Along is now PontaHR

It’s official – sometime in the last 12 hours, the name Along became a thing of the past for us. Our full-employee-cycle HR tool is now named PontaHR. We know a name change can raise a few eyebrows, so we wanted to give a bit of context. But, to talk about the present, we have to take a little peek at our past and the roots of our product. 🪴

Back in 2020, our team started working on an internal tool that would later be the blueprint for Along, now PontaHR. At that time, we chose the name Along for its purpose – to be the perfect companion for any company, following them as they grow and develop a successful business.

The name was chosen to incite warm and happy feelings of togetherness, friendliness, community, and fellowship. We wanted our brand to reflect a simple truth – that you’re never really alone with Along. So, the decisions we made were based on gut feeling, the emotions we wanted to convey, and the story around this product.

But, as the product grew, we kept running into the same set of problems; the name Along was not SEO-friendly, we were hard to find on search engines, advertising with a dictionary word as your keyword is a pain, the name was hard to trademark (impossible even, it being an every-day dictionary word), there were other companies with similar names, and so on, and so forth.

So, we felt it was time to move on, to bigger and better things, to a name you can find on the first page of a Google search. 🔍

The rebranding process

This is why we started from the beginning – with a mission to choose a new name and see how the rest of our branding fit into place. The first draft of our list of potential names had almost 1,000 options, ranging from beautiful and poetic to silly and kinda bad. In the next few weeks, we chipped away, removing any option that most of us didn’t like, that was already taken by a tool in a similar space, that we thought would be hard to market, and finally, that was already trademarked.

Then, we came down to a final five and PontaHR was a clear winner. The new logo, type, and colors followed and you can take a peek at our new branding here. 👇

‍

The meaning behind the name

Ponta actually has quite a beautiful story – it’s a regional word, coming from the southernmost part of our country, Croatia. It has a few meanings, according to the old vernacular dictionary. It can be a fish market and a place of gathering near the sea, the top of a pencil, or even a cape, a mountain top, and a protruding part of land. ⛰️

All of the meanings spoke to us, as we see PontaHR as a place to gather, a place to oversee, and a place to track in.

‍

The road ahead

Our future looks pretty much the same for PontaHR as it did for Along – we want to keep building and improving the tool, while helping HR professionals find the best new hires, without giving them a headache. You can take a look at our Roadmap for a bit more detail about what’s to come.

‍

And even though our plans for the future are the same, we like to think we’ve got a better overview of them now that we’re standing on this new mountaintop with PontaHR. 🧡