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Hi! Founder here, and apologies if reposting content in other comments above is too much. I can give some context on the name, although of course ideally contex

Hi! Founder here, and apologies if reposting content in other comments above is too much. I can give some context on the name, although of course ideally context from me wouldn’t be necessary if the name was easier to parse. Our very first users were test engineers who used our tool to spin up test environments for E2E and integration tests, and we called it Kurtosis because we imagined them catching “tail” errors that were out of the expected norm for devs focused on only one component of the system. We imagined a tool that detects bugs happening in a “high Kurtosis” error environment. We’re also big fans of the book “antifragile” by Taleb, about strategies in general for excelling in the face of volatility environments (can stretch that to kind of look like high “Kurtosis” environments) The combination of those two things felt right when we started building - but I can see all the confusion it’s now causing here!

dpflan 3y ago
I see, thanks for explaining -- let me see if I understand: you are trying to control kurtosis of a system, to reduce the outliers/errors in the distribution of functionality of a distributed system?
- mieubrisse 3y ago
  (other founder here) Yep, you got it! This is particularly relevant in the testing usecase where we started: "can we do whole-system E2E testing, so you catch more outliers before you hit Prod?"
- galenmarchetti 3y ago
  Yes! Nailed it :D
Terretta 3y ago
> I can see all the confusion it’s now causing here! Peanuts from a serial entrepreneur in the gallery, having been a co-founder of a full stack digital agency that helped and watched 10^3 startups ramp during the dot com boom... ## TL;DR: If you're explaining, you've already lost. Consider changing to something you don't have to explain. ## Pick a name you don't have to explain because it's so excruciatingly clear... or so totally meaningless you get to define it. Consider it a red flashing warning sign if you find yourself having to explain because the term you liked is pre-pigeonholed as something else. The comments here are valid, you and the team are hearing, then saying ‘good point but here's all this background’ -- means you market tested the name, and found out. Sooner is always better than later to fix market confusion. Your footprint to fix will never be smaller than it is today (unless someday marketing doesn't matter any more). Plus in the "awareness" stage of marketing you can't fix by explaining. Your first chances are "engagement" or "onboarding" and by then you've already lost revenue to the confusion.

dpflan 3y ago

I see, thanks for explaining -- let me see if I understand: you are trying to control kurtosis of a system, to reduce the outliers/errors in the distribution of functionality of a distributed system?

mieubrisse 3y ago
(other founder here) Yep, you got it! This is particularly relevant in the testing usecase where we started: "can we do whole-system E2E testing, so you catch more outliers before you hit Prod?"
galenmarchetti 3y ago
Yes! Nailed it :D

Terretta 3y ago

> I can see all the confusion it’s now causing here! Peanuts from a serial entrepreneur in the gallery, having been a co-founder of a full stack digital agency that helped and watched 10^3 startups ramp during the dot com boom... ## TL;DR: If you're explaining, you've already lost. Consider changing to something you don't have to explain. ## Pick a name you don't have to explain because it's so excruciatingly clear... or so totally meaningless you get to define it. Consider it a red flashing warning sign if you find yourself having to explain because the term you liked is pre-pigeonholed as something else. The comments here are valid, you and the team are hearing, then saying ‘good point but here's all this background’ -- means you market tested the name, and found out. Sooner is always better than later to fix market confusion. Your footprint to fix will never be smaller than it is today (unless someday marketing doesn't matter any more). Plus in the "awareness" stage of marketing you can't fix by explaining. Your first chances are "engagement" or "onboarding" and by then you've already lost revenue to the confusion.