Lopery Becomes Spend
Today, we’re excited that the personal finance app Morgan and I have been working on for the last two years has a new name: Spend.
This is a huge milestone for us. That we’re even considering doing work that isn’t product-, quality-, or customer-focused means that we’re satisfied with where the product is and can shift our focus to growth-oriented work. In addition to having a great brand, working on the right thing at the right time is a big part of why companies succeed.
Why Spend?
We love Spend as a name for a few reasons:
- Spend is short—even shorter than Lopery!
- Spend is a real word
- Spend is money-related
- Spend is memorable
- Spend is a verb
- Spend is aspirational
We also love that the name flips the traditional view of a budgeting app on its head. Unlike most budgeting apps, where you’re condemned for daily rituals and splurges that bring you joy, Spend celebrates your spending power. Spend responsibly. Spend less time budgeting. Spend within your means. Spend with confidence.
Knowing how much you can spend is perhaps the most important job of a budget. Our entire product is focused around a single number, Safe to Spend, which is the only number you need to stay on track. Our new brand reinforces this paradigm.
What About Lopery?
When Morgan and I joined forces two years ago, we both had prototypes and they both had names. Morgan was a bit further along in that he had registered lopery.com. The initial idea was that we were setting out to build a really elegant software analog to envelope budgeting systems (enve-lope-ry, get it?).
While we knew we didn’t have a perfect name, we also didn’t have a product, so we focused on building. We interviewed customers, built out features, and became everyday users of our own product. In the background, we explored 100+ different name ideas. For me, personally, being in this situation was agonizing. Every time I shared the product with someone, there was a hesitation around the name. Even my financial advisor couldn’t remember the name. It was obvious people didn’t exactly know how to pronounce it and that’s not a great place to be when you’re setting out to build the most popular personal finance app in the country.
It was also agonizing because naming is more of an art than a science. Is the name already in use? Is it memorable? Does it have good “mouth feel?” What even is “mouth feel?” Is it a real word or made up? Is the name available as a domain, on social media, and in app stores? What is the first image that the name invokes? Does it have any negative connotations in other countries or cultures? These are just some of the questions every name to which every name had to answer. Even then, no name is perfect. If we weren’t ever going to get the perfect name, maybe Lopery was good enough.
As we moved past early adopters, who used our product despite the name, we started to feel like the name was getting in the way of growth. Additionally, the product had now totally evolved away from the envelope budgeting analog. What we had created was a completely new budgeting paradigm. Spend was born.
What’s Next?
While today we’re renaming to Spend, the branding isn’t changing much yet. We’re still using the envelope logo from Lopery simply because it’s the fastest path to getting onto the name Spend.
We acknowledge that there’s a huge opportunity now to up-level the brand. This will look like a new logo, font-stack, and brand colors that we can deeply integrate into our marketing materials and into the product. We’re really excited to do this work and if you think you can help us, please reach out.
As always, we’d love to hear from you. Do you love the name? Hate it? We’d love to hear from you: help@spend.money.
Written by Avand, co-founder