What's in a Name?

This week a friend of mine asked me: "Why is it called Yetric? Any idea behind it or is it just something you grabbed from thin air?". There is an idea. Actually. If you have 2–3 minutes to spare, here's how the name came about.

Why is the company called Yetric?

I've had a company for over 10 years. Mainly focusing on building smaller projects and hoping that one of them would sooner or later generate some income. During that period I learned a lot about finding niches, crafting the offer, and measuring how well a product delivers to the user and to the product's owner (which was often me).

One of the things I am really proud of in my life is that me and my dad built a house in 2010. I lived there for over 7 years with my three kids and my wife. Around 2011 I changed my individual company — named Strategio — to a limited company. I tried to keep the name, but I wasn't allowed, since naming limited companies is harder than individual ones (at least here in Sweden). So I had to pick a new name.

I used the address to the house me and my dad built: 80 Ridge Street Media. I added "Media" since it's vague and kind of lets you offer a lot of different services and products. I was quite happy with the name.

In 2017 me and my wife went through a divorce and we sold the house. I was really close to quitting everything that had to do with having a business. But after some reasoning with myself, I decided to continue — the name just felt strange. It was named after something I didn't own anymore, and it didn't feel right.

So I had to come up with a new name.

"What do I actually want to do for a living?" That was the big question.

I want to live off my products. In order to do that, I need to either scale them up, build new ones, or build and sell products. I don't want to sell stuff I built — it felt bad when I sold the house my dad and I had built together. I really wanted to create things I owned and cared about.

What am I good at? I'm quite good at coding, building user experiences, measuring the impact, and tweaking products according to data. So I decided on two things:

1. I must do some consulting in order to make a living the first few years.
2. I want to build a product that helps small business owners with the stuff I had been working on for a long time.

What name should that product have? Yet another metric solution.

That's where I found it. I checked domain names, social media accounts — and Yetric was born. I registered the new name, and that's what's in a name.