What’s in a name?

So, why Hypto?

Rather why the name — HYPTO.

Abhi and I spent around 2 months brainstorming and talking to multiple people to identify a problem that we felt was worth solving. We landed on a problem in the offline retail space, which was not leveraging technology to solve problems.

At the core, we believed in technology and specifically computer engineering to solve problems because it was one of the domains that resulted in a ‘positive sum game’. Every industry that software touched led to an increase in the overall value that got created and not just a transfer of value from A to B. We understood that, in one way, software actually creates something from nothing. So, the domain we landed on potentially made us think through solutions for problems that were predominantly being solved by manpower and operations, and in most cases, not being solved at all (due to the traditional way of thinking linear as against in terms of leverages).

We wanted to democratize access to a loyalty management and retention analytics platform for offline retailers by building a consumer app that helped the consumer convert their existing bank issued credit/debit card as a loyalty card across all offline stores. We created a win-win scenario for both consumers and merchants in this model where consumers get rewarded for their behaviour and merchants understand their consumer behaviour and act accordingly to retain them much better.

We did not want to be inspired by our own personal feelings like we had when we chose our company’s registered name 😁. We had decided a few constraints before going about picking the company name — i) it had to be generic, not related to the problem we are solving ii) preferably ending with a vowel since those sound better iii) short and simple to remember. This trifecta ended up being a very complex thing to solve as most of what we triangulated fulfilled only 2 out of the 3 criteria (the irony is not lost on us!).

One day we were discussing something completely unrelated, which led to us landing on the Pythogoras theorem through some random connect. From there, it was a lightbulb moment for us to think of ‘Hypotenuse’ and then shorten it to ‘Hypot’. Maybe, the connection was not completely random 😉

While this met the 1st and 3rd criteria, we kind of forced it to meet the 2nd criteria by just switching the ‘o’ and the ‘t’. And then like any serendipitous moment, we were able to look back and say we do act like a Hypotenuse because we connected or technically were the square root of the squares of our merchants and consumers.

All that was left was for us to design our logo — this is when we met Kishore, who designed our initial product and website as a freelancer, and now 3 years later, works full time with us.

Would love for you to get to know Kishore in the next Hypto story.