Dear future me

I have just spent an entire afternoon looking for a great domain name for my first project after quitting my job (more on that on a future post). After several hours, I decided it was time to simply pick one and move on with my life. I'm writing this so you don't make the same mistake.

I was struggling to find a good name that still had the .com TLD available. While I agree it's generally the best TLD just because it's the most widely used, I don't think it's really important in the beginning.

If you are building a small business, there won't be that many people accidentally visiting the .com domain instead of yours. Plus, all that time that you spend thinking about .com domains could be spent on making a better product or becoming a SEO master.

On the other hand, if your business ends up being huge and very successful, you probably won't need the .com domain anyway. But if for some reason you still need it, you will most likely have the resources to make a deal to buy it.

It doesn't really matter. Think about Uber, Google, Strava... Most people don't know the meaning of those names, and they don't care.

Sure, Google would probably have had some initial advantage if they had bought the "search.com" domain back in the day. But I think it's fair to say that they didn't really need it in the end, don't you think?

I tried to delegate this decision to my friends, my family and some early adopters with a poll. I asked them to select the names they liked the most from a list and to also suggest other domains if they wanted to.
I wasn't really happy with the result.

Firstly, it's hard to come up with a great name out of the blue. Thus, it's very likely that people will just put the first name that comes to their mind.

Secondly, people's concept of what a "good name" is can vary a lot. Some think that the name of your company should be as explicit as possible (e.g. google.com ⇒ search.com). Others believe that it should be a variation of an already well-known company (e.g. strava.com ⇒ stravo.com).

At the end of the day, I think that there are just a couple of things that really matter:

The rest is probably something that will never matter or that you can fix in the future. You definitely have bigger problems than (cache invalidation and) naming things.

That's why I decided to go with https://fento.app. Please, do let me know if I made the right call.

All the best

Old you