Naming Is Hard

This is a story about how hard it is to come up with a good name.

This is in 2013 or so when I was building a system online education for Stanford. We started in 2012 and launched a nice little called Class2Go. The site worked well and supported the basic features of an online course well enough: videos, assessments, auth, reporting. We decided to keep it going and worked on it for another year, expanding the covered use cases and taking on more classes.

Even from the get-go the name Class2Go was a bit off. The original product was conceived as a way to take MOOC's off-line. The idea was people taking classes in poorly connected places, like low bandwidth countries or places like your commuter train. But the thing we actually built didn't really support the offline use case well anymore. In the process of getting to launch we kinda pivoted into a more basic online-ed course system and away from the on-the-go aspect. It ended up being more like a little CMS backed by a database for logins and simple assessments results.

Luckily when you're part of Stanford you have access to smart people. We got connected to a person who does naming professionally. After talking to us to understand the products goals and features, they generated hundreds of candidate names. Each had gone through some basic vetting for things like domain name availability and avoiding potential copyright conflicts. It was my first time working with someone like that, and they were good at it. It was a good list.