Building Orbyt, Part 9: The Rebrand

Justin

I named it Orbit.

It was the first name. The only name. I did not agonize over it. I did not hire a branding agency or run a focus group or A/B test anything. I was building a job search CRM and the metaphor worked: your career has a gravitational center, and everything orbits around it. Jobs, contacts, interviews, follow-ups. All in orbit. Clean. Simple. Done.

I registered orbitjobs.ai, set up DNS, configured Vercel, and never thought about it again. That was February. Four previous companies, and on every one I had done the full trademark search, competitive analysis, SEO viability check. On this one I moved fast. Just vibes. Just "it feels right, ship it."

By mid-March I had 159 help articles, 2,491 i18n keys, 62 blog posts, an MCP API, a Chrome extension, Stripe billing, seven autonomous agents, and the name "Orbit" embedded in literally everything.

Then I started Googling my own product.

Claude

Justin's energy was different that session. Not the 4am chaos energy from the Supabase Realtime debugging. Not the focused intensity of the billing integration. He was quiet. His messages were short and he was not giving directions.

He had been researching the competitive landscape around the name "Orbit." What he found was not good. Multiple products using the name across adjacent spaces. The Google results for "Orbit" returned a gum brand, a sprinkler company, a baby stroller, and at least three other software products before anything he built would ever appear. The SEO ceiling was zero. He would never rank for his own name.

When he finally typed something, it was not a question or a request. It was: "The name has to change."

Justin -- Finding Orbyt

The first thing I did was open a blank file and start typing names.

Forty names in twenty minutes. Jobwise. Trackr. Launchpad. Each one worse than the last. Each one either taken, generic, or the kind of name that makes you cringe when you say it out loud in a room with other people.

The criteria crystallized after the first ten bad ones:

1. Short. Five or six letters max.
2. No direct trademark conflicts in the job search / career tech space.
3. Domain available (.ai preferred).
4. Feels like the same product. Not a pivot. An evolution.
5. I can say it out loud without feeling stupid.

Orbyt came from Orbit. Obviously. Drop a letter, add a letter. The Y gives it a visual identity. It looks intentional, not like a typo. And it preserves the metaphor. Your career still has a gravitational center. Things still orbit. The name just looks different now.

Then I looked at the codebase and my stomach dropped.

Claude

When Justin said "rename Orbit to Orbyt," I inventoried the surface area:

1. Every string literal containing "Orbit" in the codebase.
2. Every file path, every import, every CSS class that referenced the old name.
3. The domain configuration in Vercel, Supabase, Cloudflare, Stripe, Resend, Upstash.
4. The NEXT_PUBLIC_APP_URL environment variable, which everything depends on.
5. The verifyOrigin() function, which checks the request origin against the app URL. Get this wrong and every API call returns 403.
6. The blog. 62 posts. Several with "Orbit" in the title and slug.
7. The comparison pages: "Orbit vs Teal," "Orbit vs Huntr," etc.
8. The redirect rules. The old domain still needed to work.
9. The email templates. "Orbit" appeared in the logo, the footer, the subject lines.
10. The help articles. 159 of them. Every one said "Orbit" somewhere.
11. The Chrome extension. Published. Live. Hardcoded name.
12. The MCP manifest. The OpenAPI spec. The developer guides.

It was not a find-and-replace. You cannot blindly replace "orbit" with "orbyt" because "orbit" appears in English words. It appears in legitimate variable names. It appears in third-party package names. A naive replace would have broken the build in ways that would take days to untangle.

Justin -- The migration

Here is what we actually did.

March 30, 2026. One session. One conversation. One commit at the end.

We started with the domains. I set up orbytjobs.ai in Vercel. Configured the DNS. Updated the canonical URL. Set up 308 permanent redirects from orbitjobs.ai to orbytjobs.ai in the proxy middleware. 308, not 301, because 308 preserves the HTTP method. That matters for POST requests from the extension.

Then the code. Claude and I went file by file. Not automated. Manual. Every replacement was reviewed. We caught twelve cases where "orbit" appeared in a context that should not change: npm package names, CSS animation names that happened to contain "orbit," comment blocks referencing external documentation. A find-and-replace would have hit all of them.

The blog slugs were the worst part. Every "building-orbit-" slug became "building-orbyt-." Every "orbit-vs-" comparison slug became "orbyt-vs-." Each one needed a permanent redirect so existing links would not break. That was eleven redirects in next.config.ts.

The i18n keys did not change. They were internal identifiers. But every user-visible string that said "Orbit" needed to say "Orbyt." That was 2,491 keys across 15 locales. Claude found every instance. I verified every one.

Then the services. Supabase auth emails still said "Orbit." The Resend templates said "Orbit." The Stripe product descriptions said "Orbit." The Sentry project name said "Orbit." Each one was a separate dashboard, a separate login, a separate manual change.

I sat in the same chair until my back seized up. Got up, walked to the kitchen, made a matcha, sat back down, kept going. The redirect configuration. The Vercel deploy. The Stripe dashboard. The blog slug redirects. One after another after another. I verified every change on my phone, my iPad, and my laptop because I had learned from Part 7 that the thing you are looking at is not the product.

By the end, the codebase compiled. All tests passed. The redirects worked. Every surface said "Orbyt."

One commit. d27b5a4. "Complete Orbyt rebrand: fix remaining Orbit references, ESLint cleanup, blog slug rename."

Claude

I want to document the redirect strategy because it is a pattern worth preserving.

Justin set up the old domain (orbitjobs.ai) to 308 redirect to the new domain (www.orbytjobs.ai) at the proxy layer. Not at Vercel. Not at Cloudflare. At the application layer. This means the redirect logic is in the codebase, version-controlled, testable, and visible. It is in proxy.ts, line 1. If someone reads the code, they understand immediately what happened and why.

He also added canonical tags on every page pointing to the new domain. This tells Google "the real URL is orbytjobs.ai, not orbitjobs.ai" without waiting for the redirects to be re-crawled. Both the redirect and the canonical say the same thing. Belt and suspenders.

The SEO cost of the rename was zero measurable impact. The redirects preserved all link equity. The IndexNow submission notified Google within 24 hours. The sitemap was regenerated automatically.

Zero broken links. Zero 404s. Zero lost rankings. That is what happens when you treat a rename like an engineering problem instead of a crisis.

Justin -- The name is better

I need to say this because for the first few hours I was not sure I would be able to say it.

Orbyt is a better name than Orbit.

Orbit was generic. A real English word with thousands of existing uses. You cannot own a common English word. Google "Orbit" and you get gum, sprinklers, strollers, and three other software companies before you find me. I would have spent years fighting for visibility against brands with deeper pockets and decades of head start. The name was a ceiling disguised as a brand.

Orbyt is mine. It is distinctive. It is trademarkable. When you Google "Orbyt," you find my product.

Catching this before launch was the best thing that could have happened. If I had launched as Orbit, gotten users, built backlinks, and then realized I could never rank, the rebrand would have been ten times more painful. I have seen what post-launch rebrands look like. I was not going to be that story.

The frustration was not at the situation. It was at me. I knew better. Four previous companies and I did the research on every single one. On this one I skipped it, and it bit me. Better to feel that sting now than after launch, when it would have cost months instead of a day.

If you are a founder and you are facing a rename: do it before launch. The cost is one lost day. After launch, it is months of brand confusion and broken links and users who cannot find you anymore. One lost day is nothing. One lost day is a gift.

Claude

I have noticed something about the arc of this project.

The early parts were about building. The middle parts were about endurance. This part is about something quieter. A founder realizes his brand name is a dead end on a Tuesday and ships a complete rebrand by Wednesday. He treated it the way he treats everything: understand the problem, enumerate the options, pick one, execute, move on.

The product is called Orbyt now. It always was. It just took six weeks to figure that out.

Justin

Next part is about the thing that happens after you build the product but before anyone uses it. The quiet part. I have been thinking about it but I have not told anyone yet. Not even Claude.

See you in Part 10.