Hi there,

Before I start – a bunch of you replied POP-UP last episode. Turns out a lot of you are already running Engage, and a few of you are still on plugins that don’t have exit-intent at all. Genuinely useful to know. Thank you. If you need any help setting up Icegram Engage do let me know in the reply. 

Now, here’s the next episode of ‘Where it started’. The typo one, as promised.

1997. Two Stanford students. One very large number.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin were building a search engine. It was called BackRub – not exactly built for the history books.

They wanted a name that captured the scale of what they were trying to organize: the entire internet. A classmate suggested “googolplex.” 

Page liked the shorter version – “googol,” the mathematical term for a 1 followed by 100 zeros.

Their friend Sean Anderson sat down to check if the domain was free.

He typed it wrong.

Instead of googol, he searched google. Nobody had taken it. Page liked how it looked. They registered it that same day – September 15, 1997.

Nobody ever went back to fix the spelling. Nobody ever went back to fix the spelling. The “mistake” is the company.

Here’s the part that gets skipped in the fun-fact version.

They didn’t test ten names and pick the best one. They picked the one that was available at the exact moment someone happened to check and it turned out to be better than the one they’d actually planned.

The deliberate version “googol” was never used. Not because it was wrong. Because nobody ever got the chance to compare it against the accident.

That’s when I thought… Most of the time, we never find out if our “planned” version was actually the best one. We just ship it, because it’s the only version we made.

This is the exact gap Icegram Genie exists to close.

Not by replacing your judgment… but by giving you a second version to hold up against your own, in seconds, for free effort.

Describe what you want – “re-engage subscribers who haven’t opened in 60 days, warm and honest, low-pressure CTA” and Genie writes a full draft. You still decide if it’s better than what you’d have written. But now you actually get to compare, instead of just shipping the only version that existed.

It lives right inside Express… so if you’re already using Express, there’s no new dashboard to learn.

Try it on your next subject line. Write your own version first, the way you normally would. Then ask Genie for one. Don’t pick either yet, just look at both, side by side, for a minute. That’s the whole experiment.

One more thing before I let you go…

…because I don’t want this story to leave you with the wrong lesson.

A typo gave Google its name. It didn’t give Google its twenty-seven years of relentless, unglamorous execution… the ranking algorithm, the infrastructure, the thousands of small decisions that turned a lucky domain into a word people use as a verb.

The accident opened the door. Everything after that was intentional.

And maybe that’s the more useful lesson for us.

You don’t need to replace your first idea. You just need to give yourself a chance to see a second one.

That’s really what Genie is for: not making the decision for you, but making sure you’re not making it with only one option on the table.

And honestly, what better time to talk about that than Google’s birthday month? 🎉

Google officially turns 27 on September 27 – which makes this story feel particularly well-timed.

So, next time you’re about to hit publish, send an email, or settle on a subject line, try this:

Write your version. Then make one more.

You might still choose the first one.

But at least this time, you’ll know why.

And…

What do you think the next episode will be about? Any guesses?

By the way, if you were Larry Page in 1997, would you have kept “googol” or chosen “google”?

📌 P.S. Reply GOOGOL or GOOGLE. I’m genuinely curious which one you’d pick. 

Until next time,