Class Dot Com
Find out why Cloudsmith thinks Puppet is one seriously classy company, why brand equity is important, and what impact a dot com has.
TL:DR; Puppet, Inc. is one seriously classy company.
When we coined the name Cloudsmith it was supposed to be the product name for the tool we were building; a sort of kitchen-sink approach to building FinTech software. At some point, sick of uncovering unknown-unknowns, we jacked it in and focused on building the world's greatest cloud-native package management solution instead. A journey we are still on today.
The name was derived from our existing company brand at the time, connotations from blacksmithing (making things) and our ethos of building absolutely everything we do around the cloud itself. It was perfect to describe what were trying to achieve.
With a quick google, we learned that Puppet, Inc. had acquired a growing tech startup also called Cloudsmith back in 2013. They had absorbed the technology, dropped the name and redirected the dot com back to Puppet - a common move when integrating an acquisition - but it was a strong signal that name was available to be reused by someone else.
Building an online brand is hard. It is hard to find a combination, any combination, that works and aligns something short, clean and trademarkable across the registered company name, domain names and the various social media outlets required to build a business today.
We took the risk and joined the latest wave of tech startups adopting the newly minted .io domain extensions. We registered the trademark in the UK and then quickly backed that up in the US. We rebooted the company as Cloudsmith and registered cloudsmith.io as our primary domain - dreaming that one day we might get the dot com if things all worked out.
That day arrived. May 4th, 2019. Star Wars Day.
Post some investment at the start of the year; one of our goals was to push the brand forward and the dot com was at the top of the list. And while we knew there was a "legal" trademark route - it always felt impersonal and the wrong option for us.
An opportunity arose where we were offered a warm introduction to Puppet's CEO, Yvonne Wassenaar, who could not have been more accommodating. We chatted about Belfast (Puppet operate in Belfast also), Brexit, the tech ecosystem, partnership and lastly the elephant in the room. She was happy to put us in touch with the relevant people in the team. With emails traded and a video call to (rightly) clarify we weren't crazies; the transfer of the dot com was complete.
We would like to offer our sincere thanks to our new friends Yvonne, Tim, Nick, Dan and Michael for being awesome and highlight the professionalism and collective spirit that resides within Puppet and the wider developer community.
And lastly, on a personal note, there is nothing more impressive to me than people who lean in and ask "how can I help?".
The folks at Puppet exude class.
They lean in.
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