This is the Rory Blog

Why is this app named Rory??

May 11, 2025

This app is named Rory. I spent at least a couple of weeks thinking about names, which turned out to be pretty tough. Maybe I should explain what an event ticketing platform is before diving into the naming process - I'm not sure if it's a term people generally know (and it's possible you found this blog post randomly, not through the site itself).

The idea is straightforward: if you have tickets to sell for anything—maybe a community play, a farm tour, or a yoga retreat—you sign up on the platform, describe your event, set your schedule and pricing, add your payment details, and get a neat little webpage where people can buy tickets. When attendees show up, you scan their tickets using the scanning part of the platform to check that they've paid.

Initially, I searched for names incorporating the words "ticket" and "event". It's the most obvious thing and presumably good for SEO. Unsurprisingly, every remotely-decent .com domain containing those words was already taken. Even when looking at alternative TLDs¹, nothing very appealing stood out. While searching, I saw dozens of existing ticketing sites that honestly looked pretty far from what I was going for. So many people have tried to create ticketing businesses of some sort over the years, and while some of them are great, a lot are sort of half-baked, and maybe never even launched. I really began finding names containing "ticket" or "event" actively repellent at some point, and decided I didn't want either of those words in the name at all. Why use words that, 90% of the time, are tied to a product that's nothing like what I am aiming for.

At some point, I thought using a person's first name might be a good direction. I brainstormed a few ideas, had a few I liked, but none that were available in decent domain names, so I moved on. Then, a week or two later, a friend who is quite interested in naming products suggested "Andy." His argument was that Andy is a very approachable and friendly name, which I agree with. I think it's a really good product name, and surprisingly² there aren't any apps using it.

Unfortunately, the name is a no-go for me. Nobody has ever called me Andy - I've always been Andrew. If I named the product Andy and it became successful, people would assume I'd named it after myself. First off, that just looks kind of weird and narcissistic. More than that though, I would hate having to explain "No, I don't actually go by Andy, it's uhh.. just a good name.. even though yes it's sort of my name". (Which by the way reminds of one of my favourite internet facts: Google's PageRank algorithm, which ranks web pages, was supposedly not named because it RANKS PAGES but supposedly after co-founder Larry Page. Even typing that makes me think it must be wrong³.

So, I rejected Andy but still liked the idea of using a friendly, jovial first name. I searched through lists of names with this specific vibe in mind, and, I came up with Rory. To me, Rory sounds like a fun, Irish guy—the kind you'd want at events, someone everyone's happy to see coming along. Rory is the fun Irish roommate of a guy you work with. When there's a work outing or bar night someone will say "Hey Yan, make sure to bring Rory, that guy is great!" or "Hey Niab, is Rory coming to the beer tasting tour?"⁴.

Another bonus: Rory-dot-com domain is theoretically available for purchase if the platform becomes huge. For now, I've chosen withrory.com⁵ as the domain. I think the "with" works nicely for an event ticketing platform. I thought about a more traditional tryrory type of domain, but it just didn't hit. I think it just looks weird with the repeated ry letters.

So that's the name! I imagine I'll have more interested posts coming up here, so keep an eye out.