Jay's first attempt at a brand name for the newsletter/business, "Infinite Creator" (built around the idea of James Carse's "infinite games"), had to be scrapped before it ever launched once he realized the phrase already had a strong, unrelated meaning.

“I didn't realize that the term "infinite creator" was used to refer to peoples' concept of God.”

The chosen name collided with an existing, widely used meaning of the phrase, which he only discovered after the visual brand and design work were essentially done.

“It was used kind of a lot”

The "Creative Companion" brand name (used for roughly 12-18 months) never landed the way Jay wanted; he later called it his own brand failure.

“Creative Companion did not test well.”

When he shared the name with people, the reaction was consistently flat, and he came to believe the name didn't signal legitimacy or clearly connect to the word "creator."

“No one cared. It didn't elicit any type of emotional response at all”

After finishing his first Unreal Collective cohort in September 2017, Jay had no buffer built in before the next one and no other paid work lined up.

“At the end of September 2017, I wrapped up my first cohort of Unreal.”

He'd left no time to run another cohort before the holidays and had no client pipeline behind it, which combined with being out of cash from the just-finished cohort to put him in a real financial crisis.

“There was not enough time to run another accelerator before the holidays”