Building a software company from the ground up is a monumental effort. There are endless to-do lists packed with things like building a lead gen engine from scratch, figuring out the customer journey and, of course, hiring more engineers. When I joined Quantifi in January 2017, I didn’t expect a re-brand to be on my agenda by year’s end, but when it popped up, we went all in and the results were worth it.

Why re-brand?

#startuplife. Seriously. One of my biggest challenges being new to a SaaS company was coping with the rate of change. Not the pace of it, but the frequency. Fast-pace is easy compared to a fast pace with a moving target. When you are building new software (or selling or supporting it) you necessarily have to be nimble. Sometimes customers come along and blow up what you thought you knew or engineers discover new, novel ways to solve problems and over time the product evolves. So must the messaging.

In late 2017 we decided to embark on a re-brand that would give us a more unique name in the market and one that better reflected the evolving approach we were taking to solving our core customer problem: What factors most impact my success on paid social — and what specific actions should I take to improve my results?

A new message with the same goal

The core customer problem hasn’t changed. But, our approach definitely has. We started out with an emphasis on campaign management and optimizing all the steps of building paid social ads in order to boost results, but we discovered that the real value in what we were doing was in the data science side of our business. We built a data co-op with participation from hundreds of brands and the resulting data allowed us to do so much more than simply build good ads.

As we gathered more data in the co-op and started iterating reports to share it, one thing became very clear. We weren’t about quantifying things anymore. It’s not enough for our customer to understand WHAT is happening — they can already see that — they need to know WHY it is happening and what to do next.

So, we began exploring names that convey a spirit of discovery and capture the importance of noticing the connectedness of data points that might otherwise be invisible to us without the help of data science and machine learning.

Space exploration was a natural theme for us to consider and we found our way to constellation-related ideas. The final result was Pattern89. Inspired by the 88 constellations in the night sky and the ongoing search for the 89th. It definitely communicates that we’re in new territory, exploring and discovering. And, that’s exactly what we were going for.