How to find a good domain name

General mechanics to adhere by

1. People and machines default to “.com”: Your aunt and your iPhone will both default to “.com” when they search for your company. Right, wrong, or indifferent, you don’t want to be a victim of auto-correct. More on the importance of “.com” later.

2. 15 characters or less: No one cares you named your company after your favorite paragraph from War and Peace. You are not that clever and I don’t want to type it out.

3. Easy to spell: If you use the words Definently or Truley in your company name, there’s a 75% chance I’ll never find you.

4. Easy to say: Imagine you’re trying to say it to your grandmother phonetically over the phone. You get it.

5. Avoid number and letter combos: Do I search for SentinelOne or Sentinel1? I still don’t know and it gives me anxiety.

6. Avoid repeating letters: I once thought about buying a domain for “Bell Lap” (like the last lap in a race), thinking it would be a cool name for an angel investing group. But I realized it would have three L’s in a row (belllap.com) and look like someone fell asleep on the keyboard.

7. Avoid Hyphens: They’re tough to express to someone verbally: “Have you seen this new site Survey-Monkey? There’s a hyphen in there by the way, between the ‘Survey’ and the ‘Monkey.’”

8. Don’t Paint Your Self Into A Box: You want to be specific enough to attract the right audience, but not so specific that there’s little wiggle room for product or topic expansion. I’m attempting to give myself more freedom in choosing mostlymetrics over onlymetrics.

9. Avoid words that can be “misused”: Like most middle schoolers trying to add new cleats to my Christmas list, I discovered the hard way that Dicks Sporting Goods does not own the shorter version of the domain

10. Don't spend too much time on it: At the end of the day, you still have to go and run a business

If you found this at all useful, I write about business metrics and other business stuff at mostlymetrics.com