When I had an approximate concept, there came the phase in which I can get stuck with my projects completely disproportionately long.
A domain.
I know there is reasonable advice: take a good enough name, buy the domain and dedicate energy to the product. I completely agree with this advice and I would recommend it to everybody.
I myself of course do not follow it.
My workflow when searching for a domain is a combination of brainstorming, technology and mild obsession. First I have my own names. Then I discuss them with ChatGPT, which generates other variants, synonyms, wordplays and combinations. From that I select candidates and throw them into beast mode on Spaceship.com.
A big part immediately falls out. The .com is taken. Or it is for sale for 18,000 dollars, which slightly exceeds the budget for my Saturday side project. Or it is free, but after ten seconds I realize that the name sounds like a brand of cat food.
The rest goes back to ChatGPT. This time I don’t want new names, but criticism. How is it pronounced? What will an American imagine under it? Does it look good written? Can it be remembered? Is there some unwanted double meaning? Will a person know how to write the domain after hearing it once?
Then again my head.
And again Spaceship.
And again ChatGPT.
And then Archive.org.
Exactly Archive.org I consider one of the most important checks with expired domains. Expired domains have one fantastic property: at first sight they often look much better than they really are.
I find a beautiful short name. .com. Free. Even some backlinks. Maybe DR. For two minutes I have a feeling that I found a diamond which nobody else noticed.
Then I open the history.
In 2012 a normal project. Excellent.
2016 parking.
2018 some generic blog.
2020 casino.
2021 another casino.
2022 Chinese or Japanese characters which I don’t understand.
2023 pills.
And suddenly I start understanding why this diamond is lying free on the ground and nobody wants it.
I saw surprisingly many such domains. I don’t want to claim that the majority of all expired domains is spam, but among short attractive names which I checked, spam history was very common. Without Archive.org I would peacefully buy several of them.
The whole process therefore looked approximately like this: my idea, ChatGPT, my selection, Spaceship beast mode, another selection, ChatGPT, Archive.org, one more selection in my head and the whole thing again.
And again.
And again.
Altogether I tried approximately 500 domain names.
Of course I did not check all five hundred manually in Archive.org. Many fell out immediately. But even so I managed to spend approximately ten hours searching for a name, which is an achievement I am not completely proud of, but at the same time I would lie if I claimed I did not enjoy it.
Still E***D****y.com** kept returning. It had one big advantage: I already owned it. It had history and DR 19. The meaning of the name could be nicely connected with the idea of an equal chance for projects. Rationally there were many reasons to tell myself: done, I will use this.
Only the concept meanwhile moved.
Directory was not the main thing anymore.
More and more I liked the battles of projects themselves. Two projects against each other, a simple question, one vote. From this rankings, challengers, maybe later tournaments and other things.
And a name which excellently described the directory suddenly described the less interesting half of the product.
So I searched further.
Somewhere among hundreds of attempts appeared B****e.com.
Short. A little strange. Not exactly a dictionary word, which when searching for a free .com in 2026 is quite a useful property. And mainly it fitted much better to what the project meanwhile became.
I went through my usual round of doubts. Is it too strange? Will a person remember it? Will he write it wrongly? Is the first domain better? Should I still try another hundred names?
I decided to rather ignore the last question.
I took the domain.
The full name or URL I will not publish yet. The project at the moment does not even have a proper base and I don’t want to make a launch of a page which contains a logo, a sentence “Coming soon” and my big plans. I already have enough such projects in my own head.
I will show the URL soon, when there is something which can really be tried.
And mainly after approximately ten hours I finally forbade myself from searching for more domains.
It was time to start programming.
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