Ever wondered where our name “GrexIt” comes from?
Grex, in Latin, means crowd or flock. Back in 2011, when we were starting work on our new product which would help teams collaborate better on email, GrexIt seemed to be an excellent name. It was easy to remember, was derived from a word that carried meaning for our business, and the .com was not taken – so we said – why not!
Over the last four years, our team has come to deeply identify with the name. To us, it stands for the sum total of our product, vision, team, and then yet some more. So, you ask – why are we changing our name?
The answer is – Extraneous circumstances – totally out of our control.
Back in 2012, some consultants at CitiGroup decided to use the term GrexIt to refer to the likely phenomenon of Greece’s exit from the Eurozone. It was immediately picked up by journalists, who soon realized that there’s a company too with that name. Over the next two years, the term continued to get some attention on and off.
Our traffic analytics showed a clear bump whenever the term GrexIt caught up steam because of the situation in Greece, and along with this bump, we’d also see an increase in our bounce rates. We learnt to live with it, and factored it into how we analyzed our traffic.
But nothing prepared us for what happened earlier this year (2015). Greece came very close to defaulting on its debt, and for a moment “GrexIt” looked imminent. Though it did not happen (and we strongly believe it never will), we decided its time to change our name, because:
1. With the term becoming more popular, we had a great deal of people getting confused about what we do.
2. The term GrexIt has a clearly negative connotation. We don’t want our product to be associated to a term that is looked upon negatively.
So here we are, with our new name.
But why Hiver?
Well, bees are awesome creatures. Picture a bee, and once you’re done thinking about honey and the sting, you’d think about work ethic, organization and efficiency. We derive our name from bee-hive. Use our product, and we’d help you be efficient, organized and get work done.
Along with a new name, we’re also releasing numerous new features over the coming 6 months. Some of them are:
- Send email later
- Snooze an email
- Snooze your inbox (do not disturb for your Gmail)
- Email tracking
- Simple task management and workflows inside Gmail
- iOs and Android apps
Welcome to Hiver.
