table of funtents

1. 🌹 what’s in a name?

2. 🎁 from my ops toolbox

3. 👑 misfit wisdom nuggets

👋🏼 it’s me, hi

LET’S GO WEEK TWO, starting with a big thank you to you.

Week 1 of the minority misfit was awesome: feedback, responses and clean stats gave us one heck of a strong start.

Y’all know I love honest data, so sip on some numbers for your morning tea:

FYI: Please note this newsletter will now land in your inbox on Wednesdays at 5 PM (GMT), 12 PM (EST) and 9 AM (PST).

Now let’s dive in, shall we?

🌹 what’s in a name?

You: Neds, let me get this straight. You’re dedicating a whole newsletter to coming up with your company name!? Surely this is the easiest founder decision, right?

Me: WRONG.

SO WRONG it’s even quoted in The Lord of the Rings, AKA the source of all truth.

Getting to “keshty” was one of the top 3 most difficult decisions I’ve made since starting this business.

Your company name is something you’ll end up saying as much as, if not more than your own first name. It defines, represents and encapsulates you as a founder and everything that extends beyond it.

🚂 Hop on the journey with me as I share all the stops I visited on the Agony Express (a new branch of the London Tube) to get to keshty’s name.

(PS: I wish I could say “I rode this train so you don’t have to” - but in this case for your own venture, I’m afraid you probably have to)

Stop 1: Jamboard Circus

23.09.23: I made a Jamboard (RIP) dumping all my thoughts on why, what and how I wanted this unnamed business to be.

Assisted by HUNDREDS of notebook pages, ChatGPT lists and parts of my arm (really), I started putting somewhat cohesive thoughts into a digital brain.

Here’s what two of my actual pages looked like and the four crappy names I whittled it down to:

We were getting somewhere, but where that place was? Who knows.

Stop 2: Can’t Stanmore

MANY notebooks, Jamboards and weeks later, I truly had nothing. 

I spoke to some of my old direct reports, all of whom said I had to do something transport related. My poor teams have heard so much waffle like:

• Would you rather drive down the road that’s right or easy?

• The train’s about to leave, you hopping on or staying at the station?

• There’s choppy waters ahead, but our ship’s sailing in the right direction.

At this point, I’d put so much pressure on the situation and simultaneously couldn’t stand being without a name anymore (get it, can’t stanmore? I’ll be here all week).

So I did something I don’t often do, but have started doing PLENTY of since launching my own business:

Stop 3: Crying

As I literally sobbed my old team’s feedback to my Chief Husband Officer (who deserves the world for his infinite patience), he threw ANOTHER curveball and suggested the name be in Farsi.

It’s my minority identity. It diversifies tech. Okay, we’re getting somewhere.

Given my totally reasonable state at the time, our interaction went something like this:

💁🏻‍♂️ Deren: what’s train in Farsi?

🤡 Me: (dramatic huff) GHATAR? No one can pronounce that, and it sounds too much like Qatar.

💁🏻‍♂️ Deren: okay… what about boat?

🤡 Me: (falls to the floor) GHAYEGH???

💁🏻‍♂️ Deren: yep fairs, what’s the word for ship?

DRAMATIC PAUSE. DRAMATIC RELIEF. DRAMATIC DRAMA.

I RAN online to see if “keshti” was available as a .com. Aaand to my dismay:

But luckily, keshty.com with a y was available. And that’s how keshty, the mighty ship that helps minority founders set sail for scale, was born.

In 2 weeks she’ll be a whole ONE year old and I’m not crying, you are.

💩 TLDR, my no BS advice for choosing a biz name:

• Make sure you identify with it and would proudly scream it in a room.

• Don’t put so much pressure on it that you drain all your creative juices.

• Ride the wave. This is one of those business decisions that can’t be delegated or outsourced, so stay with it as long as it takes.

🎁 from my ops toolbox

A reminder for the #SmoothOperators: each week in addition to a key theme, I share one tool helping me run a lean, cheap yet cheerful business. None of these are sponsored; they’re simply tools I chose after lots of researching (so you don’t have to).

Q: Staying on theme, which domain host did I land on?

🧰 In my toolbox: Namecheap

I’d searched across lots of domain hosts and found Namecheap easy to use with no BS instructions for how to set up, sync, secure and get going.

The great part about Namecheap is they’ll often have seasonal promotions, so you can get additional domain handles for a fraction of the cost.

👑 misfit wisdom nuggets

✍🏼 Caitlin Rozario, Founder at interlude, Head of Brand and Culture at Metrikus and one of the most inspiring people I know writes:

“The number one thing, and I cannot stress this enough, is to not lose confidence in your own intuition.

Building a business is almost indescribably hard – I said 'indescribably', because it's not just cognitively demanding with all the risk and decisions and actual work that goes into it. It impacts every area of your life, ALL. THE. TIME. 

You'll put all your time and money into it, so you have fewer hours to do things you love like seeing your family and friends or doing your hobbies or eating healthily, which has a knock on impact on your health and wellbeing. Once your realise this, you'll feel guilty about not looking after yourself, and you'll have to rebuild those things, and that takes time and energy too. I don't want to sound like a downer, but most people I know have been through that cycle.

So when you're finding everything really hard (as all newbie founders do), you'll naturally look for advice. But here's the thing: 

• No one knows your business like you, and the people advising you will layer their own shit in, whether they mean to or not. Most of the time, the five minutes you get with someone just isn't long enough for them to get a good idea of what you're doing. 

• ⁠Intuition is a muscle. When you favour other people's advice over listening to your gut again and again, that muscle starts to atrophy. And like all muscles, it's devilishly easy to lose strength and it's a pain in the ass to regain it. 

Advice can be SO helpful, and every now and then you might strike gold. But the real insight comes from introspection, testing and learning, and building up a strong filter for what advice you do and don't take on. If you do need advice, be careful about who you ask, specific about what you're asking for and intentional about what you take on. 

Ps. Your friend, the South London brunch hotspot king, James Timmins (founder of Utter Waffle) will actually give you the 'build a strong advice filter' advice right at the start. Listen to him, for God's sake.”

📣 HEY MISFIT! If you’d like to be featured in an upcoming issue, email me with your answer to this question and LinkedIn profile. Let’s learn together 🫶🏼

Thanks for joining episode 2, misfits! Catch you again next Wednesday 👋🏼

Before you go, let me know what you thought of this issue with the pulse check below! Good intent feedback is always welcome ⬇️

xo, Neds