What is in a name?

Choosing a name for our company was not easy. A name can carry a lot of weight and you need to be able to connect to it – both personally as an owner but also for other people who are on the outside looking in. In this short article, we want to take you behind the scenes and give you some context on why we chose the name Distinkt.

It all started with a long list

As with any new business, a lot of discussion went into choosing our name. The list was long, and we went through a lot of different concepts and ideas. Some were plain silly. Others drifted a little too far from the data space we are a part of. But there were also a lot of really good ones.

Check the trademark first

We will admit we got a little ahead of ourselves along the way. At one point we fell so hard for a name that, the moment we saw the domain was available, we registered it on the spot. Only afterwards did we discover the name was trademarked and completely off-limits.

Putting it to a vote

In the end, it came down to a vote. We each picked our top five names and narrowed the field from there. For the names that were left, we weighed the pros and cons and how each one could be used. We checked domain availability and made sure the name was actually free to use, this time before buying anything.

Living with it before committing

Winning the vote did not settle it right away. We gave ourselves time to get used to the idea that this was our name.

We tried it out on people we trusted, and we even ran a small A/B test. Some people heard one of our other candidates, others heard Distinkt, and we listened to how they reacted.

If we are completely honest, some of us thought it sounded plain weird to say out loud at first. But something interesting happens once you commit to a name. When you use it every day and start attaching value, stories and structure to it, it stops feeling strange and starts feeling like yours. Now that it is official, Distinkt feels less like a word we picked and more like a word we are building.

Why Distinkt?

We think the name captures some of the key ideas we want to build our company around.

An obvious connection to data

DISTINCT is a SQL keyword that everyone in our field knows. It removes duplicates and returns only the unique rows:

SELECT DISTINCT customer_id
FROM sales.orders;

Danish roots, with an edge

Using the "K" is the Danish way to spell it, and ties the name to where we come from and makes it our own.

The meaning itself

To be distinct is to stand out and be unique, which is exactly what we are aiming for.

Summing up

What started as just a name on a list will hopefully, in time, turn into so much more. Now it is our name, and we look forward to filling it with meaning, culture and value. From our first projects, to bringing together new colleagues, clients and learnings. This is what will continue to make us Distinkt!