My indie app was named too close to competitors and I burnt my fingers

I was a heavy user of Superhuman (the email app) for a few years and found it too expensive. So, I built a chrome extension to replicate its behaviour within Gmail. I named it Simplehuman, because a simpler version of the same experience.

It was all good for a few years until last month Superhuman reached out over a potential trademark infringement. They were surprisingly nice about it. But then another home appliance company with the same name also sent me a similar notice.

While my legal counsel advised I had a case to continue with the same name, I would rather invest the money in building the business than pay lawyers on both ends.

So I renamed it to CMDK - the hotkey that brings up the command bar in most apps.

But this is what really happened right after the rebrand and URL changes. An 80% drop in organic traffic and a huge rebranding effort that took weeks. As a solo indie dev, this could have been time spent on growth on building the product.

Lesson learnt: to be careful not to name your products too close to established products. They will come at you, you can't time the when, and its a massive distraction and waste of time.