I finally reached a point with ClipCrafter where I had nothing left to hide behind in the code.
The features were all there—authentication flows working perfectly, transcription logic solid, clip generation functional, and even an export system that didn't crash every five minutes. After about 238 pull requests, it wasn’t just a "cool experiment" anymore; it was actually running like a real product. But despite having the tech ready to go, I kept delaying one specific thing: getting a domain name.
There is something deeply uncomfortable about attaching your own URL to an unfinished idea. As long as everything lived on some random deployment sub-domain or localhost, any bugs were just "developer quirks." Once you buy something.com, the project becomes real. It’s no longer yours alone; it belongs to whoever finds that link in a Google search and decides whether they like what they see.
When I finally forced myself to face this hurdle last week, I hit an immediate wall of frustration.
- clipcrafter.com? Taken.
- clipcrafter.app? Taken.
- clipcrafter.io? Taken.
- clipcrafter.video? Also taken.
I even had a brief moment where I considered just using my personal brand domain, kshan.ai. It felt safe because it was already mine and nothing could change with me personally failing at this project—but that would have been dishonest to the product itself. ClipCrafter needed its own identity.
Instead of spiraling into a naming crisis, I decided to stop manual searching and wrote a quick script to check availability for different prefixes across various TLDs programmatically. It was much less emotional than clicking through domain registrars one by one. That’s when I found getclipcrafter.com.
It wasn't "perfect," but it followed the classic indie hacker playbook—the same pattern used by giants like Postman (getpostman.com) or Figma (before they moved to their primary). It was cheap, available, and descriptive enough that people would know exactly what I do. Within minutes of buying it, my DNS records were updated and pointed at a live production deployment.
Looking back on the last few days spent obsessing over TLDs ($com vs $io) or prefix choices (get- vs try-) was actually quite revealing to me. The domain research wasn't about branding; it was productive procrastination. I used "finding the perfect name" as a shield against launching because once that URL is live, you can no longer hide from feedback.
The fear of someone using the tool and finding it broken or useless became much more concrete the moment getclipcrafter.com appeared in my browser bar. But strangely enough, making that fear real made it easier to face. You can't fix a product if nobody is looking at you actually ship it.
The app is officially live now. No more excuses—time to find those first users and see what they think of the mess I’ve built.
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