Vinny Lingham's Blog

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!

I’m at BarCamp Africa today – follow me for some live coverage on my Twitter feed!

We have a new job opening in our San Francisco office here at SynthaSite. We’re growing really fast (we have over 30 people in the company now) and we need a dynamic, multi-skilled individual to join a great team, based in SOMA, San Francisco (sorry, no Visa sponsorships possible). You must be US based and be eligible to work for a US employer.

Retention Marketing Manager

Company:

SynthaSite’s vision is to enable anyone, anywhere to publish their own website. We’re a venture-backed start-up who recently raised our series A funding, released a beta product into the market and are ready to take the world by storm. We’ve grown rapidly over the past 6 months and need superstars to take us to the next level.

Position:

We’re looking for a ridiculously talented Retention Marketing Manager to lead our email and website marketing efforts. In this role, you’ll be responsible for both setting the strategy and running the day-to-day execution of our email and website marketing programs. If you’re right for this job, you’ll have strong email and website marketing experience and be looking for a place where you can use those skills to build a new program from the ground up. You’ll want to make a difference. If this sounds like you, we’d love to meet you.

Location:

San Francisco, CA

Reporting:

The Retention Marketing Manager will report directly to the Vice President of Marketing.

Key responsibilities:

* Email Marketing: Define, plan and execute SynthaSite’s email marketing strategy
* Website Management: Own the SynthaSite website, optimizing it for customer retention and monetization as well as working with the Acquisition Marketing Manager to drive conversion of new visitors to the site
* SynthaSite Blog: Own the SynthaSite blog. Define the messaging and collect content that will speak to the needs of our customer base
* Creative Direction: Work closely with creative team to develop marketing materials for email newsletters and the website
* Planning: Work with the VP of Marketing on quarterly and annual plans

Qualifications:

* 3+ years of related experience with email marketing
* Experience managing a marketing budget and preparing plans and forecasts
* Experience working with Graphic Designers to produce high-performing creative assets
* Strong analytical and quantitative skills
* Entrepreneurial drive

Compensation:

SynthaSite is prepared to offer an attractive compensation package, including a competitive base salary, health and vacation benefits, and company shares.

SynthaSite is an Equal Opportunity employer. Personnel are chosen on the basis of ability without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, marital status, sexual orientation, or gender identity, in accordance with federal and state law.

I did a podcast at Web 2.0 with Brad over at Technology in the Arts. Jason Fried from 37Signals is also on the podcast. Have a listen here.

I’ll be speaking on the future of web applications at this year’s 10th annual WWW Application Conference in Cape Town (at my alma mater – UCT) today.

I’ll be posting my presentation on this blog post later this weekend using SlideShare – so watch out for it.

I’ve taken one of my most popular blogs posts on web apps and turned it into a slide presentation – this should be a fun talk!

Update: 9/11/08 – Here is the presentation: