Our Zendesk configuration management platform, and the MCP that lets you do your Zendesk admin work from the AI assistant of your choice, are both now just called Deltastring. If you knew it as Beacon, the name is the only thing that’s changed: same product, same app, same logins, same URLs.
But nobody renames a product for no reason. This one goes back about ten years, to a garage.
The plan
Before any of this I had a plan. I drew it on the wall of the garage at my old flat, process diagrams and milestones in marker pen. The shorthand goes: pick a niche, become the specialist in it, and build a business that sells both the services and the products that niche needs, building the products by doing the work. Build the tools to do the job, and do the job to find the gaps the tools need to fill.
But the shorthand hides the work. The plan itself was a staged route from nothing to a viable business over about three years, with the sequence mapped out: which skills to build first, when to find mentors and when to start mentoring others, how the services and the products would feed each other. I’d run a version of it once before, in the 2010s, with a completely different business. I knew it worked. I just needed the niche, and the niche turned out to be Zendesk.
The name
Naming a company is hard. I was reading a lot of Paul Graham at the time and I gave myself rules. The dot com had to be available, because if you don’t own the dot com you should change your name. In practice that means two words, because the single-word ones are long gone. It had to mean something close to what we do. And I had to be able to say it to someone and have them spell it right the first time, so nothing with an ambiguous spelling.
I generated lists of words, shuffled them, and wrote a script to check what was actually available. Deltastring came out of that. Delta is the difference between two versions of a file. String is data, a series of characters. For a business built on knowing exactly what changed in your configuration, it fit. I’m still happy with it. Everyone can spell “delta” and “string”.
The product was called Deltastring first, too. The early builds carried the company name. Beacon came later, and it came out of doubt.
Why it became Beacon
We were doing well. Better than well, we were about eighteen months ahead of the plan I’d drawn on that wall, and being ahead of plan brings its own worries. I started to wonder if I was trying to do too much at once. Could one person really run a services business and build a platform at the same time?
So I tried to keep the two things apart. Deltastring would be the work we do ourselves. The platform would be its own thing, with its own name. I called it Beacon, thinking of a spotlight on your configuration, a lighthouse steering you away from the risks you can’t see.
Then the timing got decided for me. The people I’d hoped would run the services side took other roles. Projects got intense. I had to move house, which anyone who’s done it knows is a full-time job of its own. The launch I’d started teasing went on ice. Beacon didn’t die, but it went quiet, and the name carried on by inertia.
The name starts to bite
Once things settled, Beacon came back to life. People were using it for their Zendesk admin work, and the ones we showed at industry events were keen. But the name I’d picked in a moment of doubt started causing small, persistent problems. There are other products called Beacon. I couldn’t find a dot com for it I liked. And more and more, people would ask how “Beacon” was going, then ask in the same breath, “so what’s Deltastring?”
I never had a clean answer. I’d say Deltastring is when we do the work ourselves, and Beacon is the platform, and it never sat right in my own head, let alone anyone else’s. When Intercom renamed itself after its AI product, Fin, it put the whole thing back in front of me.
What matters
So which of these do I actually want to spend my time on?
I love the client work and I always will. But building one Zendesk builds one Zendesk. When it’s done, one company runs a bit better. The platform can help a lot of people find what’s wrong in their Zendesk and fix it, and each of those companies is serving thousands of customers of their own. It scales in a way services never can, and the numbers you reach when you follow that out are exciting.
The platform is where I’m focused now, and it should carry the name.
So Beacon is coming home. It’s Deltastring, the name it started with, the name that describes what it does. We’ll always be here for the hard client work, but that becomes part of using the platform, not a separate business wearing a separate badge.
Nothing else changes. If you’re using it today, carry on. It just has the right name now.
See what Deltastring does, or start a free trial. It’s live now, no card needed.