Clubhouse's name is now Shortcut

As of September 7th, 2021 our name has changed to Shortcut. Other than this change, the way our product works won’t be any different (other than the continual improvements we'll be making). We're just at shortcut.com instead of clubhouse.io, and old links will simply redirect to the new site. For current users, our app will remain at app.clubhouse.io until the 13th.

Clubhouse is a good name. Well, it was a good name, because it’s not going to be our name anymore.

For many of you, the reason for this is probably pretty obvious. The Clubhouse Audio App became so big so fast that we couldn’t possibly hope to forever maintain our own brand standing in the face of their popularity.

So we set out to rename ourselves, something many other successful companies have also done for a wide variety of reasons. Our new name is Shortcut, and we’re pretty excited about it.

There were three things we wanted from a new name. For it to:

• Be snappy, memorable, and stand out as being at least somewhat unique
• Imply collaboration, with individual people and their work coming together to build a greater whole
• Capture how we see software development, which is not linear and structured, but more as order brought to chaos, with that additional, usable order helping your team get things done faster

We went on an exhaustive search. We read the entire dictionary front to back five times. We visited the ancient Doolin Caves of Ireland to sit in the dark and listen to the echoes. We asked passing crows their opinion. We pulled random letters out of a scrabble bag to see what we got (as you know, we did not ultimately decide to go with AARILTT as our name).

But instead of going through all the above work it turns out we just needed to take a shortcut and choose Shortcut.

Why? It’s a memorable, fun name. And it just fits. We cut through the chaos, noise, and confusion around ongoing work to help you get that work done faster and without wanting to throw your computer out the window. We provide a shortcut to getting work done.

Our goal is to be the single source of truth, single source of planning, and single source of conversation about ongoing work. A place where everyone can feel like a natural part of the development process without needing to be constantly prodded to check in on it. A shortcut to collaboration.

But what if you personally don’t like Shortcut and think we should have called ourselves something else? Well, let’s look at the names of some successful technology companies:

• Apple
• Salesforce
• Amazon
• Facebook
• Slack

Are any of these names just good or bad on their own? Take the most successful company on this list: Apple. I like apples and all, but is that really the perfect name for a company that makes fancy computers and phones?

Is it a better name than Blackberry, which is also a delicious fruit? Blackberry and Apple had similar market caps back in 2007. Now Apple is the most successful company in the entire world and Blackberry is worth significantly less than it was then.

The question is, is this recent variance in success in any way attributable to their names? Would Blackberry now be the most financially successful company in the world if their name was Apple?

Or is it the case that if you simply switched the names of these two companies that everything else would be exactly the same? Would Blackberry TV+ still be just as cool? The answer is yes, because they would still be producing Ted Lasso and Mythic Quest.

I’m saying all this because the name Shortcut did not descend from heaven. It did not appear to us in a dream. It won’t necessarily immediately feel like the exact perfect fit for who we are (though we really, really like it a lot). But those feelings will come once we all start associating our product, the people who work on it, and the way our customers use it with Shortcut. Those are the things that will make Shortcut great, not the name all by itself.

This is more than just a name change for us. We’ll be doing a big advertising campaign in New York and San Francisco. Sponsoring / hosting tons of events to introduce ourselves to new and current customers (in-person when / if appropriate and possible). We’ll be telling you a lot more about that in the coming weeks and months of 2021. We’ve only just begun. Far more people will know us as Shortcut than ever knew us as Clubhouse. And we’re pretty thrilled about that.

They say there are no shortcuts in life, and they were mostly right about that. Until now. Goodbye Clubhouse. Hello Shortcut.

As of September 7th, 2021 our name has changed to Shortcut. Other than this change, the way our product works won’t be any different (other than the continual improvements we'll be making). We're just at shortcut.com instead of clubhouse.io, and old links will simply redirect to the new site. For current users, our app will remain at app.clubhouse.io until the 13th.