Naming things is hard

We had the idea. We had a prototype. We even had customers! 

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It was time to launch.

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The thing about going live with a SaaS product is that pesky domain name. We wanted a good one, we didn't want to have to change it.

Requirements:

• Ideally, it'd be something simple and elegant: Just a plain English word. Like we all thought Square or Medium were just perfect names. Let's find something like that!
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• It can't be taken. Easy enough! Though {name}.com won't be available, another techy global top level domain might work! Maybe {name}.app or {name}.tech. (But not {name}.io. At the time, it had some problems.)
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• Can't violate trademarks. For our product, we quickly learned that anything with "data" in it would be out. The trademark space is just too crowded.

Solution:

We went through a long back and forth on the name: Google sheets filled with ideas. Late night slack messages with new ideas. Lots of names that one of us loved but the other didn't. (Including my favorite, Heart, which is what I named the prototype.

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I think it was a little too cute for Sunil, but the name lives on in older backend code!) Then, I had an idea for how to break this deadlock:

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I made a big list of English words composed of the intersection of the top 10,000 Googled terms and the Scrabble dictionary. I checked every word against {word}.app, {word}.tech, {word}app.com, printed the hits, and then eyeballed it for decent names. I sent Sunil my top 100 favorites… and finally! He liked one! We had a name!

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Middle was a great name. Short and sweet, seems to be a unique brand, and hints at what we do:

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Moving data between your product and all the other products your customers care about. If you'd like to try the script yourself, the code is available here!

Let's talk

If you'd like to learn more about what we're doing at Middle, check out https://middle.app! We'd love to hear from you, ESPECIALLY if you're making a new product and need to get data from point A to point B.