Up until yesterday we were known as AgentHub and used the domain AgentHub.dev. We're Gumloop now.
Although a good product can make any name work, sometimes a rename is just a net positive. I have some sentimental attachment to AgentHub but mixture of small annoyances with the name and some points from Paul Graham's essay convinced us to change.
Here's why we didn't like AgentHub and why we love Gumloop.
Why AgentHub.dev was not ideal
People thought I was saying 'AsianHub'
I tend to speak quickly (normally because I'm excited to talk about the product) and didn't always hit the 'T' very hard when enunciating. A non-trivial number of people misheard me in conversation and thought I was saying Asian Hub. This is not something you want to be confused with.
Don't google it.
.dev is fine but not for non technical users
We're trying to make AI automation accessible to everyone. The .dev extension is really targeted at developers which is doesn't mesh very well with the whole no-code aspect of the platform.
This comment in our Hacker News launch hit the nail on the head
We're not technically building 'Agents'
Agents, as the AI community knows them, are normally autonomous bots that make decisions and interact with their environment while trying to achieve some pre-defined goal. We started in this autonomous agent space but quickly grew apart from it due to user feedback.
We originally chose the name AgentHub because we wanted to be a hub for Agents (nailed the name originally). We were creating a wrapper around autonomous agent frameworks and thought we could be the central location where people published, hosted and shared their agentic creations. Read more about the origin story here.
Now that we're a platform for AI automation, the Agent part of AgentHub is more misleading than anything. People who've explored other Agent frameworks come to AgentHub expecting more of the same but are confused by the lack of autonomous AI.
Non-AI people don't know what Agents are
The only agent a non-technical/non-AI person knows of is the one that sells real-estate or james bond. The word doesn't carry much meaning for 90% of the world's population. If we're building for everyone, we should avoid this term.
Why We Love Gumloop
Structurally
A two syllable, phonetically obvious word that's related to what we're building but not overly direct was the goal.
We know we're going to be saying this word hundreds of thousands of times in the coming years so the simplicity of it is great.
Gum is sticky
Our automation builder helps connects integrations together with AI, kind of like a glue to bind your data together. The idea of connecting things with some sticky substance was interesting.
Gum was by far our favourite of the words in that category.
Looping automations is where the platform shines
Automations on the platform are great to run once but they're way more valuable when looped.
That's where the scalability of everything comes into play. Being able to loop one automation 10,000 times is a core value prop of the platform. Including loop in the name felt like a no-brainer.
The domain was available
This one's shallow but important. We were tired of saying 'no not .com, .dev' so we made this a priority while searching. We wanted a name that was unique enough to have a free .com and .ai
This also helps for SEO purposes because there is no Gumloop content other than a hiking trail in new zealand 🏔️
Gum merch 🤝
Packs of gum being handed out as merch are going to be cheap and memorable. QR codes on the back of the packs that link to the product. So good.
It's symmetrical
When it's lower case it's perfectly balanced. 3 letters, a perfect divider, 3 more letters.
Conclusion
We've shipped some massive feature updates along with our rebrand so the product feels like it's not only reskinned but it's also objectively better than AgentHub was.
We're super excited to keep building for our users.
Ideally, in the near future, Gumloop will be a verb people use casually when talking about how they automated their work. "I gumlooped it"
