How we got our name (after a Klingon detour)

Version 1.0 · Published 2026-09-01

We were called Teletext.io first. It was a bad idea, and it took a while to notice.

The name was meant as a pun on Telegram, back when naming your startup after obsolete technology was briefly the thing everyone did. We thought it was clever. What we did not do was check whether Teletext was still a company. It was. Rather than wait around for our first trademark fight, we rebranded.

The second name was Instant. Fairly generic, but we liked it, and for a while it felt like the problem was solved. Then we tried to buy Instant.com, which as I remember it would have cost around seven hundred thousand dollars we did not have. So we did what you do at that point and went looking for a domain hack. We bought Cameroon’s country code and shipped on .cm.

Again, we did not think it through.

About half a year later we shipped a feature that involved sending people links. Not links on our site, links that arrived in front of someone who had never heard of us and had to decide in a second whether to click. Those links had to feel trustworthy. And .cm is a well-documented home for typosquatting and phishing, which is the precise opposite of what we needed a stranger to feel.

So we needed a .com after all. We still did not have seven hundred thousand dollars. We needed a new name, for the third time, and I was thoroughly tired of naming.

The part where we stopped guessing

This time we decided to do it properly, which for us meant finding someone who had already thought about it harder than we had.

We used the Nominology test, from a post by Daniel Reeves at Messy Matters. It scores a name on a handful of things, and the value is not any single criterion, it is that you stop arguing about taste. Evocative, so the name hints at what the thing is. Brevity, because shorter beats longer. Greppability, so the name does not sit inside common words and a search returns few false hits. Googleability. Pronounceability, so you can say it correctly on sight. Spellability, so you can spell it correctly on hearing it. And verbability, whether you can turn it into a verb.

Then we added our own, all of them scars from the previous two attempts. Pivotability, meaning could we change focus without changing the name again, because we were done making that particular mistake. Is it already trademarked, which had cost us a name once. Is it civil, because insulting people with your company name is a poor way to start. What would it cost to acquire. And the one that turned out to matter most: do we, as a team, actually like it.

A scoring sheet sounds joyless for something as personal as a name. It is the opposite. It meant we could love a name and still put it down, which is the thing you cannot do when the only argument available is that you love it.

Worf.com

Which brings me to the one that got away.

We found Worf.com. Worf is the Klingon in Star Trek, and the name is short, memorable, pronounceable, spellable, and completely distinctive. We loved it. I still think it was the best name we found.

It was also near-certain to fail the trademark test, and we knew that while we were talking ourselves into it. So we passed on it.

I regret that a little, in the way you regret a thing you would probably do the same way again. That is what the scoring sheet was for. It gave us a reason that was not a feeling, at the exact moment when the feeling was loudest.

One phone call

We had been at this for a month and were getting nowhere. Every good name was taken, expensive, or already someone’s trademark, and we were starting to talk about compromises.

Then Marcel called me one night. There was an auction closing for Unless.com, and the price looked low. Go buy it, he said. So I did, for a bargain.

That is it. That is the whole origin of the name. A month of structured work, and then a phone call at the right moment about an auction nobody else seemed to have noticed.

What I would tell myself

Naming is not a logo exercise. It is a series of expensive mistakes, and your only real choice is whether to make them on paper or in court.

We made two of them the expensive way and one of them the cheap way. The cheap one took a month of unglamorous scoring and a bit of luck, and the two expensive ones each cost us an entire identity. If you are naming something right now, the sheet is the boring advice and it is the correct advice. It will not find you a name. It will let you put down the one you are too fond of, which is the harder job.