Rampart is Now Signifi

tl;dr: The personal tier of our home Wi-Fi network troubleshooting product, formerly known as Rampart Home, is now Signifi Personal, and costs half the price with all the same features as before. The business solution (codename was “Rampart Business”) will be ready for release in just a few weeks. When it debuts, it will be called Signifi Business.

Read on for more about the name change, the price change, and what that means for current subscribers of Signifi (formerly known as Rampart).

Intro

We launched Rampart Home in August 2020 as our first foray into helping users with the work/learn/play/socialize/everything “from home” life brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. The first iteration of Rampart immediately gave users a quick way to see connection stats like upload/download speed, and highlight network issues. We kept it simple to get users back online and get on with their day.

Then, IT admins at companies started contacting us asking for a way to help their employees keep a stable Wi-Fi connection while they were working from home (WFH), so we started developing a Business tier for Rampart, which is currently in beta.

Our business solution has been in a private beta for a little over a month now, and we’re squashing bugs, tweaking designs, and making all sorts of improvements to make it easier for IT teams to support work-from-home employees in having reliable Wi-Fi connections.

Product dev is going swimmingly, and now branding needs to catch up with an official new name and logo!

Why the name change

Out with the walls

When we first named this solution, we called it Rampart because, like the tall defensive wall surrounding a medieval city, this product let you survey your (network) domain and spot enemy invaders, like interference or outdated hardware, from far away and respond accordingly.

It was a fun castle metaphor, but… it didn’t really “click.” We interviewed users and they said it sounded weird and had nothing to do with Wi-Fi. And, like always, our users were totally right.

In with the meaning

We had a lot of brainstorming sessions to come up with a more friendly name. A good name for this “Wi-Fi help for the home user” product was going to be warm, approachable, and understandable.

We thought about what the product does, and what benefits it delivers to its users. You don’t have to be a Wi-Fi expert to understand the product - it takes a bunch of technical numbers, radio waves, and measurements and basically tells you what’s working, what’s not, and how to fix it. It brings meaning to technical data so that anyone can understand it and make use of it.

The verb signify worked well here, since it means “to make known by signs, speech, or action”, or “to be of importance or consequence”.

Jackpot! At its heart, this solution is about understanding the meaning of Wi-Fi measurements and making them work for you.

Why the “fi”?

We have a long history of being playful and nodding to our favorite technology in our product names (Wi-Spy means “wireless spy”, Chanalyzer is a “channel analyzer”, Eye P.A. is your “eye on packet analysis” as well as our favorite beer, and inSSIDer is an “inside look at your SSID”) We had to stay on brand of course, so Instead of spelling it “signify”, we replaced the y with an i at the end, in homage of the “-Fi” in “Wi-Fi”.

Why the price change?

Simply put, it just felt too expensive. We want Signifi to be a utility that’s affordable enough that everyone with a home Wi-Fi network can subscribe without stressing about the price.

What is everything called?

The web app that users access at my.metageek.com used to be called “Rampart Cloud”. It’s now called “Signify.”