Naming Obojobo
Naming software is hard.
We get asked about the name of Obojobo quite a bit. I’ll admit, it’s pretty strange.
The story isn’t particular interesting either, which I regret every time I have to explain it. Not because I feel it needs an epic back story, but rather because people really want to hear something amazing. The starry eyed interest quickly drains from their face when I explain that there is no meaning behind it.
Is it an acronym, or some strange word from a dead language I’ve never heard of? Nope, it’s just a name. A glorious name that we could easily trademark that is.
When we started building Obojobo, we were calling it MindShare. I was really proud of that name in it’s duality that applied perfectly to our goals. Things started to go really well and we had to start thinking bigger. We wanted to open source or sell Obojobo, which led us to the need for a trademarked name. And to no surprise, MindShare was already in use.
So we began brain storming. There were meetings, oh were there meetings. I can’t tell you how crazy 5 or 10 people must sound when they are all trying to come up with different names for a product. Someone was hunting through the Elvish dictionary while others were creating rainbowed variations of names we had already written down and rejected.
After a while the names just become sounds. Blah bla blah bla blah. Looking back on it now, I think we just decided to free ourselves of the burden of using regular words. Once word play became sound play, it happened. It just rolled off my tongue and floated out into the room filled with the weary minds of my team. Obojobo. We repeated it a few times then wrote it on the white board.
We all spent some time trying to figure out why we liked it. Zach went straight into mocking up a basic logo. It’s symmetrical, unique, and certainly had some interesting shapes for the logotype. We knew we were onto something.
Eventually it set in, people would be talking about our software around the campus, maybe around the world. It would be glorious to hear this crazy sound coming out of department heads and campus presidents. Perfect. We knew right then that we had found our new name.
