How do indie makers find the right domains?
Daniel González Reina
3 replies
Hi!
I'm about to launch an MVP of a project for the first time. I've been working 2 weeks getting the main functionality to work, and that side is going great.
The time came to find a reasonably good domain, and I suddenly hit a wall. It's nearly impossible to find a pronunciable .com without paying a thousand $$. How do you do it??
Replies
Rich Watson@richw
Seems like people just buy up good and decent domains to not use, but to sell or auction off. I had the same issue, and one of the domains I wanted was being used by a company that isn't even using the same name as the domain it just redirects to their website- can't blame them but just found it annoying. Had to use thetradehub.net rather than tradehub.net like I wanted.
It's so hard to find a decent domain, but its still possible to get creative with what is out there. there is so mainy domain endings now too. I think dashes or hyphens in domains are cringe, but the availability is just no there. I think people are creating startup names based around the names they can get for a domain. Like they may have had a name in mind then changed it to make it work with the domain they could acquire.
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@richw Hey! I thought I'd get an email if someone replied here 😅
Same thing happened to me. All the initial ideas were taken, and even getting into worse domain names I'd find most of the websites empty, broken, or abandoned years ago.
At some point in the search I found out joining two words was my best bet. Common words combinations are all taken, but as soon as you start adding less common words things get better fast. I started using words that could translate into emojis. I thought having an emoji that can be related to your product was a good idea.
So my strategy ended up being a combination of {app related word} + {word representable by emoji}. The ordering would be the better sounding one. I ended up going with visualbolt.
I'm actually quite happy with the final choice :)
