Side Project: BoxedName.com

Silly weekend experiment: introducing 📦 BoxedName, ready-to-go naming for your next startup.

I posted it on Product Hunt and to my surprise it ended up ranking #5 for the day!

🏆 #5 Product of the Day on Product Hunt (January 6, 2020)

The idea

Startup naming is hard. You need a domain name that’s short, easy to pronounce, and easy to spell. Finding a high quality .com domain name is no easy task, unless you want to spend five figures or more.

If your target audience is the tech industry, an uncommon TLD like .io might be fine. But I’ve personally experienced the pain of using one when talking to folks outside the tech bubble. I helped launch a popular .io startup, and I spent years having to very carefully pronounce the name (often multiple times) to each new person I spoke with about it. Unnecessary friction, like having to say it multiple times and “What does the .io stand for?” Eventually we spent a lot of money to get the .com anyway.

So BoxedName offers a “name in a box”: one carefully chosen name, with everything you need to start using it right away.

What I look for in a name

Here are the characteristics I think are important when choosing a name for your next startup:

• Short
  • Ideally 8 characters or less
• Easily said and heard correctly
  • Few syllables (ideally 2)
  • With distinctive sounds
  • Avoids homophones
• Easy to spell
  • Dictionary words are usually best
  • No dropping letters (“flickr”)
  • No hyphens/punctuation or domain hacks (“del.icio.us”)
• Common sense
  • Avoid joining words together that create ambiguity (“experts exchange”)
• Few results on Google and other search engines
  • You want a brand name that you can easily dominate in SEO
• Not too specific
  • Companies pivot or create additional product offerings all the time, especially in the startup stage. Choose a name that can adapt as you do.
• Available domains
  • .com: the gold standard for domain names
  • Additionally, you should get a set of defensive domains. I think these are important:
    • .co: a one letter typo away from your .com
    • .org and .net: the other well-known TLDs
    • .app: I like this one since it’s a secure (HTTPS required) TLD and is perfect to use for redirecting users to your mobile or desktop app download page
• Social media
  • Facebook, Twitter, etc.
  • Ideally these would match your domain name exactly; however, depending on your business, a close-enough match might be perfectly fine.
• Consider existing trademarks (USPTO.gov)

The first name: Splitsaw

Rather than list hundreds of mediocre domains like most marketplaces, BoxedName sells one name at a time. The first was Splitsaw:

• One dictionary word, 8 letters, two syllables, distinctive sounds
• Fewer than 100k Google results, so easy to own in search
• No existing trademarks in a USPTO search
• The bundle: splitsaw.com, .org, .net, .app, and .co, plus a logo and the matching social media handles as a free bonus

Launching on Product Hunt

I posted it to Product Hunt on January 6, 2020, and it ranked #5 for the day, with 152 upvotes. I also shared it on Indie Hackers and as a Show HN.

The comments were useful. The most common pushback was that selling only one name at a time is risky: if people don’t like that name, nothing sells. My reasoning was:

1. Let me try to sell one to start with, before investing in a bunch of names.
2. Focus on quality over quantity (lots of sites to browse a big list of low quality domains)
3. It doesn’t have to be a name everyone loves. Just needs 1 buyer.

I also ran a poll asking whether people liked the first name. 77% said no, which is humbling but also kind of the point: it only takes one buyer.

(Someone also asked whether there’d be a mobile app. Definitely not!)

Will the name actually sell? No idea. But it was fun to try, and to go from zero to a top Product Hunt launch in a single weekend.

What I learned

As always, side projects are a great way to learn new tools. BoxedName was my first time using Netlify (it deploys straight from GitHub, and I loved it), I got more practice with Figma, and I learned a lot about how domain marketplaces like Sedo and Flippa work. I also poked around Webflow and Carrd for the first time and spent a few minutes with Gatsby, but I didn’t want to pay for a monthly service, and the fastest way to get a site online was to write some very minimal CSS myself.

Giving and receiving positive feedback is so impactful. Immediately after posting I started getting positive feedback about it being a great idea. That was suddenly all it took to make the project “worth it,” even if the domain didn’t sell.

And ranking highly on Product Hunt is still surprisingly easy if you have an idea people like. I literally forgot about posting on Product Hunt until I was in bed, then did the entire post on my iPhone, including creating the logo and assets from a screenshot.

What the site looked like

In case boxedname.com ever goes away, here’s the whole page as it looked in October 2026:

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This was originally posted as Twitter threads in January 2020: the launch and what I learned.