Ask HN: Product/domain name using non existing word and case of misspellings

3 points by fprct 4 years ago | 2 comments

Dear HN,

looking for a product name with matching .com domain. In this community I'm sure I don't need to report on how frustrating the endeavor.

There were many HN threads about naming products, domains availability etc, just to link a few I've found interesting:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3874872 (2012, Before naming your startup, read this), - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10030863 (2015, Change Your Name by Paul Graham), - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19485609 (2019, Name it, and They Will Come).

But curious about your take on a specific (sub)problem I've encountered. I come up with a single word name (not a real English word) with .com available, but alternative spellings taken. Spellings of a word that doesn't exist, mind you.

For example. My idea: reddit.com (khem). But both reddid.com and redit.com are taken. My thought process is to abandon such idea, if I can't secure (obvious) misspellings (typically this means about 1-3 additional domains), which are bound to happen rather frequently when the name is not an actual word.

This eliminates many interesting options, though.

What would be your take on that? Is just ignoring such "name neighbors" a viable approach? Especially curious as I'm not a native English speaker and I feel I may lack some of the intuitions here.

I know, I know - it doesn't matter, last time you checked reddit.com was fine, build your product, don't waste time on naming things that ultimately most likely will not need a name anyway, and if they do, the final name will not matter that much.

But in case you happen to have some other thoughts on that, I'm here, patiently waiting, as I'm trying to find my way out of this. :)

delgaudm 4 years ago |

Sounds like what you're describing is essentially typosquatting[0] without the malicious intent (hopefully). As a result, what you describe will probably very difficult as many of those domains will be specifically taken to avoid what you're proposing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typosquatting

fprct 4 years ago | |

Unintentional typosquatting is an interesting take.

But I would not call it that way, as the names I'm coming up with are neither similar to any popular sites nor to sites with similar products. And often times all or most of the similar domains are just parked, often for sale (but not in my current budget).

And I wouldn't say it's difficult to land in such a situation when generating names of this kind - actually at least three of the ideas I'm playing with have this issue.

Essentially, I'm in a situation like, I suppose, etsy was (or could have been) when they've chosen their name and decided to use etsy.com. Then maybe found out that etsi.com is used by some company (from totally other line of business) already, or for sale, but went with their idea anyway, not worrying that they won't own etsi.com (probably fake scenario as apparently etsi.com is not used at the moment, but who knows).

Again, like with reddit, this particular example shows a scenario, where choosing such name & domain was not an issue for the company in the long run.

What I'm considering, are pros and cons of such approach, and maybe some unforeseen problems.