Why 369

People ask about the number often enough that it’s worth a short answer.

How it started

In 2018 I was building my first studio and I needed a name. I’d been reading about Tesla’s fixation on 3, 6, and 9 — he called them the key to the universe, which is the kind of claim that either sounds ridiculous or magnetic depending on your mood. I was in a magnetic mood. The name App369 stuck.

I didn’t intend to build a brand family around it. I intended to name one company.

What happened instead

By 2020 I was full-time on App369 and shipping enough to see patterns. Every service-business client I worked with eventually needed the same internal ops layer: a place to quote jobs, schedule crews, invoice clients, collect payment. I kept building it from scratch for them. So I built it once for everyone — Workspace369.

Around the same time I realized that every new Flutter project started with the same bootstrapping: wire up Firebase, add Stripe, connect RevenueCat, hook up auth. Two weeks of setup before one real line of product code. I packaged that setup — Template369.

By the time I had three products with 369 in the name the suffix was no longer incidental. It was a statement: these things are related, they come from the same hand, and they’re built the same way.

The discipline it enforces

Keeping the suffix means keeping the commitment. I can’t put 369 on something I built carelessly or handed off without care. The name is a check on my own standards.

It also keeps the portfolio legible. A client looking at App369 can find Workspace369 and Template369 without explanation. The naming does the work of saying “same person, same approach, same quality bar.”

The cost is inflexibility. I can’t sell a brand with 369 in the name. I can’t white-label it away. It’s tied to me, which is either a liability or an asset depending on how well I do the work.

So far I’ve decided it’s an asset. Ask me again in ten years.