How to find a good domain name

Names should be short and memorable.
But naming things is, hard.
Finding a good name? Tough.
Getting one with a domain?
Well ... It feels down right impossible.
Especially, if you have trouble naming variables like me.

Key Insights

The endowment effect and how to reduce it
Word pairing for availability, credibility, and marketability
The right domain extension

Hi hackers, I'm Dian.

This all started about a month ago, when I finally started my own company!
It's been long overdue, so I filed the paperworks and got a domain.
But.
When my friend asked me about it at Starbucks,
I had to lower my head, sip some matcha, and try to hide the embarrassment of a name.
That's when I knew,

I done goofed.

So to learn from my mistake and create a better name, I wanted to see some examples. I wanted to know how other people came up with names. But it turns out, I'm not alone in my misery, and naming, is a skill.

You're not going to believe this.

Steven Paul Jobs, yup, Steve Jobs, wanted to call the iMac ... the 'MacMan'.
Issy Sharp wanted to create the 'Thunderbird Inn'. But that was taken. So he named it Four Seasons.
And Phil Knight, at the very last minute, before his shoes goes into production, decided to call it Nike.
Oh, what was the name he himself came up with?
Dimension Six.

Imagine.
Running in a pair of Dimension Six.
Working on a MacMan.
Or vacationing at a Thunderbird.
Yuck.

So why are people bad at naming? Two things:

lack of imagination
the endowment effect

The Endowment Effect

Paul Graham (PG) observed that startup founders get caught up with a name, that they don't have a dot-com for. Founders would think, X is what we are, we're not going to change it. X was their identity. And people don't change their identity.

A psychological bias is at play here, when we're naming something new or stick with a name we really like.
It's the endowment effect: a thing becomes more valuable, just because you possess it. Studies have shown people would name a higher price for their item, but they would not pay such a price to obtain it.

You came up with a name that sounds good, and you don't want to lose it.
(At least that's how I got a name I didn't like.)

So how do we prevent it? Two solutions.

PG:
"Imagine you'd called it something else.
If you had, surely you'd be just as attached to that name as you are to your current one.
Then the idea of switching to your current name would seem repellent." Pretty solid advice.

Mine:
Let ChatGPT do it.
I can't suffer from the endowment effect if I didn't come up with the name.
Genius!

The only problem is ...
there's a problem 😂.

So let's talk about the lack of imagination.

Word Pairing

The internet land grab started all the way back in the 1900s, well, 1984 to be precise lol.
But that's 4 DECADES ago!
That means other people already had 40 years to grab their domain. All the obvious ones are gone. What you thought of just now is what hundreds of thousands of people already thought of. You HAVE to come up with something that no one got in the past 40 years. That's the name of the game.

But there IS a simple trick here.
Word pairing.
AKA combine what you do or who you are with another word.

Want a great example?
Indie Hackers!
NomadList, RemoteOk, TherapistAI.
People know what you're about.

Which leads me to the 3 advantages of word pairing:

Availability
Credibility
Marketability
Availability.
Straight up. More combinations means you're more likely to get it.

Credibility.
It signals to a stranger what you're about, building some trust instantly.

Marketability.
People can associate the problem with the solution (you). E.g. DesignJoy or General Motors.

Right. Fairly obvious.
So how do I get started?

Questions.
What is my favorite color?
What's my favorite animal?
What's my favorite Greek hero that I liked hearing about but turned out to be a tyrant?

The purpose of these questions is to prompt the mind. This will generate some modifier we can use.
Let's say, you do consulting.
ABC consulting ->

Gold Consulting,
Consulting Bear,
Sisyphus Consulting
Well, in my defense, it's hard to make consulting sound good, but you get the idea.
Don't just stare at a blank page, boost your imagination, have some prompts for your thinking.

"Almost any word pair that is not an obviously bad name is a sufficiently good one" - PG

By now you should have some good domain names, but there's one more trick you can pull.

Extensions/TLDs

The last card up your sleeve should be the top-level domains (TLD), e.g. .com, .net, .io etc.
Everyone uses .com, because it's the default.
But if you know your target audience well, you could start exploring some other TLDs. Just know, when people verbally ask where they can find you online, you'd have to say 'xxx dot app' or 'xxx dot io'.
You don't have to do that with a 'dot com'.

Here are some examples:

If you're a e-commerce reaching to consumers, a .store might do the trick. https://mrbeast.store/
If you target gamers, maybe a .gg. https://www.op.gg/, https://ping.gg/
Have an application? .app. https://linear.app/
Building an AI SaaS? Try the TLD from Anguilla, .ai.

Thanks for reading!

I hope this was helpful for you, and you can save some time and embarrassment launching your MVP! You still have plenty of hard work ahead of you. But naming should not be one of them.

If you're interested, I built a tool just for this: Name Capy.
Shameless plug.
But it's free!
Well, until my OpenAI credits run out lol.
You can try it out here:

https://namecapy.com/

And yes, I used it to name itself. It combined the service I'm providing, 'naming', and my love of 'capybaras'.

Name Capy
Find a domain name you're happy with.