Why Yola? Why now?
So, today, SynthaSite is officially renamed to Yola and it’s been a pretty fantastic day for us – a lot of work has gone into this over many months and it was a tough decision to make. SynthaSite was really built into a solid and popular brand – supporting over 1.5m users and growing rapidly. We also raised $20m in financing last month – so we need to put that money to good use and build out a solid business!
This clearly begs the questions: “Why Yola?” and “Why now?”.
Why Yola?
In a world with so many different global brands and names – it’s actually very difficult to find a unique name, especially a short one. We went through a long process and decided on Yola. It’s short, easy to say and spell in most languages, reflects the culture of our organization, and will be able to grow with the plans we have for our business. We believe that it reflects the culture of our organization and we were able to secure the .com domain name – an important part of renaming any web company.
Why now?
Given the sizeable investment we’ve just received, we obviously have big plans for the company. The rename was always going to happen, the funding is just going to enable us to achieve those goals faster.
SynthaSite is a great name for our website building product, but we don’t believe the brand transfers very well to ancillary products that we may launch in the future. I’m not a big fan of having multiple brands in any fast growing market (it’s different in mature markets – multiple brands allow for more “shelf space”), so in order to consolidate our branding across our future products and services, we had to select a brand that could transfer brand equity from one product to another, in which case “SynthaSite” doesn’t work as well as “Yola”.
For example, in the future, we may role out a mobile product, and instead of calling it SynthaSite Mobile – we felt Yola Mobile would be a better name – shorter and to the point – the “site” part gets in the way, and “Syntha” is not really a standalone word or name (Synth A Site). SynthaSite is really a single product name and not a company/global brand name and therefore this presented a challenge, and many others like this, to us – which will all considered carefully in the process of our renaming.
The rename is really about looking forward into the future about what our company is about and where we need to and want to go – SynthaSite could serve us well as a single product brand, but it really didn’t fit with our long term product & business strategy. I’m sad to see it go, but excited with the prospects of what Yola will bring – I trust that you are too! Thanks for all the great feedback and support!
