Give it a name

Welcome to Rework, a podcast by thirty seven Signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Kimberly Rhodes from the thirty seven Signals team joined by the cofounders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hanssen. If you have followed thirty seven 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. Was Fizzy, was renamed, back to Fizzy. Let's start with that one, and then we'll kinda dive into some of our other product namings and kind of where this process comes from. Jason, do you wanna start? Sure. I mean, I'll just say that for me, it doesn't start until there's a name. I just, like, kinda have to find the name first. That actually is the the fuel that fuels the rocket for me. Like, at the very beginning. Like, I have this idea, and I wanna 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. Something'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 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, 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. And so just splat came out of that naturally, and that sort of we got excited about it. 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 is like splats, like shape. Like, you could imagine like throwing water at a window or 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 kinda got messy at a certain point. Or, like, this doesn't work anymore. So we've changed to, …