One Ferda, Please. How I Found the Name Tuela After Months of Searching

In mid-July, I went for a beer with my partner at Kulturní dům Kaštan, a pub and cultural venue in Prague. They were serving Ferdinand, a Czech beer. After I ordered one, the bartender called out:

“Jeden Ferda.” One Ferda.

He had no idea that Ferda was the working name of an app we had already been building for several months. Nor did he know that the name had never felt quite right to me and that I had been looking for a replacement since June. He was simply repeating an ordinary beer order.

And at that moment, I knew the name had to go.

We are building a mobile app designed to help keep children and families safe. It should help parents set healthy rules for phone use and alert them when a child may be facing real danger online. But it should not give parents access to the child’s everyday conversations or turn their phone into a wiretap. The child knows the app is there. The parent learns only what they need to know when there is a genuine reason to step in.

A parent may choose an app like this, but a child has to live with it. They need to understand its role—and not feel embarrassed by its name. The more often I imagined a child telling their friends, “I have an app called Ferda on my phone,” the less I believed in it.

I still did not know what the app would be called as I sat in Kaštan. The final decision was almost a month away. I knew only that Ferda could not stay.

The Right Symbol, the Wrong Voice

Ferda was not a random choice. In Czech culture, Ferda usually means Ferda Mravenec—Ferda the Ant, a classic children’s character known across generations. And there was something about ants themselves that had always fascinated me. They are tiny and easy to overlook, yet astonishingly strong. They can defend themselves and carry loads that seem absurd in proportion to their bodies.

I also wanted the name to grow from the Czech culture I knew. Ferda the Ant is clever, wise and kind. He helps others without needing to look like a grand hero.

In a single phrase, it worked: a small, strong protector. An unobtrusive app that does not constantly intrude on a child’s life, but has the strength to help when it matters.

But a good symbol and a good name are not the same thing.

Whenever I explained the story of the ant, Ferda made sense. When I said the word without the explanation, I heard a children’s character, childhood and something faintly comic. I did not hear the name of an app parents could trust with their children’s safety.

Then there was an even simpler test. If I were a child again and had this app on my phone, could I say its name to my friends without feeling ridiculous? With Ferda, my honest answer was no. A product built around respecting children cannot belittle them with its name.

The evening at Kaštan did not cause the rename. The search was already under way. That one sentence at the bar simply captured, in two seconds, the problem I had spent weeks trying to articulate: Ferda carried the right symbol, but it spoke in the wrong voice.

Finding Another Name Was Never the Problem

I opened the first focused naming session on June 15. I began where Ferda had begun: with the ant. I used AI to research translations and linguistic roots, then tried turning them into a more contemporary name. That produced options such as Formio, Formiko and Myrmo.

Their meanings could be defended. Remembering them was another matter.

The same pattern repeated throughout the summer. I would choose a semantic direction, ask ChatGPT to research its roots and generate variations, and almost every result could be wrapped in a persuasive explanation. But nobody first encounters a name after a three-minute lecture on etymology. They see it on a phone or hear it in a sentence. It either works there or it does not.

A week later, after exploring animals, shields and older words for protection, I reached the Latin tutela. It can mean protection, care, watchfulness or guardianship. Tutela caught my attention immediately. I even marked it as a favorite. But it sounded heavy and legalistic, and the domains that made sense for the brand were already taken. So I kept searching.

During those weeks, I used ChatGPT as a very fast researcher and generator of alternatives. I decided where to look, which paths were dead ends and why. Saying only “I don’t like this” got us nowhere. Saying “this sounds like a children’s game”, “nobody will remember it” or “we invented the story after the word” gave the next round a useful constraint.

Some answers were valuable mainly because of how wrong they were. When I tried replacing the Czech letter “ů” with the English “oo”, we ended up with names such as Dooverka, Slooni and Toonka. ChatGPT missed my sarcasm when I called Toonka terrible and enthusiastically began developing it into a brand.

Mimosa had a lovely botanical story. The plant responds to touch by folding its leaves to protect itself. Unfortunately, most people picture the cocktail first. For a child-safety app, that was not a detail a better explanation could repair.

With another candidate, the most attractive thing about it was the available domain. That alone is a good reason to become suspicious. An available address can make a good name practical. It cannot make a bad name good.

After weeks of these rounds, I was not short of names. I had far too many. Progress came whenever I could reject the next option precisely. AI helped me move quickly through languages, associations and meanings. Taste—and responsibility for the result—remained mine.

An Archetype Helped Me Say No

At one point, my mentor Pavel Přikryl suggested approaching the search through archetypes, much as he and his team had done when naming Opero. He did not hand me a name or a ready-made workshop. He gave me a different way to think about the problem.

For the final round, I changed the way I worked with AI as well. I did not ask Codex for another list of names. I asked it to study how naming and brand workshops are run, then guide me through one. It was supposed to use archetypes and ask questions one at a time, allowing each of my answers to determine the next step. The goal was to arrive at a result through a well-led process, not another random list of candidates.

At first, we did not discuss words at all. We discussed the role the brand should play in a family: how it should behave when nothing is wrong, and what it should do when a child is genuinely in danger.

The clearest archetype was an older sibling. Someone who is nearby, whose presence the child knows about and around whom they do not need to pretend. They leave everyday life alone. But when they recognise a serious problem, they do not remain passive: they involve the parents. Not by handing over a complete record of everything the child has done, but by telling them what they need to know in that moment.

That turned broad words such as safety and trust into concrete behaviour. Suddenly, I could reject names far more precisely. A hidden guardian came too close to spying. A parental authority sounded like control. A cute mascot diminished the child. An action hero made every ordinary day feel like a crisis.

The archetype did not produce the name. It helped me understand what I was looking for: protection without severity, closeness without childishness, and calm without passivity. Codex held the workshop structure, and its questions moved me from a vague feeling to specific criteria. The decision about what fit—and what did not—was still mine.

Five Names, One Right Tone

Five names survived into the final round: Asto, Maneo, Limen, Teneo and Tuela.

Asto sounded like a dog’s name to me. I could hear “man” in Maneo, which made it feel like a website aimed at men. Limen sounded masculine too, and a little like a variation on Lumen. Teneo had a meaningful root, but not the tone I had spent the summer looking for.

And then there was Tuela.

English does not assign grammatical gender to a brand name. Czech makes you choose: you naturally say ta Tuela, the feminine form. Not a children’s character and not anonymous security software. More like a calm protector with a feminine presence. Capable, but gentle. The word made me feel safe before I began taking its origin apart again.

That order mattered. The sound and feeling worked first. Only then did the explanation give them depth. With many earlier candidates, the process had been exactly the opposite: I found a clever story first and then tried to persuade myself that the word worked too.

On August 12, for the first time, I no longer felt that I was searching. Tuela had won on sound, role and meaning.

Only after making the decision did I return to the older brainstorming sessions and discover a rather good joke at my own expense. The exact form Tuela had already appeared among the suggestions on June 22. It was a shortened variation of Tutela, buried in one of many long lists. I passed over it and kept going.

This is not a story about how I should have trusted my first instinct. At that point, my instinct favoured Tutela, not Tuela. The product’s tone was not yet clear enough, and Tuela was simply one word among many. A strong candidate can appear early. But until I knew what I was deciding by, I could not understand why it deserved to win.

What Tuela Kept From Tutela

The Latin tutela brings together watchfulness, guardianship, care, entrusted responsibility, protection, defence and safety. It can also mean a protector or guardian. That was the part of the word that had caught my attention back in June.

But the same root has another side. Its descendants in modern Romance languages can refer to legal guardianship, authority over another person, administrative supervision and even a condition of dependence or subordination. It is not only gentle care. It also contains power.

Tuela is not a Latin word. It is a name of our own, created by one simple change:

TUTELA → TUELA

Removing the second “t” made the heavier, legal-sounding Tutela shorter and softer. But to me, the missing letter is more than a phonetic edit. In the brand story, it represents what we deliberately leave behind: guardianship as power, constant supervision, subordination and control.

Of course, deleting a letter does not magically rewrite a word’s history. Tuela is a new form, and we are choosing which part of the original meaning to carry forward. From Tutela, we take watchfulness, care, responsibility and protection. We do not take a parent’s right to see everything.

There is one more happy coincidence. The French tu es là sounds similar and means “you are here”. It is not the origin of the name, only an echo that happens to fit the idea of a calm presence.

That is where the name meets the product. Tuela should be visibly present, not secretly reading a child’s everyday life. It should notice real danger and bring in the parents when they are needed. It should protect without taking away the child’s privacy and trust.

The Team Got Used to It Faster Than I Did

When I introduced Tuela to the team, I explained where it came from, what the missing letter meant to me and how the name reflected the principle behind the app. The response was almost immediate. People heard calmness, softness and a pleasant rhythm in it. It felt good to say, and the team quickly found their own associations in it.

That same day, I bought tuela.app. The candidate had become a name we could actually begin building around.

Curiously, the team got used to Tuela faster than I did. Ferda was still lodged in my head. It was simpler, familiar, and I had carried it alongside the project for a long time. With the new name, I kept repeating the meaning to myself, testing it in sentences and imagining it on a website or in an app store.

That was not an argument against Tuela. It was a reminder that familiarity with a working title is not the same as quality. Founders become attached to working names partly because of how many times they have said them.

I do not want to dismiss Ferda in retrospect. It led me to the right symbol: a small protector that does not need to be visible everywhere to have the strength to help. It simply sounded too childish and too weak to be the final name.

When I say Ferda today, I still hear a children’s character. Since that evening at Kaštan, I also hear a beer and the beginning of a joke.

When I say Tuela, I hear calm, gentleness and protection that does not need to stand behind a child at every step.

That is what I had been looking for all summer.