From Ayuda Heuristics to Quin Part 1

The genesis of our rebrand

When I decided to join Ayuda as Head of Marketing, I thought it was a tech company creating and sharing new knowledge about diabetes. About 2 hours into the job I realised it was more than this. Try two months in…

My first two days

My first two days luckily consisted of a series of workshops about the company’s purpose, mission and values. What better way to dive into the essence of who we are, what we believe in and what we’re trying to achieve than sitting in a room, only having to think about that? Listening to the stories and the thinking of two passionate founders, understanding the genesis of it all, creatively formulating the very things that will dictate what we do in the next few years?

Ideal scenario, right? Yes! Unless, by the end of the second day everyone comes to the conclusion that the company name needs to change. And we could have just done that. Change the name. However, what these two days also showed was how much more was needed, and how massive what we’re trying to do is.

Doing it right

Could we have simply slapped just another name on our slide decks and social media? Yes. Could we have done a 1-hour brainstorm with the rest of the team to get their “buy-in”? We could have. We could also have just googled name options and forced them down everyone’s throat. Of course.

Except we didn’t. We didn’t because we care, because it’s exciting and because as a team we practice excellence. Not perfection because it doesn’t exist. Excellence.

What we do

On top of building an app to help people who take insulin make the best possible decisions, our team came together and we did our rebranding right too.  It’s not easy. Better yet: it’s painful! Very Painful. We’re still going through it and will be for at least the next 6 to 12 months.

Trust

In tackling a chronic condition and particularly diabetes, one needs to inspire trust. For people that have been hurt many times in a system, by professionals or simply by promising claims that end up disappointing. But the least we can do is to live up to our true essence. We love each other, we love what we do and we love people with diabetes.

Love

People shy away from the word love because it feel inappropriate in a business environment but if you’ve worked long enough, you know how easy it is for people to express anger, aversion, frustration or resentment towards their clients, colleagues or customers. So why is love not ok? I digress.

Growing

We need to grow, need new brilliant minds to join our team and we need more brilliant beta testers. Expanding our research with a partnership with University of Bristol, and we have an app that has the potential to help millions of people around the world.  What we do can have a granular impact on the smallest human situations while having a massive impact on the entire science diabetes science. It’s no small task and we need to bring a lot of people together to make it happen.

People-powered

After 4 weeks of daily brainstorms, user research, user interviews, workshops with the team, creating a “name-it” slack channel to harvest all our ideas, speaking to our investors, creating countless moodboards, writing several hundreds of names on post-it notes (on our not-so-white-boards-anymore), and feeling like our brains are going to explode, we gave birth to Quin. We almost didn’t go for it because having a “dot com” could have made us look more legit, because changing a letter in the name could make it seem inappropriate, because the urban dictionary has the power to deter you from naming anything these days. Most of our users loved it, but  small minority felt the second option was for was more “diabetes” and that really made us think twice. We could have gone another direction, but we didn’t. Instead, went with what felt right.

Being Quin

Quin is people powered. Powered by those who use their intuition and intelligence everyday to decide how much insulin to inject. I’m not going to get into how much work went into creating the visual expression of Quin today, but I hope this gives you some insight into our thought process when approaching our forthcoming rebrand.