From Jotski to Jottii — Why We Renamed
From Jotski to Jottii — Why We Renamed
Jottii used to be called Jotski. The change happened mid-2025 and, like most renames, it was both bigger than we wanted it to be and smaller than we feared.
This post is for two audiences: existing users curious about the story, and other founders standing where we stood — quietly aware their app's name isn't quite right, wondering whether to fix it now or live with it.
The name we started with
"Jotski" came from a brainstorm at the very beginning. We wanted something that suggested jotting things down and felt friendly and personal. Jotski had a small-stack-of-paper energy. We liked the K. We bought the .com. We shipped.
Within six months, three patterns kept recurring:
- People misheard it. "Jotsky? Jotty? Jotsi?" The K wasn't audible enough.
- People misspelled it. Jot-ski with a hyphen. Jotsky. Jotskii.
- In some markets, the suffix carried connotations we hadn't anticipated. Not bad ones — just specific ones we didn't intend.
None of these were fatal. Apps survive worse names. But every "wait, how do you spell that?" was a tiny tax. And the .com was already taken in three of the markets we wanted next.
The decision
The conversation started as "should we just live with it?" and ended as "if we're going to change the name, the cost only goes up from here."
A rename costs, in rough order:
- App store re-listing and review.
- Domain change, redirects, SEO loss.
- Email and infrastructure rewiring.
- Brand assets — every icon, every meta image, every wordmark.
- User confusion and trust dent.
- Time spent on the change instead of the product.
All of these grow with user count and brand recognition. At our size, the bill was annoying but not paralyzing. At 10× the size, it would have been a quarter. At 100×, a year. The tax compounds.
We wrote the rename criteria on a whiteboard and went through three short rounds:
- One syllable or two, easy to say once.
- No silent letters or ambiguous pronunciation.
- A unique-enough Google footprint to dominate search within 6 months.
- The .com available in our top markets.
- Carries the right tonal weight: warm, calm, personal — not corporate, not crypto-sounding.
After about a hundred candidates, "Jottii" won. Same vowel sound as Jotski, no consonant cluster trap, double-i is visually distinctive, available everywhere, and the syllables fit a soft brand voice we wanted.
What we changed and what we didn't
We kept:
- Every line of product code (search-and-replace at the brand boundary, sure, but no functional change).
- The visual identity (cream background, mono headings, target-shaped icon).
- The product values: zero-knowledge by default, offline-first, calm.
We changed:
- The name everywhere.
- The icon and wordmark, refined slightly to lean into the new spelling.
- The .com and email infrastructure.
- The brand voice on the marketing site, lightly.
The rule we set: a returning user should open the app, see the new name, and feel that the thing hadn't changed — only what we called it.
The migration mechanics
For existing users, the rename had two surfaces:
Local data. All the on-device storage keys had jotski-* prefixes from earlier versions. We wrote a one-time migration that ran on first launch of the renamed build, copying jotski-* keys to jottii-* and leaving the old keys in place for a release cycle as a fallback. (This kind of rename-migration is small but easy to get wrong; we tested heavily.)
Email and identity. Existing accounts kept the same email, same Supabase user ID, same encrypted entries. Nothing changed for the user except the name on the screen and on the receipt.
SEO. A 301 from old domain to new, sitemap re-submitted, brand searches monitored for a couple of months. Search recovered faster than expected — about three months for "jottii" to outrank "jotski" on most relevant queries.
What we'd do differently
Two things, in retrospect:
We should have done it sooner. The taxes were compounding the entire time. Most of the people who told us they liked "Jotski" didn't care strongly enough to stay attached after the change. Sentimentality about a name is almost always a founder's, not the user's.
We should have over-communicated. We sent one email and updated the site. Some long-lapsed users opened the app months later, didn't recognize the name, and bounced. A second email at the moment they returned would have caught them.
The broader lesson
Names are infrastructure. They sit at the bottom of the brand stack and every downstream marketing dollar runs through them. A name that quietly costs you 5% on every interaction is expensive even when nothing is obviously broken.
If you're reading this with a quiet doubt about your own product's name, the cheapest moment to change it is now. The next cheapest is also now. After that, costs go up.
What stayed
The thing we wanted Jotski to be in 2024 — a private, calm place to write your daily entries — is exactly what Jottii is in 2025 and 2026. Same product, same values, same crypto, same offline-first architecture. Just a name that no longer needs spelling out twice.
See what Jottii is now, or read about the architecture that hasn't changed.