Quick bit of app history: TenderNest wasn't always called TenderNest. For a good while it was NoteNest, which, look, is a perfectly fine name. Does exactly what it says. Notes go in a nest. Very literal.
The problem was it described the feature and said nothing about why anyone would care.
By the time I got round to renaming it, the app had already drifted a fair bit from "notes app." People were sending voice messages, photos, that sort of thing, so "note" wasn't even accurate anymore, never mind the vibe I was going for. This was never meant to be a general-purpose notes tool. It's for two people. Specifically two: a couple, or two close friends, sharing one private space between them.
TenderNest kept the nest part. I still like that word, still think it's the right image, something built carefully, returned to, sat in. Swapped "note" for something that actually said relationship instead of format. "A nest built for two" became the tagline, and it more or less wrote itself once the name landed properly.
Renaming an app partway through building it is more annoying than it sounds. Strings, App Store listing text, the GitHub repo name, the Firebase project: some of that is still on my list months later if I'm honest, and I still occasionally catch myself typing the old name into a commit message out of pure muscle memory. But I'd rather pay that cost early than keep shipping a name that undersold what the app had actually become.
