What’s in a name and logo?

Naming is fun. Designing a logo is hard. Here’s how we did it at Truffle.

One of the fun things about starting a company is getting to name it.

You bounce quirky ideas around, hum and haw, and—for a fleeting moment—ignore those tricky technical, GTM, and other existential questions that come with any new venture.

There are also some important considerations with names. If you open an e-commerce store selling pens, a very practical name like “We Sell Pens” can leave you in a bind in two ways:

1. You're stuck in the pen niche. If you ever decide to sell paint brushes, you’re going to struggle to explain to the market why they should buy paint brushes from a pen store. We’ve experienced this problem in previous roles.

2. There’s very little branding power associated with functional names, especially in competitive markets like pens or, in our case, talent acquisition software.

Other than avoiding something too on the nose, we had a preference for short and memorable names. We didn’t want anything hard-sounding or difficult to pronounce.

How we came up with the name Truffle

The name Truffle, like many good things, came to us while sitting on a sunny terrace, enjoying a bottle of wine and shooting the breeze.

I can’t remember exactly how we got onto the subject of a kid one of us knew who earned the moniker of Truffle Pig for their uncanny ability to find candy, but things started to come together from there.

“Wait a minute, what we’re proposing is like a truffle pig hunting for the very best candidates.” 💡

There was also something fun about the idea of a brand built around truffle-hunting hogs¹. There are enough boring, dry B2B brands that play it safe.

We didn’t want to do something out there for the sake of it, but this fit without having to stretch to make the narrative work.

The logo on the other hand…

There’s a lot of fluff that companies use to describe their logo, like Amplitude’s² “representation of an artful amplitude waveform³.” (“Artful” seems like a good word for an agency trying to justify those extra zeros.)

Even with my deep distrust of hand-wavy brand marketers, a strong belief we all share at Truffle is that building a brand from the start will give us a long-term moat. One of the things we’ve experienced in our careers is a tendency for startups to over-index on product features and forget to tell their story in a compelling way.

The problem with our grand ambitions for the Truffle brand? Our collective lack of design chops.

I’m not being modest either. I have a very mild case of the color blindness known as deuteranomaly, where it’s hard to tell some shades of green and red apart. I have no idea how to navigate any of the Adobe tools. I’m a basic Canva user at best, and even then it can get dicey.

So the plan of action was to come up with a strong direction we all felt comfortable with and then hand it off to someone who, you know, does logo and brand design for a living.

With this in mind, our first port of call was ChatGPT, and the results were…not good! (We tried other AI image creation tools, including MidJourney, and none of them impressed.)

We actually spent way too much time trying to come up with a pig brandmark that we liked a la Mutiny’s “Achoo”. But it soon became clear quite quickly that the combination of Truffle and a pig risked us being confused for an upscale BBQ restaurant⁴. (It didn’t stop us from trying to make it more SaaS-y.)

We played around with a couple of other motifs. Some we considered, like the idea of using a curly tail as the brandmark, an actual truffle using logo generator tools like Logo AI, or even a “truffle hound” that brought us from BBQ restaurant to veterinarian.

Some options were a little better than others, but none resonated enough for us to pursue them until we landed on the combination of a simple hoof and the Sans Serif font Archivo Black.

Apart from a brief concern that it looked like a tulip, there was a near-immediate consensus that we’d found the one. My lack of attention to detail was even applauded!

In the end, after getting a couple of quotes from designers in the way-above-our-budget range and working briefly with someone on Fiverr, we decided we’d evolve the brand naturally over time and bring in deep design expertise when the time was right.

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Here are a couple of other thoughts for anyone in the process of a logo or brand name exercise:

• There’s research showing that brands with short, easy-to-pronounce names are viewed more positively by investors and ultimately perform better⁵. Sure, a great name won’t solve a flawed product or business model, but it’s worth putting some time into it.

• AI design tools aren’t quite there, especially when it comes to tricky stuff like logo creation. We, like everyone else, are trying to leverage AI whenever possible. Sometimes it’s awesome, and sometimes it spits something out that looks like ManBearPig.

• Canva remains a super tool for founders with no design skills who want to avoid expensive branding agencies. At $12 per month for a Pro account, it’s definitely part of our toolkit for everything from simple blog graphics to mucking around with logos and brand marks.

• It’s a good exercise to test fit with your founding team and see how you work together. I had a blast going through both the naming exercise (okay, the wine helped) and creating the logo. If the fun stuff isn’t fun, the hard stuff will be…really hard.

1. For all the truffle nerds, yes we know truffle hounds are more common these days.

2. Not picking on Amplitude, I actually quite like their logo, just not the way they describe it.

3. I’ll save you a Google search: “The amplitude (a) of a wave is the distance from the centre line (or the still position) to the top of a crest or to the bottom of a trough.”

4. Truffle Hunter BBQ sauce sounds pretty damn good!

5. The research.