Tuna ÖztürkTyler Blackford
I built Neon Apps in Istanbul under the name I was born with. I spent a year in New York opening the office there, started using another name, and it worked better than I expected.
People could not pronounce my old name, could not spell it, and were not sure it was a name.
In the US that stopped being funny and started costing time, so I began introducing myself as Tyler Blackford to see what would happen.
What happened was more than I expected. I kept it, and made it official the same year. Nothing else changed.
Tuna Öztürk does not survive contact with English.
Tuna is a fish in English, the tinned one. Öztürk has two characters an American keyboard does not have, so it arrived misspelled almost everywhere it was typed: invites, contracts, badges, the reply address. For years that was only a joke, because I was selling to people who already knew me. Then I moved to New York for a year, where nobody knew me.
- Tuna, like the fish?
- Sorry, could you say that again?
- How do you spell the second one?
- Is Tuna a first name?
- Sorry, I will just call you T.
I tried a name an English speaker could hold.
I picked a name an American ear does not trip over and used it for one round of outreach, the way you would test a subject line. No strategy deck, no naming workshop. It was not a decision about who I am. It was a decision about what to put on line one of an email. I did not tell anyone I was American and I did not stop being from Istanbul.
It worked more than it had any business working.
The friction went first, which is what I was after. Then something I was not looking for: the same emails, from the same company, about the same work, started reaching a second call more often. The reason is duller than it sounds. We grow by referral, and a name people cannot say is a name they do not pass on.
I did not run an experiment and I am not offering you a number. The product did not change that quarter, the team did not, the pitch did not. I found it uncomfortable and I kept using the name.
This is not a reasonable thing to do.
Changing your name for the sake of a business is not a normal thing to do. You have to be slightly mad about your company to even consider it, and I am not going to argue with anyone who says so. People ask me how I could do it, and some of them are not really asking.
But this is how I am about the company. If something gets in the way of it working, I take it out of the way, and my own name turned out to be one of those things. You have to want the work to win more than you want your own name on it. It is also how we grew in America: we have far more clients there now than we had before.
Questions I am asked constantly
- Do people still call you Tuna?
- In Istanbul, constantly. I answer to both. Carrying two at once has its own small cost: one name for the people who know me, one for the people who buy from me.
- Are you hiding that you are Turkish?
- I run a company in Istanbul with a Turkish co-founder and a Turkish team, and you can hear where I am from in the first sentence of any call. It would be a poor disguise.
- Did the company change its name too?
- No. Neon Apps already read the same in every market we sell into. That was the entire problem with mine.
- Would you recommend it?
- No. I am telling you it worked, which is not the same thing.