What Does Tweelin Mean?
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Since I started collaborating with Tweelin Inc., many of you asked me questions about the meaning of its name, so I decided to interview the co-founders and tell you the story behind it.
Towards the end of 2020, the future Tweelin team was discussing name and branding for a new innovative product concept: a digital twin that would learn from you and represent you whenever there is back and forth texting with other people to organize meetings or coordinate availability for a non-scheduled (impromptu) call.
Initially, the team was split between the concepts of augmentation and twin; in fact, the placeholder name was “Ogment”, which wasn’t going to last due to a potential trademark issue.
While augmenting someone’s life sounded quite appealing given the Augmented Reality (AR) ongoing buzz, when the team collected feedback from their target user segments, some people had mixed feeling because they interpreted the augmentation concept as something needed to be a “better self”, which was perceived as too pushy and inappropriate.
So, the “twin” concept won, however, much more work and discussions followed: the team had to find a name that minimized any trademark infringement risk, along with a corresponding available domain.
Obviously, domains involving the word “twin” were either too expensive or already in use. This meant the team ought to be creative.
New variations of the twin concept emerged and led to naming hypotheses such as 1more.me, Doppl.me and a few others. More user research followed and these names generated positive feedback, but never for more than a half of the interviewees. Those names weren’t appealing enough.
Almost a month went by, and the future company was still without a name and a brand. So, one night, one of the co-founders had an intuition: he opened Google and started translating the word “twin” in many languages. After a few translations, he realized that some languages had similar words that meant twin: zwilling (German), tvilling (Swedish, Danish and Norwegian) and, above all, tweeling (Afrikaans and Dutch).
Among the 3 candidates, tweeling was the one that sounded better and easier to pronounce, so the team chose it and, in line with naming best practices, decided to make it shorter by removing the “g” at the end.
It was an immediate hit and the feedback was largely positive: well above 50% of the target user base. Luckily, domains were available and there weren’t any trademark concerns whatsoever, so Tweelin was. The rest is history.
Fast forward to today, Tweelin became the world’s first Artificial Intelligence (AI) virtual assistant that allows you to avoid the avoidable 1:1 meetings in your calendar, transforming them into impromptu conversations, magically presented at the right time for both you and the person you need to talk to. All without sending any “when can we talk?” text message.
With Tweelin, workers have the chance to become more productive while working less overtime.
- They spend less time coordinating people’s availability. No texting back and forth, no 1:1 meeting scheduling.
- They have more time to focus. Their calendar has less 1:1 meetings (usually 40% of the total meetings) because they transform them into impromptu conversations.
- They make decisions faster. Workers talk in an impromptu fashion today, rather than scheduling calls in the future.
- They have a better work-life harmony. Workers get more things done by focusing during work hours and don’t need to work overtime on their individual tasks.
Tweelin is approaching the Android Beta phase soon. Visit www.tweelin.com to sign up! It’s free.
