Bryan Marble

Naming a mistake

2019-06-24T08:52:47-07:00

Two years ago, I broke ground on automated intake solution for small law firms. As I combed through domain names and tossed around ideas, I came across ClientSherpa. It felt perfect.

“Sherpa” evoked the idea of a dedicated, knowledgeable and gritty companion helping to reach an important goal. A noble profession.

And that’s what I always envisioned the software to be. A companion that takes on the heavy lifting of onboarding new clients.

Over the next two years, I received exactly zero negative feedback (about the name anyways.)

That is until about two weeks ago.

I sat down with my coffee to read my email and get ready for the day. At the top of my inbox was a rather innocent looking customer email. I opened it and started reading.

It was almost apologetic in tone.

One of the author’s employees had asked her to let me know that ClientSherpa was deeply offensive to her.

“Wait, what?” I thought as I stopped mid-sip, immediately googling “sherpa misappropriation.”

”Oh, oh no.“

I’ll summarize, though if this is new to you like it was to me, I would highly recommend digging into some of these posts.

Sherpa isn’t a profession. Sherpa refers to an ethnic group of indigenous clans from Tibet. A group with a rich history doing the dangerous work that props up the region’s economy.

While Sherpas became famous in the Western world for their service to climbers, they are no more synonymous with a porter (the actual profession) than say, Americans are to cowboys.

In my Western bubble, this sadly didn’t even occur to me. The idea of a Sherpa being a profession was so ingrained that I didn’t even stop to question it.

I had messed up.

This is 100% on me. I should’ve done more research than a quick trademark and domain lookup. I should’ve paid more attention to the fact that, when coming up with branding, I explicitly instructed the illustrator to avoid anything that could be construed as stereotypically Tibetan. I should’ve looked one layer deeper at WHY I felt the need to clarify that. Perhaps I would’ve avoided all of this.

Time to make a decision #

My gut said I needed to change the name. And I wish I could say that was that and I followed my convictions immediately. But changing the name of a business is not trivial, and I wanted to be sure that I was’t overreacting.

I reached out to some Slack groups for founders to get their opinions. I even reached out to founders of other businesses that used the word Sherpa in their name to see how they handled it.

And while I didn’t have any connections with actual Sherpas, it’s clear from the articles in that Google search that they found it offensive, and really that’s the most important thing.

It appeared that I had three options.

#1. The Lebowski #

I could keep the name and just not address it at all; chalk it up to someone being overly sensitive. After all, I’d gone nearly two years without so much as a peep about it.

I don’t know if folks were just trying to soften the blow that I’d done a racism, but there was a lot of feedback that I should just ignore it, that the world had become far too PC and that I shouldn’t worry about it.

I generally disagree with the statement that you can be too PC. The English language is diverse enough to communicate in a way that avoids devaluing the experiences of other humans. It just requires that we put some thought into our words and consider the lived experience of someone other than ourselves. I’m not sure you can have too much of that in the world.

And so acknowledging that this is a problem, what else could I do?

#2. The bare f*cking minimum #

I could keep the name and explain why I chose Sherpa, and hope that paying lip-service to being inspired by the Sherpa culture was enough to appease those that took offense.

It would kick the can down the road to a point where I might be in a better position to rebrand in the case the the backlash ever got to be problematic.

It’s cynical, but it’s the path most would expect a corporation to take given the circumstances.

Except I didn’t start a company to be a cynical corporation. I built a company so that I could live according to my own values, and in the meantime I’d be running the software equivalent of the Notre Dame Fighting Irish, Cleveland Indians, or Washington Redskins.

One comment from a mentor helped clarify the situation so well that I can’t help but quote it here:

“What is the connection between Sherpa (the ethnic group, because now you know) and your business? When you chose that name, you didn’t know. Fair. But now you do. So what do you do? What claim can you make to defend that choice now beyond, "I thought this was a job and when I found out it was an ethnic group I decided to keep the name anyway.” What would you do if it was another group? Would you charge forward with a business called “ClientItalian” “ClientCherokee” “ClientAshkenazi”?”

And that comment brought me directly to the place my gut was always pointing me…

#3. Change the name #

Change it now. The cost will never be lower in terms of having brand or SEO equity to lose. And as that mentor pointed out, you really only get one chance to do the right thing. After that, it’s just varying degrees of cynical damage control.

Besides, how many folks were out there, uncomfortable with the name of my business that I never heard from? How many potential opportunities never presented themselves because I chose an insensitive name? I’ll never know, but from the feedback I’ve received as part of this process, I’m pretty sure the answer isn’t “zero.”

And so…

As of today, ClientSherpa, is officially ClientRock. #

Epilogue - The Silence of Dissent #

I’m not exaggerating when I say that I got zero negative feedback on the name.

It wasn’t until I actively solicited feedback on the name, that I started to hear phrases like “I just assumed you weren’t a ‘woke’ company.” And as a few of those voices popped up, the tone of the feedback completely switched. From ~75% saying not to give in to the sensitivity of one individual, to ~75% saying I was absolutely making the right call in changing the name.

That’s the reason that I wrote this and opened myself up to the additional feedback I’m sure to receive.

When pushed on matters of political correctness, there’s a palpable tendency to avoid being seen as the person that’s softening their stance in response to moral objection. Until someone else in the crowd “virtue-signals” that it is in fact OK, it felt like no one wanted to be “that guy” in the crowd that might bring everyone down by saying a line had been crossed.

And so yes, I am here, virtue-signaling for as many people as I can, that when mistakes are made, it’s ok and necessary to confront it. I hope I’ve owned my mistake, and by sharing this experience I hope you can avoid the same mistakes I’ve made.

What if you had a decade to live?

2011-06-17T19:54:44-07:00

At some point in your life someone has probably asked you “what would you do if you had one day to live?” At which point you wrack your brain coming up with all of those little experiences you would want to pack into those 24 hours. You’d probably quit your job and spend as much time as possible surrounding yourself with friends and family. You’d spare no expense (and perhaps loads of debt) trying to check items off of your bucket list. We would throw our responsibilities to the wind and focus on pure fulfillment. Fulfilling small dreams, fulfilling promises, fulfilling selfish desires.

It’s an interesting cocktail discussion perhaps, but usually inconsequential. The odds of that scenario playing out are so unlikely that we toss it aside and continue on with our day, understanding that it’s not likely our last.

After reading this post by Derek Sivers and after receiving some terrible news about a friend, it lead me to wonder…..what would I do if I had a decade to live? Not a day. Not a week. Ten years.

I think that changes things drastically.

A lot can happen in ten years.

What would you change? Would you spend the next ten years in the same job? Maybe? Maybe not? After all you’ll need to make ends meet, but without the prospect of needing to save for retirement or to build a career, what would you do differently?

Who would you spend time with? Would you spend your time on facebook each night engaging in passing conversation with folks you’ve only briefly met? Or would you make a concentrated effort to visit friends and family in person, knowing with a little more clarity that each visit could be the last?

What would your legacy be? Do you want to change the world? You can change the world in ten years. Do you want build a family? You can build a wonderful family in ten years. Do you want to see the world and take it in, leaving nothing but footprints? You can do that too.

What would you do?

Productivity Hack for Bootstrapping a Company on 2 Hours a Day

2011-01-25T06:06:04-08:00

Here it is, the single greatest productivity hack I’ve learned while building GroupTrip.

Perform a mental backup before you stop working. #

Take 30 seconds in your editor of choice and write down what you would be doing for the next 15 minutes if you didn’t have to stop.

When you come back to work, you have an instruction sheet that you can immediately tackle without having to think.

If I sit down at my laptop from scratch, it often takes me about 20-30 minutes to get in the zone development-wise. I have to remember where I left off, what I was doing and load all of the pertinent info into my head before I can pick up where I left off. If I only get an hour or two at a time to work on a product, that means anywhere from 30%-50% of my time is wasted just getting to the point of being productive. Ouch!

This is kind of a micro version of Marc Andreeson’s write three tasks before you go to bed except instead of writing the major things you want to accomplish in the next day, you write down just enough detail to get you back into the frame of mind you were in before you stopped.

It takes 30 seconds and easily saves me 30 minutes of dev time a day. Not a bad ROI.

Your turn, what keeps you productive working on your side project?

Clear.CO or Cntortd.COM – Split Testing a Domain Name

2011-01-18T06:09:34-08:00

I’m building a group travel platform to make the logistics of planning trips with friends as fun as the trip itself. I had a great name for it too. Grouptrip.com. Since that was taken I started building under the name GrpTrp. It has symmetry, it’s relatively easy to describe (“grouptrip, no vowels”), and hey, I’m bootstrapping a proof of concept, I can’t be spending thousands on domains.

After listening to Jason Calacanis gush over .CO on This Week in Startups, I realized, you know, maybe I can have my cake and eat it too. The name I wanted with a big ole heaping of cash I can spend on more important things. Before I went through the effort of rebranding (while easy given I haven’t launched yet, still, it’s time I could be spending finishing out the beta) I thought I’d try to get a little data first. So here we go, the story of the Clear.co vs the Contortd.com.

Trust #

My first concern with the clear.co was that users wouldn’t trust the domain. After all, outside of tech circles people still think of renegade Russian hackers when they see anything other than .com, .gov or .edu. Or so I thought. To find out, I ran two advertising campaigns (on Facebook) with the hypothesis that the Click-Through-Rates would skew towards the domain users trusted more.

The first campaign pitted the exact same ad copy with the only difference being the domain that was displayed by the link. In my case, “grptrp.com” vs. “grouptrip.co”.

	Ad Impressions	Clicks	Conversion Rate	CPC
grptrp.com	196,684	27	0.014%	$0.83
grouptrip.co	143,583	28	0.020%	$0.80

While it looks like the grouptrip.co ad performed a bit better than the grptrp.com ad did, we can’t say with statistical significance that grouptrip.co will always be better than grptrp.com. However, it’s pretty clear that at the very least, grouptrip.co doesn’t perform worse than grptrp.com, so the idea that folks don’t trust .co is pretty well bunked.

Just in case you’re not convinced, I ran a second test. This time the heading of the ad was the domain name (“GrpTrp.com” and “GroupTrip.co”) to draw a little more attention to it. The body remained the same, and the URL at the bottom of the ad matched the URL in the title. Here were the results:

	Ad Impressions	Clicks	Conversion Rate	CPC
grptrp.com	141,374	29	0.021%	$0.78
grouptrip.co	114,388	30	0.026%	$0.73

Again, we’re not statistically significant, but through two tests covering almost a half a million impressions, it’s clear that the .co holds it’s own against, and perhaps beats out, the .com.*

*Open Kimono Note: One factor that might have influenced this test is that the logo displayed for the ad was the logo for GrpTrp. This may have actually held the numbers for the .co down as there was dissonance between the logo and the product name. I would’ve gone for an ad with no picture, but I had ad-block on and didn’t double check it before running the test. Mea culpa.

So it seems clear that users will click at a similar rate when presented with a clear.co vs a cntortd.com, but once they do, can they tell their friends about it and spread the word?

Virality #

A common back-of-the-envelope suggestion is to see if your name is spreadable is to see if you could say the domain over the phone and have people understand exactly what you’re talking about. I would argue that that’s necessary, but not sufficient. Here’s how I came to that conclusion:

My original reason for choosing grptrp.com was that I could describe it as “it’s grouptrip.com with no vowels.” I figured, if it worked for a company like SCVNGR then, hey, why not? Here’s why not. Search in google for scavenger. SCVNGR is nowhere to be found. If you go to page 2, you’ll see a sponsored ad asking if you meant SCVNGR, but guess who’s paying for that one? You think a one-time domain name expense is tough, try the recurring expense of running a sponsored ad every month until the end of time.

The point is, SCVNGR has made it work, but at what marketing cost? If you can’t afford the domain, you certainly can’t afford the marketing costs of overcoming an unsearchable domain. Make no mistake, SCVNGR is becoming a very successful company, but they’re doing it in spite of their name, not because of it.

Alright, back to the analysis…

To figure out which domain would be more spreadable, I broke out the mother of all ghettopreneurship tools – PickFu. For the uninitiated, PickFu uses the power of Amazon’s MechanicalTurk to get users to pick between two alternatives and provide reasoning for their choices. It’s quick, it’s dead simple to set up, and perhaps most importantly, it’s cheap ($17 for 200 responses).

Here’s the questions I asked:

Given the following descriptions and their associated addresses, which would you be more likely to remember and use?

The overwhelming answer was that people preferred the clear.co. You can see the full responses here, but here’s a summary. The majority of the grouptrip.co responses mentioned that the extra thinking involved in vowel-removal would make them less likely to remember the name. And guess where people go when they can’t remember the exact name? Google. See above.

Still, the responses that tended toward grptrp.com were largely due to people not trusting a non-.com domain. Over time I’d say that this sentiment will go away, but it’s there. One thing to consider, at least with .CO, is that .CO will be running Super Bowl ads this year a la GoDaddy, so that might make a big dent in fixing the legitimacy concerns with .co. time will tell.

Conclusion #

As always, there are holes in this “study”, but I think the data is strong enough for me to make the move from grptrp.com to grouptrip.co. I think we’ve reached a trend of diminishing power for the .com TLD, and .CO is exacerbating that trend.

As always, I’d love to hear your criticisms and suggestions for further study. Of course if you want to leave a supportive note, that’s cool too :-)