The idea had been sitting around for a while. What actually moved it forward was picking a name, because until something has a name it stays an idea you talk about rather than a thing you build.
Naming is mostly elimination
Every good name I came up with was already taken by somebody in an adjacent industry. Anything with Intelli in it was out. Cortex, Sage, Logic, Mentor, all had real companies attached. Two names I liked, Intelox and Elby, turned out to belong to an existing software firm and a registered trademark from 2002 respectively.
Buntelli came out of my own surname and survived the checks: no exact match on the UK trademark register, nothing similar in a relevant class, no company using it anywhere I could find, and both the .com and .co.uk available for less than the price of a takeaway. I bought the .co.uk that evening.
The product names followed the same pattern. BuntelliSystems for the company, then BuntelliBuild, BuntelliTrace and BuntelliData for the three parts. Same root, different job, and each one still recognisable if you only see the logo.
The logo is one shape with one variable
The mark is a fork: a root node splitting into two. It is the shape of a decision, which is the shape of the whole product. The left branch is always a plain dot in every version, and only the right branch changes per product. That way the family reads as a family even at favicon size.
Typography is IBM Plex Sans for the name and IBM Plex Mono for the product suffix. They are designed as one family, so they cannot clash, and the mono suffix makes the product name read like a technical tag rather than a second word. Both are free.
Then the afternoon I lost to a file upload
Getting a holding page online should be the easy part. I built a single page, put it on Cloudflare Pages, pointed the domain at it, and it went live. Then I made a change, uploaded the folder again through the dashboard, and the site started returning a 404 while the dashboard cheerfully reported that every file had uploaded successfully.
The cause was the browser based folder upload not reliably preserving the directory structure. Uploading a zip file instead fixed it immediately. Nothing in the interface hinted at this.
The same upload path also quietly broke the signup form. I had written a small serverless function to capture email addresses, and through that route it was being served as a plain static file rather than being recognised as a function, so every submission failed. Rather than keep fighting it, I swapped the form over to a free third party form service. It worked first time and needed no backend at all.
What I took from it
The lesson is not about Cloudflare. It is that the failure reported to you is often several steps away from the thing that is actually broken, and that the tool telling you everything is fine is not evidence that everything is fine. Which, now I write it down, is the entire premise of the software I am building.