Where did we get the name Xobni?

Etymology

Back in the spring of 2006 Adam was talking with Paul Graham, our first investor, about naming the email company Paul had just invested in. Adam was toying with the name “InboxAdvisor” mostly because he was consulting at a consumer Internet security company called SiteAdvisor at the time.

Paul suggested that Adam use the word “inbox” spelled backwards. Paul is known for this type of momentary genius. Adam went home, and registered the available (!!) five letter domain name http://www.xobni.com for $8.00. It is nearly impossible to find a five letter domain name these days, and yet we found one that actually had something to do with the company we were building.

Pronunciation

From the beginning we pronounced Xobni with a long ‘o’: Zobe-nee. Friends who have known Xobni since the beginning still pronounce the name with a long ‘o’. As the company began to get more exposure however, we found that everyone was pronouncing Xobni with a short ‘o’, including Bill Gates. Rather than fighting the tide, we now officially pronounce the name with a short ‘o’: Zob-nee , but it wasn’t until a few months ago that we removed the line over the ‘o’ in our logo, which was our early attempt at forcing the long ‘o’ pronunciation. Lesson: Don’t try to force user behavior or pronunciation.

Logo

There are a lot of fun things you can try with a company name that’s spelled backwards. I think a lot of early stage companies spend too much time worrying about names and logos. We did too. Below are the major milestones in the progression of our logo:

Okay, I’ll take the blame on this one. Yuck! I’ve never been called an artist. And this was the image on our first business card. I wonder what the VCs thought when we handed our cards across the board room table.

Finally, my Photoshop skills improved and I discovered my new favorite font: Trebuchet MS

We hired Bryan “rounded corners” Kennedy. Everything got nicer around here with Bryan on the team.

This is the logo we launched with at Techcrunch40

For public launch, Jeff insisted that we go lowercase and remove the line over the ‘o’. It was a good call, but my nostalgic side cried a little bit. We also tried a new method of highlighting the ‘backwards’ inbox.

But if you take a close look at our mascot, the Xobni man, you may notice a vestige of the days of old:

Misspellings

I wonder how many people visiting our website fail to realize xobni is the word “inbox” spelled backwards? We see misspellings of our company name in the media and in the Google searches that drive traffic to our site. Here are my favorite misspellings of X-O-B-N-I:

1. Xobini
2. Xobin
3. Xobnini
4. Xoboni
5. Xonbi
6. Xobani
7. Zobni
8. Zobny

Okay, I’ll admit it. I wanted to find a way to work the misspellings of “xobni” into a blog post. With our good pagerank this blog post should quickly move to the top of the Google search results for all xobni misspellings.