Naming a Startup: 10 Real Founder Stories of Finding a Domain

Nov 4

Almost every founder starts the search for a name with confidence and ends it with a compromise. Knowing what a name should be is easy: short, memorable and related to the business. The trouble starts when you type your first option into a registrar's search bar and see: taken.

I went through this myself, and then I collected the stories of other founders, from indie hackers whose budget covered only a domain registration to startups that spent a large part of their seed round on a domain. The stories differ, but everyone hits the same wall. In this article, we look at how long the search takes, what founders sacrifice, how much they pay for a good name and why they later change it.

My story: from pages of lists to genezis.com

When I was looking for a name for my startup, I knew nothing about the domain industry. But I understood branding well: a name should be as short as possible, easy to remember and, ideally, related to what I do.

My confidence came from past experience. My previous company's name and website address were the same: four clearly pronounced letters, with no hissing sounds and no alternative spellings in any language. Customers saw the website address right on the invoice, so it needed no separate advertising. In stores, I never even had to give the number of the company's discount card: cashiers remembered the name the first time they heard it and found it in their system. It was impossible to misspell, even for someone who did not speak the language natively.

The wall

That was exactly the kind of name I was looking for. But as soon as I started, I hit a wall: every name that was even half good was taken. At the time, I did not know that a taken name could be bought on a domain marketplace. The registrar suggested other domain extensions, so I tried one: I registered a good name with a .life extension.

The mistake became clear after my very first conversations with customers. When you give someone an address with a country extension, .com or even .net, they take it in naturally and ask no questions. With .life, I had to explain every time what the extension was and that nothing else needed to be typed after it. In effect, I was teaching every customer from scratch, and I quickly gave up on that uphill battle.

Pages of lists and "astronomical" prices

I went back to searching. The name did not come quickly: I searched on and off, alongside my main work, and in the end the search stretched over roughly 7-9 months. My options filled several A4 pages, and I typed each one into the registrar. Sometimes, instead of a registration fee, it showed a price at which the owner was willing to sell the name. Most of those prices seemed astronomical to me.

Then, in yet another list, genezis.com turned up. It is a dictionary word: the name of the first book of the Bible in a number of Eastern European languages. I could not believe my eyes, so I found a Bible in an online store and confirmed that the word was spelled exactly that way. And the purchase price turned out to be quite reasonable.

Yes, this is not the English spelling. But the market where the word sounds native is huge, and English speakers understand it intuitively. After all those lists and all that time, I felt that a shift in a mine would have been easier.

What happened next

Today, genezis.com is part of my portfolio. Just two weeks after I bought it, I received an offer for it in the five figures, and then another in the six figures.

By then, I had dug through most of the information about the market and prices, and I had come to understand the real problem, at least in part: good names exist, but for a new business they are either taken or unaffordable. That is how I formed my own view of how to build a business model in the domain industry. I still have a lot to learn from the market leaders, but I already have my own perspective.

What I took away from the search:

A niche domain extension saves money on registration but then requires an explanation in every conversation.
A taken name is not always out of reach: you can buy it, and today you can also lease it.
A good name does not have to be English. What matters more is that it is easy to say and spell in your market.
A good name is an asset: the market may value it well above what you paid.

How founders search for a name: lists, rounds and compromises

The process is similar for everyone: first simple words, then compound words, then invented ones. At every step, the founder hits the same wall and lowers the bar.

Attio: three approaches and eight finalists

The team behind the CRM Attio decided from the start that the domain had to be a .com. First, they contacted the owners of one-word domains, but prices often reached seven figures, and even the lowest were six figures. The team had only a pre-seed round, so they had to give up on that approach (Attio blog).

Next, they built two word lists for compound names and sorted hundreds of combinations into three groups: taken, taken but for sale, and available. Nothing fit. The third step was invented words that followed simple pronunciation rules. Eight names made the final cut, and the team judged them on four criteria:

whether someone can spell the name after hearing it;
whether it is understood across accents and when read;
whether it can rank in search, secure matching social media handles and be registered as a trademark;
whether it has no negative associations and has room to grow.

ConvertKit: a $10 name to keep moving

Nathan Barry started his email marketing service under the working name MailApp so that the search for a name would not slow down development. Then, using a name-search tool, he went through thousands of word combinations and registered the available ConvertKit.com for less than $10 (Nathan Barry). The long compound name let him launch, but as the following years showed, the company outgrew it.

Adalo: four names before launch

The team behind the app builder Adalo went through four names: Apto Labs, Proton, Foundry and, finally, Adalo. Foundry had the biggest problem: the word was too common, and the best address available was FoundryPlatform.io. In about six months under that name, customers repeatedly could not find the website, emailed the wrong domain and called the company "Foundry Platform" (Adalo blog). The team renamed the company a couple of months before the beta launch and chose a name in honor of Ada Lovelace.

What these stories have in common: founders spend weeks or months searching, go through hundreds of options and end up choosing from a handful of finalists. The main filter is almost always the same: whether the domain is available and how much it costs.

The backup domain: get-, .io, .so and the long road to .com

When the .com they want is taken, founders usually compromise: they add a prefix (get-, try-) or choose another extension (.io, .so, .app, .ai). This lets them launch right away. But the backup rarely lasts forever: as the company grows, it goes after the real address.

Company	Backup address	Move	What we know
Dropbox	getdropbox.com	dropbox.com, October 2009	The company ran on the prefixed address for about two years after launch; that same month, its legal entity Evenflow became Dropbox, Inc. (Wikipedia)
Notion	notion.so	notion.com bought in 2018, move completed in 2026	The team chose .so because many companies were already called Notion, and .so was available (Smart Branding)
ConvertKit → Kit	convertkit.com	kit.com, 2024	The company outgrew its compound name and bought a three-letter .com (Domain Name Wire)
GetShift → TimeChi	a .io domain	new name TimeChi	Almost every .com with the word Shift was taken, and the backup name did not even describe the product (TimeChi)

How Notion got notion.com

This story shows well that a domain deal is not always just about price. According to Notion co-founder Akshay Kothari, in 2018 the team spent a whole year trying, anonymously and unsuccessfully, to get a price from the owner through various brokers. Things moved forward with a different broker, who spent months building a relationship with the owner. The owner turned out to be an entrepreneur and a big Grateful Dead fan. In the end, he was offered cash, equity in Notion and a private meeting with the band. He declined the meeting but chose to lean into the equity (DN.ca, text of Akshay Kothari's post).

Even after the purchase, the move took years: in June 2026, Notion announced that it had finished moving workspaces from notion.so to app.notion.com (Create With). The takeaway: the longer a company lives on a backup address, the harder the move becomes.

What about search traffic?

The biggest fear about changing domains is losing search rankings. Kit's experience shows the real size of the risk: after the move to kit.com, search traffic dropped by the expected 20%, but by the end of the year it had fully recovered and reached 108% of the baseline (Nathan Barry, 2024 review).

How much a good name costs

A short dictionary-word .com can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars on the aftermarket, and startups sometimes pay for it out of their very first round.

Company	Domain	Price	Share of the company's money
Friend (2024)	friend.com	$1.8 million, on a payment plan	Out of about $2.5 million raised (404 Media, TheDomains)
Pilot (2017)	pilot.com	$400,000	According to the co-founder, a very substantial share of the seed money (Category Visionaries / Frontlines)
ConvertKit (2018)	seva.com	$310,000	The domain had previously been leased out for $2,000 a month (Nathan Barry)
Attio (before its seed round)	one-word .com domains	from low six figures to seven figures	Not bought: the pre-seed money was not enough (Attio blog)

Pilot co-founder Waseem Daher explained the decision this way: a startup has to plan for success, and the team wanted a single English word that was easy to spell and pronounce, with a .com domain. Pilot later became a unicorn valued at $1.2 billion (CNBC). But the company's success does not prove that the domain purchase caused it.

Seva.com: an expensive purchase that went unused

Nathan Barry himself described the purchase of seva.com in detail (Nathan Barry):

The search for a new name for ConvertKit took about two years. Three strong candidates were dropped because of trademarks or domains owned by others.
Seva.com belonged to a broker that leased premium domains. Leasing this name cost $2,000 a month.
The broker first asked $500,000 for an outright purchase. After about a month of negotiations, the deal closed at $310,000 in March 2018.
On July 1, 2018, the company announced its rename to Seva.
Less than 30 days later, the decision was reversed. For Sikhs, seva is a sacred practice of selfless service, and part of the community saw the rename as hurtful appropriation.

Barry admitted the mistake publicly, and the company remained ConvertKit for six more years, until it became Kit in 2024. There is a detail in this story that is often overlooked: the owner itself offered the name for lease. Let's do the math. About four to five months passed between the purchase in March and the reversal in the summer of 2018. Leasing for that period would have cost roughly $8,000-10,000 instead of $310,000. And the purchase price equals 155 months of lease payments, or almost 13 years.

When a name has to change

The domain is not the only trap. A name with an available address can run into someone else's trademark or into a meaning the founder did not consider.

Trademark: Jarvis → Jasper

An AI writing tool went through three names in a single year: Conversion.ai, Jarvis and Jasper. The name Jarvis echoed Tony Stark's AI assistant from the Marvel films. In January 2022, after receiving a letter from Marvel and Disney lawyers, the company renamed itself Jasper. By then, more than 350,000 people had used the service (Jasper announcement, via Medium). The team decided not to fight: even with strong arguments, a legal battle against a large corporation could drag on for years and distract from the product.

You can check a name against trademark databases for free and in advance: TMview covers Europe and many other countries, and the USPTO search covers the United States. This does not replace advice from a lawyer, but it filters out obvious conflicts before you spend money on a domain and design.

What a word means to others: Seva

The ConvertKit story shows a risk that does not appear in any trademark database. A word with a beautiful meaning for one audience may be sacred to another. The company handled its second rebrand, to Kit, differently: in public, documenting every step (BoiseDev).

A word that is too common: Foundry

The Adalo story from the previous section makes the same point. The name Foundry was free in their niche, but a search for the word returned tens of millions of pages, and customers lost the company among other sites.

What these stories teach

Decide in advance what is non-negotiable for you. From day one, Attio treated .com as a hard requirement, and that immediately narrowed the search. For another business, the priority may be a country extension or a word that is clear in the local market.
Test the name out loud. Dictate it over the phone and ask the other person to write it down. If they make a mistake or ask about the extension, as happened to me with .life, you will have to explain the name to every customer.
A backup address is a fine start, but not the goal. Dropbox and Notion grew on backup domains but eventually moved to .com anyway.
Check trademarks and meanings before you buy. Jasper and Seva show that an available domain does not mean an available name.
A domain's price is negotiable. The first ask for seva.com was $500,000, and the final price was $310,000. The owner of notion.com took part of the payment in equity.
Between "buy" and "settle for less," there is a third way. Seva.com was available for lease, friend.com was bought on a payment plan, and the owner of notion.com accepted equity. Owners of premium domains themselves offer formats that spare a startup from spending a large part of its round on a name up front.

What if…

The .com you need is taken and costs more than your entire round? Find out whether it is available for lease or on a lease-to-own plan. That way, the name starts working now, and your capital stays in the product.
You have already launched on a backup domain? That is not a death sentence. But the better known your company becomes, the stronger the negotiating position of whoever owns the domain you need. Sometimes it pays to make a deal sooner.
Are you afraid of losing traffic when you move? With permanent redirects, the drop is temporary: for Kit it was 20%, and by the end of the year traffic exceeded the baseline.
You found the perfect word with a deep meaning? Find out what it means in other cultures and languages before you pay for it. Leasing the name while you test it lowers the cost of a mistake.

Frequently asked questions

How long does it take to find a name for a startup?

It varies, from a few weeks to several years. The ConvertKit team searched for a new name for about two years, and Adalo went through four names before launch. What drags the search out most is taken domains and other companies' trademarks.

Can you launch a startup on a .io or .so domain, or with a get- prefix?

Yes. Dropbox (getdropbox.com) and Notion (notion.so) started that way. But as they grew, both companies moved to .com. A niche extension has to be explained to customers, and moving away from it later takes time and money.

How much do startups pay for a premium domain?

Known deals range from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars: ConvertKit paid $310,000 for seva.com, Pilot paid $400,000 for pilot.com, and Friend paid $1.8 million for friend.com. The first asking price can be noticeably higher than the final one: for seva.com, the seller first asked $500,000.

Will search traffic drop after a domain change?

Probably, for a while. After ConvertKit moved to kit.com, search traffic dropped by 20%, but by the end of the year it had recovered to 108% of the baseline.

Is there an alternative to buying an expensive domain?

Yes. Premium domains are leased and sold on payment plans, and sometimes an owner agrees to take equity in the company. Before it was sold, seva.com was leased for $2,000 a month, friend.com was bought on a payment plan, and the owner of notion.com received part of the payment in Notion equity.

Conclusion: the wall is the same, but there is more than one way through it

An indie founder with lists on A4 pages and a team with a seed round hit the same wall: the good names are taken. From there, everyone chooses one of three paths: settle for a backup address, pay for a good one or find a format in between.

A backup address later has to be explained to customers and eventually replaced, while buying at launch can eat up much of a round. In-between formats such as leasing, payment plans and equity already exist, and major deals prove it. This is exactly how NamRent works: a premium name benefits your business from day one, and your money stays in the product.

Is your project on a .com or a backup domain right now? Tell us in the comments.

Sources

okna. ee