Same team. Same platform. New name.
Why the change?
When we started, we were building facsimiles of real people, synthetic personas grounded in population data. "Ditto" made sense. But as we grew, the name started feeling wrong. Too generic, too corporate, and too close to a dozen other companies to trademark properly.
We needed something that couldn't be mistaken for anything else.
Why Fish.Dog?
One of our founders, Rod, came up with Fish.Dog. First, we laughed about it and put it aside. But we all kept mentioning it. It stuck in a weird way. Then somebody said "how about we use this for the API?" and we agreed that would be good.
Then it became clear that with Ditto, we were running into real trademark issues. The word was too generic and close to impossible to protect. This mattered, especially as we were raising our first round of investment.
In a founders' meeting, we tried to explain it properly: the fish is searching for insights. The dog is the loyal companion that's going to be there for you. Put them together and you get something that makes people laugh and then ask, "what the hell is that?"
And then they never forget it.
That's the point. In a market filling up with interchangeable names, we wanted one that was unmistakably us. BlackRock is a strange name for an investment company. Google is a strange name for a search engine. Fish.Dog is a strange name for a synthetic research platform. They all work for the same reason.
There's also a practical reason. Ditto implied we were making copies. Facsimiles of what already exists. We're building synthetic personas today, but tomorrow we might be modelling populations that don't exist yet, or testing products for markets that haven't formed. The old name boxed us in. This one doesn't.
What's changing?
The name and the domain. We're now at fish.dog. The app lives at cat.fish.dog. Your existing links to askditto.io will automatically redirect.
Everything else stays the same. Your studies, your API keys, your data, your account, all exactly where you left them.
What about my existing bookmarks and integrations?
All askditto.io URLs redirect permanently to their fish.dog equivalents. If you've integrated with our API, the old endpoints will continue to work via redirect, but we recommend updating to the new domain when convenient.
The team
We're the same four founders who started this: Andreas, Phillip, Rod, and Gianluca. Same vision. We just have a better name for it now.