Emily
Peppa Pig and the Butterfly Effect
Today is my cousin’s daughter wedding. Emily. She’s marrying Phil. I’m going to take credit for the butterfly effect that made it happen. The butterfly effect is idea — mostly from weather science — that an infinitesimally small thing can change the start state to have profound impact on an outcome.
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Emily visited me in New York during my Peppa Pig-watching phase. Anthropomorphized cartoon animals go through life in a small English town. It had the charm of my childhood fave, The Magic Roundabout sans Zebedee. I identified with the fat, grumpy, repair-impaired dad character. Not really sure why. Mostly it felt like a college drinking game. You’d take a snoutful every time the narrator would say, “Clever clogs.”
I got Emily watching Peppa Pig so much that she watched it on her flight home to London. That so unimpressed the “good-looking guy” sitting next to her that she was still single when she landed. That infinitesimally small thing changed her start state. Which lead to Phil and today’s wedding.
The BE has been good to me. In 1992, I was sitting in Quinton’s office at Bank of Nova Scotia when he got a call that a trader went on mat leave. That’s how I got my first trading job. Many years later, I bumped into Bill outside a Gap store at 64th and Third. That was my how I got into private equity, venture, and startups.
That got me thinking about butterfly effects in startup land. Tiny things that go largely unnoticed that can have terrifically large results.
A few years ago, I had this idea for a voice social app. To me, it made infinite sense. Twitter started as a way to text people from your computer. Then, morphed into a public texting forum. The follows, hashtags, link sharing, ads, and the rest of it came much later. Back to voice. A few years ago, people started to send audio message. Why not make that new media easy, shareable, and all that jazz. Post short voice memos. Follow the people you want to hear. Audio blobs stream. Ads could be inserted.
Genius. Except the name. In development, we called it “that talking app.” The group chat had a series of long and short vertical lines near it. They were meant to look like a sound wave and looked sort of like this: ililli.
As we readied for launch, we needed a name less generic than the one Maserati uses for its flagship four-door: Quattroporte. I took at stab at pronouncing the lines… eye-lilly. Awful. No one could pronounce or spell the name of an app meant for talking. That took up the first 47 seconds of the 30-second pitch. Fail.
Fortune smiled on us when a Lebanese gal we spoke with said, “Wow. I love the name. eye-lilly means listen to me in Lebanese.” We adopted that as our backstory. Still, the damage was done. Things went much better after we moved it to the medical market and dubbed it the far more generic Medspoke.
I wasn’t going to make that mistake again. I called my next voice app, Gia. Short, sayable, and spellable. Plus, it explained the business – we would generate intelligent audio for all the stories you didn’t have time to read. For a whole bunch of reasons that have nothing to do with the name, Gia is still in drydock.
I wonder if it would have worked better if I had called it EMILY. Instead, it’s land Phil…. :)
