The name
Why we are called Atum.
Every company name is an argument about what the company is for. This one is four thousand years old, and it turned out to describe the problem exactly.
01 The story
A god who made himself out of nothing.
Atum is the creator god of Heliopolis, from the oldest layer of Egyptian religion. His name is built on a root, tm, that means completeness, or totality. He is the one who contains every element of creation inside himself before any of it has separated out into separate things.
He was self-created. Nobody made him. He rose by his own force out of Nun, the formless water that was there before there was anything else.
He came up as the benben: the first mound of solid ground breaking the surface of that water. Later the Egyptians carved it as a single pyramid-shaped stone. It is the first firm thing in a world that had nothing firm in it.
And he is the setting sun, in the particular moment it sinks past the western horizon and goes into the Duat, the night. He fathered the first two gods, Shu and Tefnut, and stands at the head of the Ennead of Heliopolis.
That is all of it. We have not added anything to the mythology to make it fit better.
02 What we took from it
Four ideas, and what each one made us do.
Completeness
A trades business does not have a phone problem, a quoting problem and a website problem. It has one problem wearing six coats, and every job that gets lost gets lost in the gap between two of them. So Atum is one system, not six products with an integration menu.
It is also why this website looks the way it does. One type scale, one spacing rhythm, one set of parts used everywhere. A company arguing for completeness cannot ship a site that was obviously assembled out of bits.
Order out of formless water
Nun is the version of a trades business that runs on memory. The missed call nobody knew about. The quote that was going to be sent on Sunday. The customer somebody was definitely going to ring back. It is not laziness. It is what always happens when the work lives in people's heads and the heads are on a roof.
Atum is the ground under that. Everything gets written down as it happens, so nothing depends on anybody remembering. The picture at the top of the home page is the same idea: scattered marks resolving into one ordered line.
The setting sun
Where the colours come from. Deep blue above the line, warm light at it. The whole palette sits at the horizon at dusk, and every page on this site has a horizon in it somewhere.
It is also literally what we sell. The hours after the sun goes down are the hours your competitors are not answering their phones.
The benben
The mark at the top of this page. A low mound of solid ground, with the horizon cutting across it just above the base. Most of it standing clear of the water, some of it still under. Two shapes and nothing else. That is all it is, and it is all it needs to be.
What you will not find here
There are no hieroglyphs on this website and there never will be. No ankhs, no pyramids, no gold, no sand. The mythology is how we think about the problem; it is not a costume. If you had not read this page you would just have seen a company with a short name and a horizon in its logo, which is exactly right.
03 Who this is
Two of us, and you will deal with both.
There is no account manager between you and the people who build the thing. When you call about something that went wrong at three in the morning, you are talking to whoever wrote the rule that got it wrong.
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Angelo Van Cotthem
CEO and Founder
Photograph to come
Five years in web3, running business development for the listing team at a top-20 global exchange. Start-ups the whole way through: building them, selling for them, and keeping the relationships that come out of both. Atum is what that experience is for.
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Zino Esseling
Co-Founder, COO
Photograph to come
Sales representative for one of Belgium's leading supermarket chains, then three years in web3 as a listing agent. He and Angelo have known each other since birth and their families still do, which is a longer working relationship than most companies this size have behind them.
Two photographs, one of each of us, taken properly. Nothing bought from a stock library will ever go here.
- Where
- Belgium first, then the rest of Europe and the United States. Belgium first because that is where Angelo is from: a shared language and a shared way of doing business get further than a bigger market.
- Languages
- Dutch and English, spoken and written, including everything the system says to your customers.
- Trades
- Plumbing, electrical, HVAC, refrigeration, roofing, industrial maintenance. And anything else that runs vans, answers a phone, quotes work and has to chase people.
04 The awkward part
What we would say if you asked us the hard question.
The hard question is: why would I let anything other than a person answer my phone at night?
The honest answer is that you should make us prove it before it matters. Start with the out-of-hours calls only, keep your main number exactly as it is, and listen to every recording for the first two weeks. There will not be many. If any of them are wrong you will know immediately, and pointing the number back at your voicemail takes an afternoon.
We would rather you tested it that way than took our word for it. Judge it on recordings of your own calls. That is the only evidence that is actually about your business.