We’ve just announced the new name for our product at RailsConf ‘07 in Portland, Oregon and with that comes the launch of this blog! I got to stand up in (what I think) was one of the fullest sessions – the open mic demo session. I guess everybody wanted to see what each other is working on.

The Backstory

Our product is a content management system that we’ve been using for our own clients for the last 3 years with much success. This year, we decided we would bring this software to the public and offer it as a hosted service. The one thing that kept coming back at us was the name of the application.

The name we’ve been using was “Asábiké” (pronounced Ah-Saw-Bee-Kay). This is an Aboriginal word from the Ojibwa tribe which is the verb for “make a net”, for fishing. But in our case, the making of the internet. It was a word that the client almost never had to use and when they did attempt to say it, it would come out in various ways. In fact, most clients showed enthusiasm just trying to pronounce it.

The (re)Name Game

In April we went back to the drawing board to come up with a new name. We found inspiration from folks like 37Signals, Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki and Michael McDerment. We knew what we had to do.

Our main objectives were to find a name that met the following criteria. There was other critieria, but because of the troubles we had with Asábiké, these 3 became very important to us.

1. Easy to pronounce
2. Is memorable
3. If you heard the name spoken, you would know what domain name to type in.

The (re)Name game basically went like this: think of a name, check the domain, realize it’s taken, repeat. Ultimately, we had a handful of names that we liked but still were having reservations – especially because the name Asábiké was still a very special name for us.

Name My App, Please?

So we thought we’d try something a bit different – NameMyApp.com. Why not create a site and have people vote on our top 4 names? Crazy? Probably. Let’s do it. The four options were “Luna Meadow”, “Yike Site”, “Yoluna” and just leaving the name as “Asábiké”.

The response was phenomenal – and a test of humility as well. After about one hundred people voted, we thought that was a good enough cross-section for our little experiment. And good timing too, because RailsConf was just around the corner.

The feedback was varied. Some were very positive, some were very negative and some surprising. I got excited about the comments where people left more than a one-liner of text.

I was excited to see that YikeSite won (it’s what I ended up voting for as well). Many people said that the exclaimation was too Yahoo! so we decided to get rid of it and soon we will do a logo redesign.

I Yike It

I’m happy to say that my son actually named our product. One day at the height of the (re)Name game, my 1-year-old son was learning about his tastes. He was walking around saying “I Yike It, I Yike It” and then it hit me – YikeIt.com! No, IYikeIt.com! No…. YikeSite.com. Hey, they’re all available as a dot-com domain. So, I registered all three and narrowed it down to just YikeSite.

We hope to have fun with the word Yike and use it just like my son – “I Yike It!” Or when things go wrong – “Yikes!”.

So I guess you could say that “Asábiké” was kind of like our code name and now we’re pushing forward with YikeSite. Stay tuned for more! And thanks for reading.