
Finding names for your startup - jwoz
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.
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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.

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nreece
<http://instantdomainsearch.com/>

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damir
I've tryed few names yesterday and it reports false positives - domain was
marked as available while `whois` said it was already taken.

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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.

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bmaier
search at <http://www.internic.net/whois> you can be sure it wont be stolen if
you search there.

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jwoz
the cpan module uses internic, np. thx.

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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.

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monkkbfr
Try the web 2.0 company name generator. It's at:

<http://www.lightsphere.com/dev/web20.html>

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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.

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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>

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slackerIII
Can't you just remove some vowels from a descriptive name? Or is that passé by
now? :)

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ivankirigin
passé.

Come to think of it, can you use unicode? That would be really hip.

~~~
juanpablo
You can. But it doesn't look good in Firefox. <http://www.i-dns.net/>

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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.

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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.

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patrocles
<http://domify.com> \-- good for brainstorming....

