This week, we launched a new SAAS website.
- You can’t pronounce it
- You will spell it wrong
- We do not own the .com
- I am starting form scratch instead of building on the 12,000 Inlinks users.
Why? I am asking myself, but thought it might make a decent blog post.
You would think that as a long-time SAAS tool marketer, I would have learnt these four really obvious “lessons” from my friends and from the bitter experience of having to change brand names mid-cycle in the past.
But the truth is that times, they are-a-changin’ as Bob Dylan would say. With all the AI crap that is out there now, breaking through the noise needs some changing to the old paradigms. The reason that we went with the brand “Waikay” is precisely because anyone talking about it is (we hope) going to have to immediately explain why it is “Waikay” and the answer is that it stands for “What AI Knows About You”. If It was easy to spell and easy to pronounce, then possibly people would not add this context. By doing so, the conversation now not only explains how it is spelt, but we have communicated the tagline at the same time as communicating the brand.
It is either a really good idea or a really silly one – but when we were all discussing possible brand names on a Teams call, this was the first idea where everyone said “that’s brilliant” immediately. We had already bought “AI-scanner.net” so we did have a choice. Did we make the right call? Time will tell.
The other big call was why we started on a new tool at all instead of integrating it into our existing platform, Genie – our knowledge graph manager (and also, my daughter… very proud dad!) wrote an awesomely honest post today, which goes some way to answer this point. To elaborate a little on her points from the CEO’s perspective, I was always taught, in my MBA and by other SAAS peers, that it is best to focus on a narrow product and do it well, rather than trying to be all things to all people. I do not know if that strategy is accurate, but certainly, InLinks now is quite a beast of an SEO marketing tool that does a lot of things… for SEOs…. knowing “what AI knows about you” is a much more succinct product with a potentially much wider audience than the SEO community.
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