LeverEdge is now Juno!
Same concept, same team, just with an easier-to-spell name.
Why did we change our name?
For one reason only – to make it easier to share.
Most of our members find out about us through word-of-mouth. That’s how we’re able to keep LeverEdge free, increase trust, and deliver the best deals in student financing.
We love LeverEdge, and we won’t lie – we’re pretty attached to the name. But even our core team has some disagreement over how it’s pronounced (see evidence below).
So, we spent the past few months trying new concepts and testing new names to find something easier to say and faster to share (with an available domain name).
Jokes aside, we will miss the name LeverEdge dearly. When you associate so much of yourself with a name for two years, it is hard to imagine going by anything else.
But, we built this company to solve problems for others and to find ways to make collective bargaining more mainstream. Graduating to Juno will help us accelerate those goals, and we couldn’t be more excited about what’s ahead.
If you’re curious to learn more about the genesis of Juno, and a little history on our old name(s), we hope you’ll enjoy the read below:
How we came up with Juno
Pop quiz. How many names has this company had?
Name 1: MBA Loan Negotiation Group
In May 2018, we started off as a Facebook group called the ‘MBA Loan Negotiation Group’. 700 students joined us in what was then just an experiment to see if we could negotiate a discount on our own student loans.
It was descriptive and accurate, but at 23 letters and 4 separate words, just doesn’t quite roll off the tongue.
Name 2: Brokr
Three months later, we applied to an accelerator and changed our name to ‘Brokr’ - you know, like broker, without an ‘e’
The person who read that application politely suggested we try something different.
Needless to say, she was right. And now, she’s our Chief of Staff.
Name 3: LeverEdge
For the past 2 years, over 25,000 of you have come to know us as LeverEdge!
How did we get there? We wanted to create a new word that was memorable, and just as importantly, one that had an available domain name.
Leverage is what you get when you join together to negotiate as a group. Our business model gives our members an Edge. So, mash it together, throw a .org on the end, and you get name #3!
For a startup created by two MBA students, we considered this a feat of creative inspiration. We...then ran into many interesting pronunciations and spellings of our name and realized we hadn’t considered ease of pronunciation or spelling.
Name 4: Juno
How do you change a name after two years?
We started with a shared Google doc between team members and threw in any ideas people had.
After a few weeks, we got to 41 possibilities. Some were great. Most were embarrassingly bad*.
But, it got the creative juices flowing, and we soon narrowed that down to eight final contenders.
Next, we embarked on a four-week proprietary selection process that we learned at Harvard Business School**. And finally, we landed on Juno because it met every key objective... and because we could buy joinjuno.com.
* If you refer 100 friends, Chris will send you the full list.
**(we polled people using thumbs up and down emojis)