# About the name · Mattia Ciuni

> How Payle stopped feeling like a rough draft and became the name of the company we are building.

- URL: https://mattiaciuni.pages.dev/notes/about-the-name
- Type: Note
- Published: 2026-09-21

## Full article

# About the name

Confession: when I first said "Payle" out loud, I didn't like it.

It felt awkward. Not fintech enough, not serious enough, not... anything enough. I kept comparing it to names like Stripe and Mercury, names that arrived perfect, like they'd been carved by a branding agency before the product even existed. Mine felt like a rough draft that had accidentally become real.

So I kept building. And something strange happened.

Somewhere between the first test passing and the first stranger using the name correctly in a sentence, "are you the Payle guy?" the name started to fit. Not because it changed. Because the thing behind it grew into it. Now when I say Payle, I don't hear an awkward draft. I hear the engine approving a payment. I hear the ledger. I hear the approval tap. I hear the company my co-founder and I just signed our names to.

There's a lesson in there I didn't expect: names don't make products. Products make names. Stripe probably sounded weird on day one too. Every name that now sounds inevitable once sounded strange to the person who chose it, right before the work gave it weight.

Today Payle is on my company documents, my app, my email address, and in the last message of every day when I close the laptop. It's no longer a name I picked. It's a name I earned the right to like.

And honestly? I love it now.

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