It seems like the origin of the company’s name is a must-tell story for start-ups 🙂 so we thought we would deliver ours today, on a sunny Good Friday…
The funny thing about our name is that everybody has an assumption that, what’s more, makes perfect sense. Probably more than the real story, that is actually not so interesting :-).
The designer that created our logo, a creative person by the nature of her job, assumed a complicated word play. Her guess was that Quandora was coming from the word “quandary” suggesting dilemma, puzzle. And she was actually inspired by this word in creating a whole branding theme around perplexity and quest. Which resulted, among other, in our present day logo, that we totally love. A happy mistake, in conclusion.
Somebody we’re working with lived for several years in Europe and she speaks most of the Latin languages. Our brand’s name immediately caught her eye and she was quite certain it came from joining two Italian words: “quando” (meaning “when”) and “ora” (meaning “now”). Of course, this is just a happy coincidence as well. It made us remember this popular “Quando, Quando, Quando” song from the 60s 🙂
In a more serious register, several people we’ve done business with saw a connection with the name of Quora, the Q&A community. Especially that we sometimes like to compare Quandora with a “Quora for the Enterprise” – which by the way is not entirely accurate, but still an efficient way to give a reasonably correct idea of what we’re doing in just 4 words. Truth is, the similarity of the names is a consequence of what both companies are doing: it’s related to the sonority of (Q and A ). At least it is in our case 🙂 I must say that I didn’t check Quora’s story – maybe I’m as wrong about this as everybody is about Quandora :-).
And now…the real story. We wanted something that points directly to what we are doing – a Question & Answer software for knowledge sharing -, plus we like the shape of the word Q and thought it would open nice possibilities of logo (which it did). Question & Answer -> Q and A -> “qanda” this reads approximately like “quanda”. We had a start. But how to end this word? We decided to look at options ending in an “a”: we liked the soft, feminine touch this brings.
The middle was pretty much a matter of domain name availability. We would have preferred Quandera, but the domain was not available. Quandora was the best next option.
That’s it, kind of boring, as I was saying. We spent very few time on this matter, and the guiding principles were more pragmatic that anything else: suggestive of what we’re doing (versus more conceptual, subtle stuff), short (one word), not a common word (to avoid SEO battles), pretty easy to remember and not spelling error prone. And of course, above all, with the domain name available.
Happy week-end to everybody!
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