Automaton is now Stack Moxie. Even though I love the name, I hate it.
I loved the name Automaton when my cofounder Andy and I sat down in 2016 and came up with it. I was shocked to see it available in a trademark search. It represented everything I thought the company should be – robots doing the repetitive work that humans shouldn’t. I felt like the visual identity – steampunk – fell right out of the name.
Turns out, the trademark wasn’t reserved because it was unreservable. And a few years later there are way too many companies in similar industries using the name.
And what’s worse, we’ve discovered that no one can say the name. As fraught as the fundraising processes is, the best part is listening to the creative ways VC’s find to avoid having to pronounce the name. Or listen to our customers and partners (who mean the world to us) struggle to pronounce our name when they talk about us.
I spent nearly two years working to recruit the absolute best people in the world. One of the best finally joined us to lead marketing, and it was obvious that we had to rebrand now. It was a miserable dance to find a balance between letting him lead, and making decisions that only an early stage CEO should make in rebranding. In the end, I think we nailed it. And he nailed it, blending old and new while reflecting so much of what matters to our entire team.
Everyday, our marketing and sales operations customers are defining the rules for an entire new category. They dance between marketing and IT functions with grace, manage massive tech stacks, budgets and projects that are the very backbone of their organization’s entire revenue machine. It takes a lot of moxie to keep all those balls in the air.
In my mind, our product will always be the robot, the automaton, that takes on the repetitive and complex monitoring and testing. But from here on out, we will be Stack Moxie, in celebration of the best of our incredible customers, and the tech stacks they manage.
