Show HN: Namegine – find a name for your startup or product | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Namegine – find a name for your startup or product

namegine.com

121 pointskiechu72 comments

Quick thoughts:

-The pitch line makes it sound like it assesses the 'quality' of the name rather than it's availability/similarity. I was expecting something that would 'rate' a name based on some kind of popularity or sentiment score.

-Im not really a fan of the name, which is a problem that stands out when your product is about good names. "Namegine" parses strangely, I think my brain's looking for another "n" to complete the word "engine" and keeps wanting to pronounce this word "Namm-Egg-Inn". Honestly, I think just NameEngine would be a better name. Obviously very subjective though.

I think the latter point is somewhat subjective indeed. I was reading it as an almost-anagram of "imagine" and also "name genie" :)

> -Im not really a fan of the name, which is a problem that stands out when your product is about good names. "Namegine" parses strangely, I think my brain's looking for another "n" to complete the word "engine" and keeps wanting to pronounce this word "Namm-Egg-Inn". Honestly, I think just NameEngine would be a better name. Obviously very subjective though.

Absolutely, at the risk of bike shedding, for a German/English speaker this parses really strangely. The parent comment nailed the problems I have looking for another missing consonant.

NameNgine?

I find naming anything where:

- lastletter of first word

- firstletter of last word

are the same thing gets confusing.

nameengine.com

Maybe this is just me, but I went as far as selecting my first phone number so that it's easy to remember as well

I also stuttered in my mind while parsing the name.

The feedback being subjective doesn't detract from it at all since that's all there is.

I think it's a great hack way to collect ideas from others and execute them. I should do something like this when I out of ideas.

I beliebe that idea is only a couple of % of the new venture. People and their ability to execute is the vast majority of any business success. You know, no one would pith in front of the investors if they were afraid of being robbed by investors. Eventually our mission is to protect our users IP, not steal it from them...

For counterpoint, I think the name is fine. It's a portmanteau of "name" and "engine" and made immediate sense to me.

Thanks, that was our intention indeed. Yet, the comments above yours made us realised that there is a long way ahead of us with building a great product.

”Nameinator” had a nice ring to it.

My mind jumped to pronouncing it as Name-Genie, thinking it was a reference to a genie in a bottle that would spit out a startup name for you.

> thinking it was a reference to a genie in a bottle that would spit out a startup name for you

I thought the exact same thing. I was surprised when it asked me to type in a name. Wary of what would happen next, I used the name of a competitor! :-)

The name is horrible. I had no idea that it would lookup trademarks. Once I saw what it did I came away impressed.

I saw something with engine in there too. And I think we’re supposed to(?).

You can almost read it like NGINX / NameGINX ... ah, Name(en)Gine

Though of course I’ve put far more thought into that then anyone else likely will.

I thought it was going to be something where you type in a theme word and it adds -ly or .io on the end.

I'm pleasantly surprised at what it turned out to be.

Congrats on the launch.

I run Namevine.com and have for 6+ years. It does much of the same thing.

Did you not consider naming clashes/confusion yourselves when creating the product?

It's nice to meet competitors. We have run the name against trademarks databases. The product was not ready when we registered our domain, but that's valuable feedback, to look out for similar domains.

Thanks for the reply, likewise.

And to echo another question in the comments, how is the name pronounced exactly? On reading it, it seems "gine" is likely pronounced "jin" or "gin" as in "engine".

That was the intention. It was meant as an engine for names.

This is a nice tool for domain names. I didn't find any as complete as yours when it comes to generate potential .com domains

For personal / social media link names I use https://namechk.com/ to see the full listings of every software.

I like the idea, but all I am getting is "Searching... Please Wait"

Even without seeing results, though - looking for an existing business name in the state you want to register your company would also be useful.

We are experiencing some issues with a hosting providing we try to figure out.

a free lambda node or generic compute instance could run this site and do everything its trying to do

it can't check for twitter profiles?

oh brother..

We run it on Heroku on production quality dynos. Heroku came out to be a bottle neck. Moving things to lambda is an option we will seriously consider. Checking for, Twitter as well.

What happened then? It was able to serve the site but not do API calls, so no mem-cache in front of your database? The Redis mem-cache didn't flush itself when full?

The site is served via AWS CloudFront. It is SPA app hosted on S3. The API is on Heroku. No mem-cache anywhere. To search we use ElasticSearch hosted on AWS. We bump up the specs to speed it up but that was not the core problem.

I suspect Heroku Postgres DB. We didn't used some Hobby version and I think it is the real bottle neck + some unnecessary middleware for the API that also requires DB.

maybe a mem-cache then?

DB's have limited connections and are often billed as such, the mem-cache might help if there are any repeatable things. It might not be useful for your solution though since everyone searches for their own things all the time.

Increasing DB plan did the job.

Seems broken on mobile. Android Chrome. Cant click anyt hi ing to proceed. Neat concept. I'll try it on my mac...

don't have mobile version yet, sorry.

Thanks for following up,

I tried it on my mac ( looked good) but as you/your teammate reported, it is having issues getting data back from the API, every call is returning a 502

Not my area of expertise but it would be functional if I could just resize it. It seems locked on this zoom level. But I’m of the opinion that desktop UI on mobile is just fine because I know how to zoom, if I’m allowed.

Same on iOS.

Slightly related, I made this name generator that will make up words so you are unlikely to run into something that already exists: [link redacted]

It uses a couple of different techniques, I'd love to add more if you have any!

Very cool, I want to dig a little deeper into that when I'm not on mobile. That was spitting out some of the best generated names I've seen, they weren't all good but they were all pronouncable for an English speaker.

Thanks for the comment. Sorry to disapoint you but the names you see in the first section of our tool are not generated names. These are the names of similar names already registered as a trademark with United Stated Patent & Trademark Office. So you can check if there are any conflicting trade names (trademarks) to the one you are searching.

> Swogbyksjylf

Doesn't exactly roll off the tongue..

:-D it has its ups and downs..

In the few seconds I used it, it was pretty frustrating trying to copy a 'word' as it scrolled up rapidly. Consider implementing a way to pause (or delay) generating new words.

I'm not sure what facebook availability means - the term I searched for says "available" but the account name is taken. Does it mean something else (page name? I'm not very familiar with facebook..)

Yes. It checks if a Facebook Page url for a given name is free.

Idea: once you have a steady stream of users, automate some domain name squatting. Buy the cheap ones (.xyz, .website, etc.) for every name, then threaten submitters with libel blogs unless they pay up.

I think it would rather be short-time revenue stream... We aim for a long-term relationship with our future customers :)

Although I am sure your intentions are pure, he raises a valid point. I think you'd benefit from making it apparent that "we won't steal or squat you name" somewhere on the landing page.

I think it's a fantastic idea, keep up the good work.

Thanks. That's valid point. We are against front running or black hat SEO. That's not the place we want to be.

Honestly, if I saw that message I wouldn't trust it.

Immediately I assumed they would be doing this, but used it anyway. If the message was there, I would not have.

You forgot to add the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header to your api:

Failed to load https://api.namegine.com/api/v1/*: No 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin' header is present on the requested resource. Origin 'https://namegine.com' is therefore not allowed access. The response had HTTP status code 503.

We had API cached by ClodFront. In the process of troubleshooting we turned it off and we attached frontend directly to API. There should be CORS headers though. The problem was more scalability problem. It's too soon to say for sure, but getting rid of some middleware and scaling Heroku Dynos helped.

I presume "ClodFront" was a typo, but given the frustrations I've had with it myself, I'm not certain.

Yup, CloudFront. Less typo more like Freudian slip. :D

Hard to trust a naming product with such a clumsy name itself.

I love the idea! Everybody has projects (for fun, hobby, or serious projects) and you see it all the time were the name is already used by [insert other large library/project] or it translates poorly in another language [becomes the word "poop" or something].

This is really cool! :D

This worked perfectly for me with a couple of project names I've got. Was glad to see no one trademarked it and the words mean about the same thing in most languages. So thanks!

FYI: div.contactUs panel that says "Interested in Trademark Registration" is covered by the namesearch-Hintcontainer with its z-index of 500. It also gets especially screwy on narrow screen width, and obscures the footer text. So I hope you can make some quick CSS adjustments there.

Nice service.

I love this. With the excessive use of dictionary words it's nice that there is now a way to search so that hopefully people will stop naming projects "Hydrogen" since there are 376 pages worth of results for it. lol

having lots of problems interacting with the site on FireFox Nightly. Can't close the subscription banner for example.

Thanks. We will look into that.

If any of you guys want to get product updates, just drop me a line at maciej@namegine.com (no spam policy).

Oh how well I remember "Namerazor"..."so good it named itself".

Anyone else hits on the link above and gets nothing?

We are still working on resolving hosting problems. Some improvements should be already visible. You should see more improvement soon.

We got stability. We had to remove a middleware, increase number of Heroku Dynos to ridiculous amount and we had to change Whois provider.

Don't see yet

What browser do you use?

Chrome. Your site is still not working

That's strange. We see on analytics that app works correctly. Is is mobile or desktop Chrome? What kind of error do you get?

It’s working on my iPhone now. Yesterday I tried from my work desktop.

I tried again from my workplace desktop computer. What I am getting is this →

"This site can’t provide a secure connection namegine.com sent an invalid response. Try running Windows Network Diagnostics. ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR"

Do you opine this has something to do with my firewall? My public IP address is 123.201.232.114.

Thanks.

Tried from Firefox this time. This is what I got →

"Secure Connection Failed

An error occurred during a connection to namegine.com. SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length. Error code: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG

    The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
    Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem."

Same public IP address as below.

Thanks.

2018 and it is unusable on an iPhone SE.

Using it on mobile it's a nightmare

Same, completely broken in both android Firefox and brave. Worked in brave desktop mode, unusable entirely in Firefox. Plus, it didn't seem to offer much utility over a Google search for the name under consideration.

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