You thinking about starting a new online app, website or company hey? And you need a name and a .com domain? Yeah, that’s exactly where I was 3 weeks back with, lets call it from now on Project# (projecthash). Here are some tips on how we managed to think up a name for Project# as well as find the almost perfect .com domain.

A teaser of the names I jotted down using my FieldNotes booklet

Names

The first thing the 3 of us did was sit down together, drink a beer and jot down a number of keywords that we thought encompassed the direction and type of project we wanted to build. With that, we all went away and had a mini deadline set to each come up with names, phrases, quotes or keywords we could use to create a name for the project. In total we had close to 40 variations between the 3 of us.

I took the 3 lists from Basecamp, shuffled them and put them into 1 long list, which we now had to choose our top 3 favourites. Luckily we all had 1 name in our top 3, so we finally had a name!

Selecting a .com domain

.com domains are always first prize, so when we were batting our heads against the wall trying to find a domain to match our name, we flirted briefly with going the .net route, but every time I wrote down project#.net, it just never did the name any justice. This is where you must not give up. Keep on searching, trying alternative and quirky uses of the name of your project to come up with a .com domain that is available. Add keywords to the name that don’t change the meaning of the project such as project#app.com, thebigproject#.com or project#now.com. This was the route we had to go and came up with a gem of a domain that is catchy and memorable!

My tips on choosing a name and .com domain:

• Jot down keywords/phrases/quotes on paper that come to mind
• Mix and match the keywords and create a list of them
• Choose your top 3, sleep on it and finally choose 1!
• Don’t give up searching for that .com domain as it will take a couple of days and different angles to find one
• Add keywords that don’t change the meaning of the name such as keywordapp, keywordblog, keywordnow, thekeyword etc

By no means is this the definitive way of choosing a name and .com domain, but it worked for us. The more people you have to bounce ideas off the better, but make sure there is 1 person that makes the final decision as all of you may never agree and ultimately never get the project off the ground!