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The same company, under the Revolution RE name
Existing relationships, agreements, and contacts carry forward. The people you have been working with are the same people, with a new email signature.
JoyHub is rebranding to Revolution RE. Same company, same team, same mission, new name. The JoyHub Revolution RE rebrand reflects two things that changed since we started: we are no longer a tenant-facing product, and we are building something much bigger than a real estate platform. This post explains how we got the first name, what a good startup name is supposed to do, and why Revolution RE is the right one for what we are building now.
If you knew us as JoyHub, you know us now as Revolution RE. Nothing about the company behind the name has been swapped out. The people, the product, and the customers are the same. What changed is what we call ourselves, and the reason is that the old name described a company we are no longer building.
We are writing this down plainly because names are how people find you. Anyone searching for JoyHub should land here and understand immediately that JoyHub and Revolution RE are one and the same. The rest of this post is the story behind the JoyHub Revolution RE rebrand.
I’m not great at naming things. Evidence: I once had a cat named “New Kitty.” Naming a company is a lot like naming a child or a pet. You are going to be stuck with it for a long, long time.
The trouble is that in the early days you sometimes spend so much time workshopping a name that you hit a wall of fatigue. You decide to pick something so you can move on with executing on your business plan, and you end up with a less than ideal moniker. That is not a failure of imagination so much as a failure of timing. The name gets chosen when the company is least sure of what it will become.
When we first started JoyHub, we liked the idea that our company had some whimsy. We thought of JoyHub as a great tenant-facing engagement tool. Who doesn’t think of their home as the hub of joy? It was a stretch, but we committed to it.
Spencer Rascoff, the founder of Zillow and many other startups, wrote a recent article in his publication dot.la about naming startups. He said there are four top qualities that a good name should have.
When we started JoyHub, we may have hit a few of those top qualities, but we were overall unconvinced about the name. That uncertainty is worth paying attention to. A name you are unconvinced by at launch does not become more convincing as the company grows. It becomes a small tax you pay in every introduction.
The four qualities are a useful test because they are about the listener, not the founder. A founder can love a name for reasons nobody else will ever know. The market only cares whether it can remember, spell, distinguish, and find you.
We have made some changes since the beginning, and two of them made the old name obsolete.
We are no longer tenant facing. We are now B2B. JoyHub was named for a resident’s relationship with their home, and that is not who we serve. Our customers are the owners and managers of rental properties and portfolios, and the problem we solve for them lives in their data, not in their residents’ apps. Our company story covers how that shift happened.
We have realized that we are building something much more than just a real estate platform. We are empowering the real estate industry to capture the value of its own data and capitalize on the extraordinary insights that big data can uncover. The industry generates enormous amounts of operating and financial data and has historically gotten very little back from it. Our series on how rental property data got so messy explains why.
With the realization that we are starting a revolution in data, a name change seemed only natural. Revolution RE says what we do and who we do it for, in two words, which is what the JoyHub Revolution RE rebrand was meant to fix. What makes our approach different is a data model built for multifamily rather than adapted to it, and that difference is the substance behind the new name.
A rebrand changes the name, not the company. For anyone who works with us, here is what to expect.
Existing relationships, agreements, and contacts carry forward. The people you have been working with are the same people, with a new email signature.
Our work is helping owners and managers of rental properties and portfolios capture the value of their own data. That focus is the reason for the rebrand, so it is the last thing that would change.
If JoyHub appears in your vendor records, bookmarks, or internal documents, it now reads Revolution RE. Searches for the old name should still bring you here.
We are Revolution RE.
JoyHub was named as a tenant-facing engagement tool, and the company is no longer tenant facing; it is B2B. The team also realized it was building far more than a real estate platform: a way for the real estate industry to capture the value of its own data. With that realization, a name change seemed only natural, and the JoyHub Revolution RE rebrand followed.
Yes. Revolution RE is the new name for JoyHub. The company, its team, and its customers are unchanged; only the brand is different. Any reference to JoyHub, including older podcast and press mentions, refers to the company now known as Revolution RE.
Revolution RE empowers the real estate industry to capture the value of its own data and capitalize on the insights that big data can uncover. It is a B2B company serving owners and managers of rental properties and portfolios, and its name reflects the data revolution it set out to start.
According to Spencer Rascoff, founder of Zillow, writing in dot.la, a good startup name should be Memorable, Spellable, Unique, and Ownable. The test is about the listener rather than the founder: can people recall it, type it, tell it apart from others, and can the company actually own it.
Revolution RE helps owners and managers of rental properties capture the value of their own data. The name is new. The mission is the reason we started.
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