This is a "Once upon a time" story, and it goes like this...
Once upon a time, using the acronym "ICE" didn't raise the specter of a bitter political divide. Instead, it stood for something boringly academic and noncontroversial: Industry Cost Escalation. I call those the Footnote Years.
Two monthly products—Direct-ICE (released in November 1994) and ICE-Alert (released in April 1995)—were the opening gambit of two youngish economists. I was one of them; the other was, and still is, my partner Elizabeth Baatz. We both came from Otto Eckstein's econometric proving grounds, Data Resources, Inc., and our goal was to directly tie macroeconomic data to the power dynamics of B2B negotiations. The products were an immediate success.
Yet, the technological hurdles of getting them to market were immense. We regularly felt the shivers of uncertainty and vulnerability that come with climbing out on an innovative limb. Branches break. However, we did not imagine for a second that our biggest threat was the very acronym we were pinning our future on.
An Arabian Night
Again, once upon a time...
There was no such thing as a supply chain analytics SaaS. There was no magazine with "supply chain management" in its title. What there was, was Purchasing magazine—the granddaddy of all procurement-related trade publications with roots reaching back to 1915. And what there was, was the generous and venerable publisher named Jack O'Conner who saw to it that our industry cost analysis appeared in every issue.
We knew the value of this opportunity and ran with it as fast as we could. We lived in what was initially a small Boston condo and quickly became (unbeknownst to our neighbors), 'world headquarters' for a tiny company called Thinking Cap Solutions. ICE-Alert led the way as our flagship offering.
With no competition in sight and a solid and supportive media partner, we built a paying audience of over two hundred readers and a 2026 revenue equivalent of around a quarter of a million dollars. Our customers ran the gamut from small caps to Fortune 500 companies. The orders came in via fax or snail mail from as far away as Saudi Arabia.
If you get an order over a fax line in a small Boston condo in the middle of the night from a company in Saudi Arabia, you do not fall back to sleep. You spend the rest of the night wondering how you're going to deliver a hardcopy subscription product to the kind of customer you didn't ever image having.
Hills Like Small Potatoes
An indulgent thrice upon a time...
Skyscrapers hadn't yet fallen to the ground. Terrorists didn't make sneaker bombs, and people who may or may not be here legally weren't dragged from their work, homes, and schools into detention centers. One might argue that before these things, we lived in simpler times. I would argue the notion of "simpler times" is a luxury afforded to people who live long enough to become overwhelmed by the present. No time is simple to those having to live through it.
The daily pounding of current events eventually gave birth to a government agency called "ICE." For two now-aging economists, the rise of ICE's political profile made it impossible to build an audience around our flagship product. Trust me, no one today hears the name "ICE-Alert" or sees the domain ICE-Alert.com and thinks: Ah, yes, industry cost escalation.
All of this said, our branding problem, though a royal pain in the ass for us, is trivial to the deeper physical and psychic pain felt by many people of every political stripe over the last quarter-century. At the end of the day, no matter how it harmed our business, this is merely the stuff of business school case studies. I'm pretty sure this post includes things on the "what not to do" list.
Love in the Time of Cliché
It's easy to throw around the word "love." Just like it's easy to talk about "making lemonade out of lemons," or to describe a process of renewal as "a phoenix rising from the ashes."
While Direct-ICE and ICE-Alert are the ascendants of DataSkinny, the line between parent and child is far from straight. As our company, Thinking Cap Solutions, grew, we moved beyond supply chain management analytics—sending small tendrils into the finance, sales, marketing, and investor communities.
The branding hiccup gave me a much-needed excuse to wind down older projects and to begin building something of much greater utility. More importantly, I was free from every developer's ever-tightening creative box: having to build on top of existing products and technical infrastructure. DataSkinny can be whatever I want it to be—capturing the same spirit from when the original ICE products were sharp, exceedingly useful, and ahead of the curve.
For me, the use of the moniker DataSkinny is still new. I like it, but I won't say I love it. Not yet. That will take getting to know it better—and earning that feeling through a healthy amount of sweat equity.
And In the End...
There are a few final things you should know. First, my partner, Elizabeth Baatz, continues to bring her invaluable interpersonal skills to our work. You can build the most brilliant economic data application in the world, but if no one knows it exists, it can't help anyone.
Second, I must again acknowledge Jack O'Connor's support during the "Footnote Years." Jack was a rare, exceptional person. He has passed on, but the time Elizabeth and I spent with him sticks like superglue to my brain.
Last but not least, there are the two Lindas: Linda Stallman and Linda Church. Linda Stallman bequeathed us a generous sum that funded half the computing power behind the original ICE products. Linda Church came into the story later, helping us transform our print-only editions into an online digital resource—one of the very earliest available.
