Is there another meaning of kurtosis that is applicable to this product? Kurtosis is used to describe aspects of probability distributions' tails/flatness.
Is this a pun on "distributed" systems?
I think it’s a way of borrowing the credibility attached to the term. But at the same time it dilutes the original meaning of the term and confuses people over time.
That said, I hear you that it's confusing when people need to distinguish between "kurtosis the statistical concept" and "Kurtosis the company"!
Our very first users were test engineers who used our tool to spin up test environments for E2E and integration tests, and we called it Kurtosis because we imagined them catching “tail” errors that were out of the expected norm for devs focused on only one component of the system. We imagined a tool that detects bugs happening in a “high Kurtosis” error environment.
We’re also big fans of the book “antifragile” by Taleb, about strategies in general for excelling in the face of volatility environments (can stretch that to kind of look like high “Kurtosis” environments)
The combination of those two things felt right when we started building - but I can see all the confusion it’s now causing here!
Peanuts from a serial entrepreneur in the gallery, having been a co-founder of a full stack digital agency that helped and watched 10^3 startups ramp during the dot com boom...
## TL;DR: If you're explaining, you've already lost. Consider changing to something you don't have to explain. ##
Pick a name you don't have to explain because it's so excruciatingly clear... or so totally meaningless you get to define it. Consider it a red flashing warning sign if you find yourself having to explain because the term you liked is pre-pigeonholed as something else.
The comments here are valid, you and the team are hearing, then saying ‘good point but here's all this background’ -- means you market tested the name, and found out.
Sooner is always better than later to fix market confusion. Your footprint to fix will never be smaller than it is today (unless someday marketing doesn't matter any more). Plus in the "awareness" stage of marketing you can't fix by explaining. Your first chances are "engagement" or "onboarding" and by then you've already lost revenue to the confusion.
But I see from the comments it is decently confusing!
Although I see how the overloading of the term is pretty confusing here