Naming Is Hard

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

This was in 2013. I was part of a team building a system for online education at Stanford. We launched a nice little site, Class2Go, with a small team in a few months. It worked well and supported the basic features of an online course: 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.

But even from the beginning the name Class2Go felt a bit off. Our original aim was to enable offline MOOC students, people trying to take classes offline or in poorly-connected places But we ended up pivoting away from the offline use case to more standard hosted-course features. It became a little multi-tenant CMS with a small database for auth, assessment results, and some basic analytics.

We decided to rebrand. Someone knew a naming consultant, presumably an alum, and soon enough we had an expert on board. They were really interesting to work with. After understanding the platform's goals and features, they generated hundreds of candidate names. Each was vetting for domain name availability and copyright conflicts. The consultant was good at their job, bringing us something like a hundred candidate names (I wish I still had that list).

One name caught everyone's attention: Tindra. It's a Swedish word that means "sparkle" or "twinkle." It's evocative and easy to say. It also happens to be a woman's name, but not a particularly common one we were told.

Surprisingly, tindra.com was available! In 2013 short and catchy domain names were getting hard to come The new gTLD program had only just been approved in 2012, and .com and .org were pretty crowded.

The problem was that if you Googled "tindra," the top result was a Swedish adult film actress! Not good. Maybe with enough SEO juice, over time, we would have overtaken that. But on launch day, that's not the association you want to have.

We ended up punting on the problem and going with a generic name, Stanford Online. It got the job done, but felt like a missed opportunity. We later merged with edX and I found another job. Eventually the team re-branded the site with the name Lagunita, the name of the lake on campus, which they're still using today. I like it.

I admit I still have a thing for Tindra though. The name, not the actress.

Postscript: tindra.com still doesn't seem to be used for anything today. It looks to just be parked by a German domain registrar. Google results don't seem to be a problem. Maybe it's available for something interesting?

Thanks to Jane Manning for her review, she was there too.