How we renamed our startup in 48 hours

“I hate saying the name”. I was speaking with one of our earliest customers, who had backed us when we were little more than an idea and a Miro board. He'd just told us about his Series A raise, and that he wanted to use our product to hire 5 engineers.

“One thing though, are you set on the name? I hate saying Boolio”

Truth was, neither did we. This candid feedback was the catalyst for a whirlwind 48 hours searching for a name that doesn't suck

The problem: why Boolio isn't a great name

The meaning — it was a play on the idea of Boolean searching, which was THE cutting-edge way to search for candidates in 2014 when I started in recruitment. It elicited at best a small nose snort from recruiters. But a reference to the old world isn't exciting. It's one of those names that smells clever but is actually bad. Like Amazon, which gives rainforest, books are made out of trees, that all makes sense. Until you think "wait, so you're cutting down all the trees to make books, that sucks." So Boolio was out, and when we told our customers we were changing it, no one seemed surprised or asked why. This was good validation!

Why superposition?

On my physics undergrad, Quantum Mechanics was the first lecture that absolutely gripped me. And I think about a vacancy in terms of superposition. Initially your ideal hire exists in a quantum state. It's probabilistic but not entirely random, there are densities where they are more likely to exist. You're hiring for a founding engineer, and they might be a cracked systems programmer, or a vibecoder with exquisite design taste. And once you meet the perfect fit all of that collapses into a single point. THIS is the person you need to take your company to the next level.

Then there's the more literal interpretation, we find people's next super position (as in role or job)

Super means above (as in superscript) and so the name bakes in our ambition of being the highest position (#1)

It also means excellent and so our early backers who invest in us are taking a super position by betting on us.

We're opinionated, and building opinionated software and so are confident in our strong (Super) position on how hiring should be done

The process

We chose the name in 48 hours, here's how we did it

1. Created longlists separately, for Edmund that meant yapping to GPT while walking around the park
2. Compared lists and then brainstormed a bunch more together
3. Put our favorites into a shortlist
4. Created a chart with the emergent themes, one axis was Playful vs Intense, the other was Building vs Cosmic
5. Created a tier list of our top 3, added the runners up into a list of 10 and shared that with a bunch of other founders in a Google doc
6. Mocked up logos and brands for each of the top 3
7. Slept on it
8. Chose our favorite

Why we like it

The best advice we got on this topic was "you're going to be explaining how and why you chose this name for at least the next decade. Make sure it's a story you like telling."

We're both physics nerds, and have loved watching other founders' eyes light up when we tell them the name. And (this far) no-one has told us they hate saying it

My biggest advice to founders thinking of a name for their startup: choose a name that only your team could pull off. It should be personal to you, and be a story you can imagine re-telling over and over.