Why Founder Julian Chose “Duende”?

To decide whether we go for a new name for Duende, $DUENDE, aiming to be Latin America’s PayPal, I asked advices from many people, and in the process, I had to explain why I chose Duende in the first place.

I’m indecisive between “Duende V3” and “Confío” now for #rebranding. I came up with Confío just yesterday. Confío means “I trust” in Spanish. (In Spanish, the verb part “trust” varies depending on whether “you trust” or “we trust”, and so on) Some people say that Confío makes sense for a #payment app, which requires trust, while some others disagree that Confío actually doesn’t sound trustworthy because it insists to trust us by its name.

Still, people say that they can see where I’m coming from in choosing Confío. So why did I choose “Duende”?

When I was conceiving something like Latin America’s PayPal, I looked up on Google, “The most difficult Spanish words to translate to English”. And one of them was “Duende”. It generally means “elf”, not a pretty elf but “goblin”. In addition to that, it appears that the word “duende” often represents an emotion or response to a selected piece of art in Spanish literatures, and it is arguably one of the most difficult Spanish words to translate into English.

So, why did I look for a word that’s difficult to translate into English? I wanted to decide the name with my intention to declare to the world that you don’t need to be Americans or English speakers (originally from English speaking countries) to achieve something great in this world. In other words, it was my indirect declaration to challenge “American exceptionalism”. Plus, it has a meaning of “elf” and it is easy to remember for Spanish speakers.

It still remains to see whether we will change the name of Duende or not. But we have a lot of time, so let’s see how it goes 😉 #Branding is difficult 😂