I Renamed My Product Instead of Talking to a User

Here is the thing nobody warns you about building a startup: you can feel an enormous, glowing sense of progress while accomplishing literally nothing. The purest form of this feeling is the rename.

One morning I decided the central concept of my product was named wrong. Not built wrong. Not positioned to the wrong buyer. Named wrong. The word was fine. It was a perfectly good word that customers understood. But it wasn't elegant, and I had two free hours and a dangerous amount of espresso.

So I renamed it. Then, because one rename is never enough, I renamed everything it touched — the metric, the states it could be in, the little engine under the hood, the thing on screen you actually look at. By lunch I had a beautiful, internally-consistent new vocabulary and the same number of users I'd had at breakfast: a number I will not be disclosing because it is also elegant in its smallness.

The lie I told myself

The lie was that this was strategy. I drew a little diagram. I wrote a paragraph explaining why the old name was "adversarial" and the new one was "relational." It was, genuinely, a better frame — I'll defend the thinking to this day. But let's be honest about what I was doing while I was being so insightful: I was hiding.

Renaming things is the most sophisticated form of procrastination available to a literate person.

A rename has all the dopamine of shipping with none of the risk. Nobody can tell you a word is wrong the way they can tell you a feature is broken. You don't have to put it in front of a stranger and watch their face do the thing faces do when a product confuses them. You just sit alone, being a wordsmith, feeling like a visionary.

The part where I almost learned something

The rename was good. I'm not retracting it. The framing it produced is now the spine of how I describe what I do, and it's genuinely sharper than what came before. That's the cruel part — it worked, which means I'll absolutely be tempted to do it again.

But here's the uncomfortable math. The rename took an afternoon. Talking to one actual human about whether the product solves their problem takes about thirty minutes and roughly all of my courage. I had been choosing the afternoon. Every time.

A word can't tell you you're wrong. A user can. I had been very carefully spending my time with the one that couldn't hurt me.

I've since instituted a rule, which I follow roughly half the time, which for me is a personal record: I'm allowed to rename something only after I've shown the old version to someone who could actually buy it. Conviction first, vocabulary second. The thesaurus is a reward, not a strategy.

Anyway. I think the new name is really good. Don't @ me.

— Ridha, who would like it on record that the new name is better