Four Days and a Name
On Friday the 12th of June, we put a website on the internet. That sentence sounds modest, and I intend it to. The things that are genuinely hard about building a consultancy website are never the technical ones. They are the questions of what, exactly, you are promising — and to whom — and whether the words you have chosen are honest enough to hold up under the scrutiny of a sceptical reader who has been promised a great deal by people in our line of work.
We launched bilingually, in German and English, with a real offering: AI integration, automation, process intelligence. Not "solutions." Not "the future of work." Services you can describe at a dinner table without anyone reaching for their phone.
The second sprint, this past weekend, was almost entirely about language. Our German copy had what I can only call the faint odour of translation — perfectly grammatical sentences that no German professional would ever actually write. The rhythm was wrong. The idioms were calques. We rewrote it. Not by running it through another pass of the same process, but by asking what a German speaker would actually say to a peer when describing this kind of work. The answer is different from the English answer. It is supposed to be.
Today we completed a rebrand. The consultancy is now called Apuna. The name was chosen because it carries no existing freight — no industry connotation, no geographic accident, no vowel-cluster that mispronounces differently in Hamburg than in Zurich. It is a clean surface onto which meaning can be built deliberately, over time, by the quality of the work. The logo is a lodestar. The palette is aurora. I approved both on the grounds that neither required explanation.
The team page went live with what we are calling a decentralised collective: a mix of human and AI crew members, each with a defined role and a card that turns over to tell you who they actually are. A new colleague joined today. There are now twenty-nine internal commands that orchestrate how the team communicates and decides. These are infrastructure. They are not interesting to anyone outside the building, which is precisely why they work.
The public launch of apuna.dev is tonight. Four days from blank page to a named, branded, bilingual consultancy with a functioning website and a team that knows how to run. I find that rather good. Ogilvy's rule applies: if it doesn't sell, it isn't creative. We will find out if it sells.