Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve been undertaking a pretty major brand overhaul. As most of you have probably noticed, we’ve changed our name from Home Service to Yada! While we loved the name, loved our old logo, and loved everything else about it, we felt that a change was needed to better reflect the growth of the platform we’re building.
First off, it’s not change for the sake of change. Change can’t be avoided, but it’s best to make changes when you’ve got a pretty good reason to do so. And we’re pretty sure the amazing things we’ve all accomplished together over the past year give us precisely that reason.
When I started Home Service a little over a year ago, I had a very simple mission: to bring voice tech into vacation rentals, and make hosts’ lives easier by automating a bunch of the conversations they’d otherwise have to get into with guests. Over time, our platform grew, more and more people started using Home Service, and we rapidly evolved into a one-stop communication and engagement platform for vacation rental hosts and property managers. We spread out into chatbots for rentals, rolled out integrations with property management systems and bookings sites like HomeAway and AirBnB, and are building a suite of incredibly powerful tools to further help hosts get more amazing reviews, reduce the time spent managing guests, and move forward with the insights they need to be as successful as possible.
With this evolution in our product, and the rapid growth of our user base, we realized that ‘Home Service’ (which was meant to be a pun on ‘Room Service’ but for Homes) wasn’t going to cut it as a name and as a brand going forward. Home Service also came with a great many misinterpretations about what we’re building and who we are as a company. Without exaggerating, at least 25% of the messages and inquiries we get were along the lines of “when can we schedule a cleaning” or “do you manage rentals in antigua”.
It was pretty awful.
We tried all sorts of things to make it clear what we were, but our name kept on causing confusion for first time visitors. And so, Yada was born.
We had a number of pretty important criteria which we took into account when choosing a new name. Because a huge part of what we do is voice-first, whatever name we decided to adopt would have to be one which is easily recognizable, pronounceable in multiple languages, and unique. It had to be a name which embodied our mission to be the most comprehensive and powerful conversational AI tool for hospitality. And it also had to be a name which reflected the cutting edge research and engineering work we’re doing.
Yada ended up being the perfect name. And it had an unintended benefit. While it’s not a global saying, “yada, yada, yada” is commonly used to describe a never-ending conversation. And since our business is all about automating those “yada, yada, yada” conversations, the name was a perfect fit.
We also adopted a more cohesive and simpler color palette, which we’re going to be rolling out through the platform over the next few weeks.
What does this mean for you? Realistically, nothing. All the old domains still work, but our new home is at yada.ai. The Home Service Alexa and Google Home skill which has been in use up until now will continue to be operational for the next six months, in tandem with our new Yada skill. We’ll be adding reminders in the skill so guests and users know to transition to the new one.
The platform, chatbot, and analytics aspects are unchanged - going to homservice.ai will automatically redirect to yada.ai won’t be any interruptions.
We’re really excited about this name change and what it means for the future of this company!
TL;DR; We changed our name