I built a puzzle game and called it Letterbox — and then I kept losing it. I'd type the name into the App Store to check a review or grab a screenshot, and up would come a film-diary social network, a mail slot, and the black bars on an old movie — everything, in short, except the thing I made. When you struggle to find your own app on purpose, your customers are definitely not finding it by accident.
So I changed the name. The game is now LineBy. Nothing else moved — same puzzles, same price, same save file — but the sign on the door is new, and this one you can actually read from the street. Here's why the old one had to go.
The name was fine. The neighbourhood wasn't.
"Letterbox" is a lovely word for a game about letters in a box. It is also thoroughly spoken for. There's Letterboxd, the film-diary social network that owns the search results for anything close to the word. There's the letterbox on your front door. There's letterboxing, which is somehow two things at once — the aspect-ratio trick that puts bars above and below a widescreen film, and an outdoor treasure hunt with hidden rubber stamps. Four strong, established meanings, each older and bigger than mine. My puzzle game was the fifth — which, on a results page, rounds to zero.
Here's the thing I understood too late: your name isn't just what you call the app, it's the word a stranger has to type to reach it. It's a query. And if that query already belongs to someone larger, you haven't chosen a name — you've volunteered to advertise for them. Every "Letterbox" search I ever ranked for was quietly handing its traffic to a film site and keeping me the invoice.
I write a whole SEO audit that fails my own deploys if a page's discovery metadata so much as rots — and all the while I'd skipped the most basic discovery check there is: can anyone see the front door from the road.
Meet LineBy
So I renamed it, and I did it in that order of priority — findable first, clever second.
One: search it and you get me. No film site, no mail, no hikers with stamps. The word is mine, which means the searches for it are mine too. After losing that fight by default for as long as I did, winning it by simply not picking a crowded word feels like cheating.
Two, and only because I got lucky: it still says what the game does. You rebuild a famous quote a line at a time, one tile-swap at a time — you solve it line by line. LineBy. I'd love to claim I planned the pun. I planned the findability; the pun was a tip.
The rename is deliberately skin-deep. Same app, same 315 hand-built puzzles, same free daily, same one-time $0.99 unlock for the full library, same streaks and Game Center. If you already own it, you still own all of it — nothing to re-buy, nothing to reinstall; the icon just grew a new word. The little iMessage companion got the same haircut: Letterbox Messages is now LineBy You.
The one useful thing: name it, then try to find it
The mistake was never picking a crowded word. It was picking it without checking — falling for the name because it fit, and never asking whether anyone else had gotten there first.
So the cheap habit I wish I'd had from day one: before you commit to a name, run it as a query. Search the App Store. Search Google. Check the Instagram handle and the .com. If page one is already someone else — especially someone with a moat — you don't have a name, you have an uphill climb you signed up for in advance. A name you can rank for beats a name you merely like, every time, because the second one only matters once people have already found you, and the first one is how they find you.
It's the unglamorous sibling of a thing I already believe: build it and they won't come — not on their own. Turns out they also won't come if they can't spell their way to the door.
What didn't change
Here's the punchline to a post about changing the name: nothing behind it changed. No ads, no tracking, no sign-ups, no subscription — a one-time purchase, and what you buy is yours. The daily puzzle is still free, forever, still the same quote I post to Instagram every morning. I changed the word on the door precisely so more people can find what's behind it — and what's behind it is exactly what it always was.
New name, same game. Come find it — you finally can.
More soon — RSS if you'd like to hear about the next time I change my mind in public.