The Yak Tack Blog

In February 2018 I wrote a list of company names for this thing that would later come to be called Yak Tack. The list included: Lenguify Stackhog Stickidiom Wordcork Wordsnare Word Sticker Word Whale Yak Tack I wanted a practical name; something that stood for what I wanted to do, which is help people remember words. While it's a household name now (and a verb), "Google" is a prime example of what I think of as an impractical name. It doesn't relate to what the company does. I also wanted to borrow part of the name and use it as an action that describes the process of remembering words. Word Sticker might have been a great choice as it is literally what we do; help stick words in people's minds. Alas, the domain name was taken.  There's a song from the 50's by The Coasters called Yakety Yak . In addition to being a hairy animal with horns, yak also refers to "noisy talk." And, it rhymes with tack , which is "the quality ...

Yak Tack was something I started back in 2018. I'll get into the origin and motivation a bit deeper in later post. But primarily, I started it to keep my software-development skills sharp since I'm not doing much coding at work these days. I also started it because, as I like to tell people, words are my jam. I worked with my wife, who's an interaction designer at Google, on the logo. We landed on this. [the logo] I was happy. She was happy. We were all happy. We're still happy. After working for months on this thing, I decided it was time to do a proper launch. We scheduled a 10-day vacation in Florida to visit the in-laws in August 2018. I thought I'd capitalize on the free babysitting and get Yak Tack ready for Product Hunt -- the de-facto startup launcher. I got all the assets ready to go, work up early, and hit "publish." A couple hours later, this guy named Matt Holsinger finds me, and makes this comment on my Product Hunt page: ...