Getting Kinetic
NO. 08 · SEPTEMBER 30, 2026
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Hi— This is the story of how Simple Focus got its name. I usually clean it up in the telling, but this time I’ll leave the mess in. | |
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A TENSION
We were called Click-Boom. Great name for a digital shop in 2009. Then in 2010 a cease-and-desist showed up, and I felt exactly as victimized as you’d expect. A mentor gave me the least sympathetic advice I’ve ever received: change the name and don’t let this distract you. He was right, which was annoying. So I spent months picking a new name. I had criteria: unique, ownable, dot-com available, and nothing that could ever attract another lawyer’s letter. Every candidate that survived those criteria was dead on arrival, and it took me a long time to see why. I wasn’t naming the company. I was naming my fear. Then one Friday night, on a weekend away with buddies, a staticky radio station was running the county’s high school football wrap-up. A young quarterback had played the game of his life, and the announcer said he went out there with a simple focus. Boom. The way I usually tell this story, the lesson is relax and the answer finds you. That’s a greeting card. Here’s what I think actually happened: I didn’t invent our identity that night—I recognized it. The words went by at midnight on a bad frequency and something in me grabbed them—because they described the thing I’d been refusing to let go of all along. | |
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FROM THE WORK
You know the hedgehog concept from Good to Great: the companies that last hold one simple idea and refuse to drop it. What the book undersells is that nobody picks their hedgehog in a strategy offsite. Those exercises produce committee-safe answers—defensible, agreeable and dead on arrival, like my list of lawyer-proof names. Lately I’ve been asking products the version of the question that works: if this thing burned down tonight, what’s the one capability your customers would line up to carry out of the fire? Twenty years of features, settings and integrations, and there’s always one answer. The rest is furniture. Some of the furniture is nice. But you rebuild around the thing they’d carry. | |
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PUT IT TO WORK
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The thing I’d carry out of our fire is the name—which is funny, because I never chose it. It chose me, by certified mail. What would your customers grab? Hit reply. I read every one. — JD and the Simple Focus gang | |
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