How did you guys name your startup? | Hacker News Reader

How did you guys name your startup?

10 pointsterpua35 comments

Expiring domains, dude.

Several hours on Instant Domain Search, eventually finding one that was expiring, slapping down $18 at GoDaddy, and waiting patiently for it to finally be released. That's how we got lalife.com and, just today, localgo.com for our upcoming site.

Okay, actually, we got LALife.com directly from GoDaddy a few months before they started auctioning off such domains. But localgo.com just flat-out expired, was picked up by two domain kiters for a week or so, then was completely available.

There are a lot of names that expire every day. Maybe you don't want hearcon.com, lolmat.com, gotajet.com, gotomit.com or liewell.com (all available since two days ago), but hey, somebody once did for some reason. It's worth considering.

Admittedly, you want to avoid ambiguous sites with expired domains, since you often can't grab alternate spellings. True story: one of my friends is the founder of a startup called Flixor, and I was dumbfounded to discover one morning that TechCrunch had a story on Flikzor. With a Z and a freakin' K! People, people! So you may want to cover your bases as much as possible for the simple fact that names as scarce as they are.

I don't know a good site for searching through expired domains securely, though. Anyone have a suggestion?

After involving a few startups myself, I've a few advices to give you all:

1. Try hard to make a name that is not more than Three syllables: see how Apple names their names from corporate name "Apple" to products like "iPod", "iTunes", "WebObjects", etc. Chances are, you'll chain your company name with another product: "Apple iPod". So keep it SHORT!!

2. Make sure you speak the name 100 times to yourself, just make sure it is easy to say. Imagine your operator has to say "Welcome to XXX" thousand times a day.

3. Make sure non-English speakers can speak it easily, and not embarrased. So please, no weird "Z" or other tricky accent. If your Chinese/Japanese/Korean/French/Italian friends have no problem speaking, you're A-Okay, otherwise do it again.

4. Make sure you get the name right the first time. It is pain in the butt to change company name later.... bank accounts, merchant accounts, address, and other paperwork will drive you crazy. I learned it the hard way.

On a side note, I run a little online flower shop that is catered to a smaller market in Asia. We named it fleur.hk instead of some super long abc-flower-shop.com names. Well, I can tell you we have the shortest flower shop name in Asia, super easy to remember. No problem getting traffic whatsoever.

So if your company only focus for a specific country, go ahead to use some their .com TLDs.

Yould (http://ygingras.net/yould) Uses Markov chains to generate pronouncable random names. I can't reccomend it enough. What do you guys think?

A lot of the generated names are "funky" to say the least. Here's one I generated a minute ago...

mone mordengdom forcer sperichad whor prined Allas allonexpet yough hichery

One trick I've used is to listen & prompt youngsters to talk. Early speech requires mimicry of sounds. But listening to words for the first time doesn't always yield results. So you get a sort of 'human understandable babble' that sounds like a word, but isn't.

The result is unique, understandable. Sometimes it works, other times it might sound like something straight off the Teletubbies. It's better than trying to make one up out of thin air.

Thanks! Now at last I understand the source of the current crop of incomprehensible business names ;-)

'... incomprehensible business names ...'

Cruel but pretty close to the mark. Never thought of it that way. Of course you could use the total utilitarian method favoured by Chinese companies ( I've observed this on industrial equipment & stores direct from the Chinese manufacturers ) of "Stamp Mill #14" or "Foundry #4".

The real problem is the broken domain name system. If you have a company you need a domain name that matches. Yet domain name companies create tools to let you buy names that are similiar to squatters who buy them up. This ties up domain names and hence the problem in name choice.

My favourite geeky product naming technique was Andrew Tridgewell of Samba, RSync who had to think up a word for his new SMB (Server Message Block) protocol. Solution? Simply grep for smb against the system dictionary on his system. Samba was chosen. ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samba_software#History

useful:

http://instantdomainsearch.com/

I find this sometimes gives incorrect results, as if my fast typing speed and slow link speed cause problems, especially if I backspace multiple times to remove characters from the end.

I've had false positives because of this, i.e. I've gone away thinking "that's it, and it's available" only to find out the next day from WHOIS that it's been registered for months.

So, double-check any you really like with whois(1) or similar.

I have found that finding "available" domain names is close to impossible these days... some people get really creative with it though.

Has anyone started looking at european extensions like .es, .pl, .lv etc... ? Domains like imin.lv ha!

How would a foreign extension affect user search results? Would you show up in a US search if you're under .es?

I think the problem is that people would still just use the .com domain, so your marketing investments would simply benefits your competitors.

Which makes me think, what is the default behavior of browsers? Surprisingly many people only type the company name into the url field (without www or .com) - I think then they are at the mercy of msn search?

Having the exact domain name to the company or product name is actually not necessary.

Example: 37signal's Basecamp is basecamphq.com. This creates more possibilities.

You really want to own the .com, I think. Some URL's for foreign countries are pretty cool, but if people don't quite remember the name, they're going to attach a .com at the end.

I recently tried PickyDomains.com, which was a suggestion from news.ycombinator. My task was an "umbrella page" - I am tired of this domain name problem, so I figured I need something like google or yahoo - when they create a new service, they just create a subdomain (maps.google.com, answers.yahoo.com, whatever.google.com...).

What PickyDomains came up with is Artifia.com (since I mentioned artificial intelligence, I guess). So here is my question to news.yc: what do you think about that name? I am not a native speaker, so it is hard for me to judge (sounds good in German, not even sure how it would be pronounced in english). I think the name could grow on me.

It's not bad, as a native English speaker. Is it arty-fee-a or ar-tiff-ia?

Thanks - in german I would think artyfeea, but in english I think it would be pronounced artiffia?

Yes, as a native English speaker I'd assume arTIFFia as the pronounciation.

It's a challenging process.... I was consumed by it for months--every word I saw was a potential name. Finally one of my inspirations paid off and I found an open domain I liked (fluther.com).

My only advice is to open your mind to lots of ideas, and try and find a name which will match your branding.

A great tool (I wish I knew about when I was starting): http://ajaxwhois.com

"It came to me in a dream."

But seriously...it did come to me while I was sleeping:

The subconscious mind is phenomenally powerful. It is best harnessed, for some people, through meditation or sleep.

Frankly, I was amazed the URL(s) were still available.

(Truncated spelling of core concepts is all.)

We focused on making sure our name was memorable and easy to spell. It's a bit goofy, but I'm pretty sure if you saw it briefly in an article or overheard someone talking about the site you'd be able to easily find it later.

And no, I'm not ready to share the name yet. :)

Technology startup names normally depends on available domain names. Try our domain naming service http://grabagooddomain.com We have helped some other startups.

Lacking any imagination, I named my startup, Xackup, since we were doing X different kinds of backup (outlook, web-based, ical, storage agnostic, mobile, etc.) across X different platforms/devices.

I like the name and it looks nice in print, but I think a good test would be to tell someone verbally to go to xackup.[tld] and see if they spell it right.

Xackup is not the best name from a pronounciation point of view :(

For some reason when I see that I think of Yackup, i.e. cat barf.

I had my heart set on another domain, whose owner wanted to rent it to me. That sounded like a really bad arrangement to me, so I finally found a domain that wasn't taken, ourdoings.com.

I took one of my favorite Rush songs and put 'soft' after it. Bravadosoft. I think this gives the company instant credibility with the right kind of folks. :)

Easy. Just think of an awesome, super-cool name and check WhoIs. Repeat until you finally decide on something that sounds so stupid, nobody has taken it yet.

1) Started out with a list of descriptive "taglines".

2) Modified various words/merged/played with them.

3) Searched availability of .com domains.

I just asked a bunch of friends for possible names. One suggested MyGrub.com. Unfortunately, that was taken, so I settled for MyGrub.net

I got really lucky and scored a recently unregistered domain name, hivgene.com (nothing there yet)

That's one thing most of us hope we DON'T get when we "score".

:) in this case, the "HIV Gene" is something you would want to have

I wonder if gene therapy could make us immune to ALL viral STDs. That would rock. So would girl robots.

Woops, I guess downmodders felt left out -- girl AND boy robots.

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