We built Excelmatic. Then Microsoft’s legal representatives emailed us.

In April 2026, we faced a decision we hadn’t planned for: whether to keep our product’s name.

We received emails from legal representatives acting on behalf of Microsoft. They raised concerns about our use of “Excel” in “Excelmatic,” citing Microsoft’s brand and trademark rights, and asked us to address it.

They also contacted our domain service provider and cloud hosting provider, asking them to take action.

That made this more than a naming discussion. We had to think about the potential impact on the services our product depended on.

We decided to change the name—not fight to keep it.

After careful consideration, we chose to move forward with a new brand and a new domain.

That’s how RowSpeak was born.

Our slogan is “Let Rows Speak.” The idea is simple: help people understand what their data is telling them.

Our focus hasn’t changed. We’re still building a data analysis product. But now we have a name that expresses our mission without incorporating the name of another company’s established product.

Our new home: rowspeak.ai

A new name came with a painful transition.

Changing the brand also meant changing the domain. As I shared in our migration story, our Google visibility dropped dramatically after the move, and we’re still struggling to recover it.

The cost wasn’t just updating a logo and a website. It was time spent handling the transition instead of improving the product—and dealing with the search visibility we lost along the way.

What I’d do differently

Before building around a name, I’d pay much closer attention to whether it contains someone else’s established product name.

A name can communicate exactly what your tool does and still create problems for your business.

This isn’t a legal conclusion about anyone else’s naming choices. It’s a lesson from ours: choose a brand you can build your own identity around, and investigate potential conflicts before you invest heavily in it.

Have you ever had to rename a product because of a brand or trademark concern? What do you wish you’d checked before launch?