t spend months on, we spend a week or two or three, then screw around. Sometimes it’s the first thing we do, we we move on. Other times it takes a little bit of tweaking, but we don’t go through some long huge, arduous process that just takes forever. And we don’t do entire style guides or branding guidelines, where you can and can’t use it. And it’s such a waste, I mean I know big companies do this and small companies do it to try to act like big companies, but it’s such a waste of time. And who gives a damn, just make the damn logo that you’re proud of, that you like.
(14:45): No one cares anyway, and put it out there something that you like and use it however you want to use it. It’s your damn company. It’s so weird to make rules about where you can use your own brand. It’s like yours. It’s yours. And eventually you do settle into how you want to use it and where you want to use it and when it makes sense and when it doesn’t. But it doesn’t matter that much. Just don’t worry too much about that. This is where companies get caught up spending and wasting so much time and effort on things that just simply don’t matter, make the product really good, the logo’s fine, whatever. It’s, it’s good. I mean, the other thing is with names, I always think about reflecting on naming, since we’re talking about naming here. I feel like most of the biggest brands that we’re all aware of, if you looked back at them five years from now and they were named something else, but you pitched the current name, nobody would ever accept it.
(15:34): Instagram. It’s like what? Instagram? What? Google. Stupid, right? Let’s say it was called something else. I dunno. Photo stream. And then five years later. How about Instagram? Instagram, no. Or all the Google. I mean Google’s kind of a good name, but still it’d be sort of… ChatGPT. Yeah, but I feel like five years from now ChatGPT as a name maybe wouldn’t be called that. There are so many of these. I’m blanking on them now, but I usually go through them whenever I see one and that is just kind of a silly name and there’s no way they’d accept it today. So point being, don’t worry too much about it. Find something that you like. People get used to it and they won’t think about it. They’ll just move on.
Kimberly (16:16): Okay. I know we’re talking about product naming, but I do want to go back a little bit to logos because we’ve changed the Basecamp logo over time. It’s not the original Basecamp logo. Tell me your thoughts about that on rebranding and changing the look of a logo over time.
Jason (16:32): Yeah, I don’t like our current logo. I know you’re wearing the shirt.
Kimberly (16:34): You don’t?
Jason (16:36): I liked it for a while. I liked it for a while. I mean, I liked it enough that we’re put out there for years, but I don’t like the general
Kimberly (16:44): You’re over it.
Jason (16:44): Yeah, I’m over it. I’m over it because it’s too flat, it’s boring, it’s a single line, which has kind become the thing. And I think in general, logos have been dulled down and they’re quite boring these days. A lot of companies have gone with flat single color or no dimension things. For a while it was all three dimensional and colorful and now it’s flat and boring and I’m bored with it. So I think we’re going to explore something new. So maybe this year we’ll do a new Basecamp logo and like, again, who cares? We could spend hundreds of thousands of dollars rebranding.
(17:20): We could spend months and months and have 12 people on it. We could say, oh my god, we can never disrupt the brand because the people know what it… Who cares, it doesn’t matter. None of these things matter. So we’re going to mess with that and find something we like. It’ll still probably have the mountain in it. The mountain is sort of the iconic bit that we want to maintain.
Kimberly (17:38): From day one.
Jason (17:38): It’s from the beginning, from day one, it’s tied to the name. So we’ll kind of keep the peaks, the twin peaks basically, essentially. I’m assuming, I don’t know, we don’t have to, but we probably will and we’ll come up with something else. I just want it to be more fun again and have more life again. I think that our early snow globes and we had a snow globe with the face in it, which was a little bit trendy.
(18:01): I didn’t really like that, although it looks kind of cute. We kind of moved away from that. We played with some other things. I think we flattened out a little bit for a while. Anyway, I’d like to see it be more vibrant. Again, the current logo though, was designed to essentially be like a paperclip, and we actually made physical paperclips in that design. The idea was to hold all your stuff together. And of course this is what companies do is they make up stories about their logos and nobody gives a damn. It’s like a paperclip and yeah, whatever. Customers don’t look at it that way. No one cares. You can spend all this time justifying it, it doesn’t matter. So we tend, as you can tell, names and logos seem like they’re important and they kind of are to some degree, but they’re not that important to spend so much time on them. So we just kind of move on and play. I think the biggest thing is just a play. If we want to change a logo, it’s our company, it’s our product. We can do it. Don’t feel like you can’t do things because you set out at some point and people have to get used to it. Who cares? What’s the difference?
Kimberly (18:59): So in an earlier podcast episode, we had mentioned that we’re working on a couple of new products or we’ll be working on a couple of new products this year. Where in that naming process are you currently, does everything already have a fake name?
Jason (19:14): Yeah, both have working titles. One has already had two working titles. One of I really like, I won’t say it yet, but I think it will probably end up being the name. It’s very visceral. It’s part the design of the product actually reflects the name on a bunch of different levels and I hope we can go with that one. I think that’ll be fun. The other one, I’ve got a few, again, we’ve gone through two working titles. We haven’t even started really working. We’ve started on the product. As far as the idea, we’re going to start actually in two weeks on working on the actual thing.
(19:53): There’s a name I like that we’ll see, and there’s a short domain name associated with it that we might end up getting if we can, but I don’t know, we’ll see where it goes. I feel like that’s the kind of project we have to make first to really know in the end what the right name’s going to be for it. The other one, it’s right from the start. I think it’s right from the start, just nails it and it’s fun and it’s goofy and it’s perfect for this sort of thing. But the other one, no, we’ll see it started out as a different idea too. And so the idea is morphing a bit and I feel like this is one that’s going to morph as we build. So what we’ll figure it out in the end.
Kimberly (20:32): And then my last question for you is are you crowdsourcing these product names? Is it just a here’s what it is and I’m Jason and I decided, or is it like, yeah, or hey company, what’s the process for the decision making?
Jason (20:47): Well, I start by putting 'em out there. And then for example, Workbook was an name I came up with and then Brian’s like, how about Writebook? I think two weeks ago. I’m like, you know what? That does sound better. I think you’re right. Actually, I dunno if it sounds better, but I think it is better. So let’s roll with that. And someone sent something on Twitter, which was kind of interesting, called Wrotebook, which is fun. It’s a play on notebook and I already wrote the book, but it doesn’t…
Kimberly (21:13): Interesting.
Jason (21:13): It’s lacking some, it’s not quite wrote book. Wrote is not a really a pleasant sound, I don’t think. But I thought it was an interesting name. I would absolutely consider that, Wwrotebook. I just write, it’s more active versus past, even though you have written it, it is in the past, but I dunno.
(21:34): So sometimes there’s a name out there that I hear from somewhere else where I think is good or there’s an inspiration from somewhere else. But typically I’ll start playing and then it’ll stick or it won’t. I remember with ONCE, I forget what our initial name, actually our initial name for that. The initial name. I was sitting at a restaurant with David and we were talking about this idea, this is last year. And he was sitting in front of me, I was looking over his shoulder and I was looking at the door and there was a sign above the door. It said Exit. And I liked Exit. Exit software is what we were going to call it.
Kimberly (22:12): Oh, interesting.
Jason (22:13): Because the idea is you’re getting rid of subscriptions
Kimberly (22:15): Exiting SaaS
Jason (22:16): You’re leaving. Yeah, exit SaaS, right? You’re leaving that world. It’s a nice, there’s something kind of interesting about it.
(22:25): It’s also kind of edgy. And I was just going to use the universal exit sign, which is in a rectangle with neon letters. So that was the working title for a while. And then as we really got into it and we realized this is really, you pay once and you get it, even though the next product’s going to be free, there’s no paying at all. But it just kept thinking we pay once. Let’s just double down on the real differentiation here, which is this idea of once and ONCE is kind a cool name, really cool name. And once upon a time, and once there was, and once you pay once and we were able to get the domain name for a reasonable number, it was expensive.
(23:03): It’s funny, it’s reasonable now. It would not have been reasonable 20 years ago, but anyway, we could get it. And so once we were able to get it, it cemented it as what we were going to use. We also I think had registered like once.co or one other thing, if we couldn’t have gotten the .com, we probably still would’ve gone with once dot something. But
Kimberly (23:25): Once hq
Jason (23:26): Yeah, exit was the original one. Yeah, once hq, I mean, it could have been like payonce.com. I don’t even know what it would’ve been. But yeah, exit was the original idea.
Kimberly (23:36): Well, that’s kind of fun. I love how it evolves over time. Well, we’ll be listening to see how these new product names evolve over time. Until then, REWORK is a production of 37 Signals. You can find show notes and transcripts on our website at 37signals.com/podcast. Full video episodes are on YouTube and Twitter. And if you have a question for Jason or David about a better way to work and run your business, leave us a voicemail at 7 0 8 6 2 8 7 8 5 0. You can also text that number. We just might answer it on an upcoming show.