

Experiment: Re-naming 31 Startups with the Domain Refinery - bionica
http://blog.bionica.com/2011/08/31/experiment-renaming-31-startups-with-domain-refinery.html

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jrd79
Sounds like a great idea. I have several web sites and I would definitely have
given this a try when trying to find names for those. And I'll give it a try
for the next one.

But I have a couple questions that I didn't find answers for in your article.
They are:

1) For a "typical" case, how many rounds are necessary? I know it all depends
on the particulars, but some bounds would be good to know.

2) I see you have an introductory rate of $5 per round. That seems like an
amazingly good price, assuming the service works. Is that price sustainable,
or will it have to rise to meet costs?

3) Did you use this approach to name your own start-up (Bionica.com)?

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pbh
1) There seem to be two things that impact the number of rounds necessary,
your description and how many names are taken in that area. With the same
description, usually one or two rounds is sufficient to see how well you're
going to do (sometimes you'll get a bad batch of workers, but one or two
rounds is usually enough to smooth the variance). However, if you're changing
little things it might go longer. For example, if I was to do more rounds, I'd
probably add something to the DebtEye description to ask for more "safe
sounding" words, and less sort of sleazy words (e.g., "ez" or "instant").

2) $5 is below cost, our twin goals for the moment are to gather more data
about what sorts of names we can do well on and to get our name out there.
We'll probably do a survey or something later of real buyers to see what the
actual price should be. There's also some raw-ness to the results right now
(e.g., you'll get 2 or 3 good results with 47 bad results) so we're keeping
the price relatively low until we have better automated filtering.

3) Unfortunately, when we were just starting out we didn't have Domain
Refinery (and a naive implementation doesn't work terribly well for reasons I
won't go into). As a result, we did the days of brainstorming followed by
purchasing an overpriced name route. However, we've since used Domain Refinery
for our naming, and in fact, Domain Refinery is named using itself. The top
three names for what is now the Domain Refinery were domainrefinery.com,
nolongernameless.com, and brainstormdomains.com. Ultimately, we liked
domainrefinery.com best because it signaled the refinement aspect that we
wanted to contrast against competitors.

(I'm one of the co-founders.)

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Finbarr
I think this is an interesting and promising concept and I certainly prefer
some of your suggested names to the originals. However, the analysis of result
quality is fairly subjective and in many cases I prefer the original name to
the suggestions. I'm sure others would have different opinions.

Great tool for kicking off an initial brainstorm around names even if you
don't end up using one of the suggestions. In fact, it could even be useful
for gauging an initial reaction to your startup concept.

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pbh
The brainstorming and initial reaction points are two points I actually forgot
to make in the blog post. Thanks!

Regarding brainstorming, I've found that I tend to get locked into one line of
thinking when brainstorming domains, and the workers don't do that (since
they're all different people). As a result, even if the specific proposal by a
worker isn't great, they're often on to an interesting line of domains that I
can continue myself.

Regarding initial reaction, I found that the process of honing a description
to get a good name was actually really similar to honing a pitch describing a
company. When the workers didn't get the concept, they could not produce good
names. Further, the best descriptions start to sound like what-problem-does-
this-solve customer-based pitches for websites.

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jeromeparadis
Our Startup, Buyosphere previously had a name so bad (shwowp for wow in
shopping) that we even won an award for the worst brand name in 2010! Read
about the rebranding here: [http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/15/purchase-sharing-
site-shwow...](http://techcrunch.com/2011/04/15/purchase-sharing-site-shwowp-
becomes-buyosphere-opens-to-the-public/)

We actually crowdsourced domain name suggestions with a lot of suggestions and
the winner wasn't great enough to warrant a name change. We got some free help
from a brand name expert and we finally found a word play around the concept
of replacing "bio" with "buyo". We loved the buyosphere.com domain name since
it represented exactly what we're about. As a bonus we can play around concept
such as a user buyography.

However, the buyosphere.com domain name was taken but amazingly, the owner was
willing to sell it to us for $500. We just was sitting on it and liked what we
wanted to do with it.

Conclusion: we're the proof that you shouldn't put aside taken domain names
being squatted and have nothing to lose to just ask.

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swatthatfly
I think you could add something else to your algorithm. Some of the key words
defining the business are ranked on adwords, so a particular good keyword in
the name will increase the search engine ranking of this new name
significantly. Perhaps you can specify this fit with some stats taken from
adwords.

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pbh
I really like the idea of combining AdWords with domain search, though I'm not
quite sure what the right implementation is.

For example, suppose that there are two domains, "[uniquequery].com" and
"[commonquery].com". Do you think people would prefer the "[uniquequery].com"
because their name will show up at the top when they tell people about it (and
because its more unique)? Or do you think people would prefer
"[commonquery].com" because it will be easier to rank for the competitive
query and there might be more organic traffic?

We had a similar question, trying to decide between "brainstormdomains.com"
(which seems like a much more common query, though I haven't checked) and
"nolongernameless.com"/"domainrefinery.com".

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maslam
Are you guys going to hook into SEO at some point? A catchy / associative
domain name is great, but I've found that it also has to be search-friendly.
Thoughts?

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pbh
This is definitely a direction we're considering going in, but we're not quite
sure exactly what people want.

Are there particular features we should provide, constraints on domains, or
other things that we could brainstorm that you have in mind?

(You can also e-mail me with your thoughts, my e-mail is now in my profile.)

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jarin
I will sell lannisters.com to DebtEye if the price is right, with the wild
popularity of Game of Thrones I think it's a pretty good one :)

I'm actually doing something sort of similar to DebtEye with lannisters.com as
a weekend project, but I have many other weekend project ideas.

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PanMan
I quite like the idea, so I decided to test it out. However, after filling the
form and paying, there is no feedback. I expected an email with the rest of
process: "You can expect the first results in X hrs/days" or so. Now I just
have to hope something comes out of it.

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pbh
Sorry for the delay! We actually got a bunch of orders, so we're in the
process of running brainstorms for all of them.

Since the blog post said that most of the iterations were a few days, we
originally opted not to have a follow-up email, but I think that was probably
a mistake. I'll modify our systems right away to do that.

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jorkos
If you are serious about your startup and can spend a bit of money to get a
good name, spend the $1000....relying on services that only offer names that
aren't registered is a mistake in my opinion.

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sunchild
FYI (OT): The "Bionica" link in the upper left of your blog leads to the
default github "page missing". The home link on the right is OK.

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pbh
Should be fixed now on reload. Thanks!

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beck5
I've just signed up (henry.oswald) your drop down on the pay now in chrome
crops off the cents in the price.

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pbh
Will fix that!

At the moment, there's only one option so we'll probably just switch over to
having a button, but I haven't had a chance to convert it yet. (PayPal has a
habit of blocking your forms if they detect any mismatches between your
encrypted and form data, so I want to be careful about it.)

