Two days from AppDeploy to Vamiq

On Monday 19 October I had to admit something about our product's name.

AppDeploy described what the product did, but we could never own it. Search for it and you found other products called AppDeploy, from at least four other companies. A name you cannot own is a name you keep paying for: in confused buyers, in search results that lead somewhere else, and in every conversation that starts with "which AppDeploy?"

So I decided to rename it, and to do it straight away.

Why straight away

A rename gets more expensive with every customer, every review and every link. Early on it costs you days. Later it costs you a year.

I wanted a short name we could own, with a "Va" sound at the front, that would sit well next to ScotiTech and work in all four languages the site speaks. We chose Vamiq. The mark came together the same evening: a phone and a wider screen side by side, forming a V, because the product is about the iPhones, iPads and Macs a company gives its people.

The rule: nothing for anyone to redo

The hard part of a rename is not the logo. It is everything that already points at the old name: bookmarks, sign-in pages, search results, links in old emails, and, for a device-management product, every iPhone and Mac that is already enrolled and quietly checking in.

I set one rule: nobody should have to redo anything.

So we renamed in place. It is the same product, with the same accounts and the same data. We did not move anyone to a new system or ask a single device to enrol again. The website, sign-in and app moved to vamiq.app, while the connections that enrolled devices already rely on carried on exactly as before. The devices never noticed.

Every old page got its own permanent redirect to its new home: page by page and in one hop, not a blanket bounce to the home page. That matters for people with old links, and it matters for search engines, which treat a clean one-to-one move very differently from a site that has simply vanished.

Tuesday night

On Tuesday 20 October I bought vamiq.app. That night, Vamiq went live. Existing accounts signed in as before, and old links landed on the right new pages.

The next morning we shipped the first release under the new name, and two more before midnight. That day has its own story.

What I would tell another founder

• Decide quickly, then be thorough. The decision took a day. The care went into the redirects, not the debate.
• Rename the brand, not the plumbing. Customer-facing names changed everywhere. The machinery underneath, which customers never see, stayed where it was.
• Keep every old address working. A rename that breaks links is one you will still be paying for a year later.

AppDeploy is now Vamiq: the same product, with a name we can own and nothing for anyone to redo.