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Finding names for your startup

16 points by jwoz ↗ HN
I'm trying to figure out a name for my startup. In two cases, the same has been swiped from me by third party. A name helps provide focus and reason least of which identity. How are people choosing their names and where, what process? I'm at the gallows.

18 comments

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gscott
https://www.tdnam.com/trphome.aspx look under closeouts and do a search on expiring auctions.

I have found some really excellent domains in there such as AskShare.com, RealtyGoLive.com, SharedList.com, and ShareCircle.com.

dkokelley
In two cases, the same has been swiped from me by third party

Are you saying that you had a great idea for a name (domain name I assume) only to find that it's registered moments before you would have registered it, or that it was already registered?

What really bugged me when I was looking for a name was the fact that 90%+ of the domains I thought would be any good were being squatted on by a generic page. Nobody seems to have told these people that you can't expect to get $1,000,000 for a catchy name anymore.

jwoz
That's cool. Thanks. I realize the name won't make the startup, but it's enough for me to give me direction without deviation from my idea. Network solutions has stolen two of my domains and are now squatting. I'm thinking about raising the issue further if i can.

That's a great link you posted btw. I'm using a perl script now solely to search domain names now through cpan module.

edw519
"give me direction without deviation from my idea"

Then use the name you like but is already taken as your "working name" to keep you focused. Rename it later at launch.

(My working name is "Back Pocket", always reminding me that with this software in my back pocket, nothing can stop me. Of course, that will NOT be the name of my company.)

slackerIII
Can't you just remove some vowels from a descriptive name? Or is that passé by now? :)
dood
Many of those (the good and obvious ones) are registered/squatted by now.
edw519
"I'm at the gallows."

Why?

I've come up with at least 200 names for my startup. Alas, 180 of them were taken. But that still leaves me with 20 candidates. I claimed the best 5, and when I launch, I'll just keep the one (and any derivatives).

The trick is, until you launch, you're never done naming your company. I still write down one or two names per week and review them later. Surprising how bad a great name is a week later.

Naming your startup is like everything else in your startup. Perservere. Perservere.

staunch
I think it's pretty good to start with describing what your product will do and then come up with plays on it that are unique. YCombinator is a cleverly descriptive way of naming a company that starts companies. I believe Google's name comes from the idea that it's indexing a huge number of pages. It'd be lame to have called Google BigNumberofIndexPages.com or YC CompanyThatStartsCompanies.com. So aim for clever and inside humor that will give it personality.
misterbwong
Not the most efficient, but here was my process:

1. List 100 things about your company and what you want it to represent.

2. Throw that into an application with custom rename logic (i.e. remove vowels, flip words, replace similar sounding letters, etc)

3. Run the list against taken domains

4. Code in some random simple removal logic based on the letters

5. Comb through remaining by hand.

Olgaar
In our case, we asked friends and associates who were familiar with our product to provide descriptive keywords. We ran through those until we had a short list of names we liked. Of course most addresses were taken, but we didn't stop there, we made the effort to contact the current owners. Which required a /whois + some creative googling.

We actually found one owner who said he might be willing to sell it, but he didn't have a clue how to transfer it or even price it. We walked him through the process and he even offered it to us at a fraction of the assessed value because he said, "that price was just too much!"

We were thrilled when we landed http://realphotography.com