I wrote a script to check 40 domains because every good name was taken

I had the perfect name. Had it for weeks. Then I went to buy the domain and it was gone. Of course it was.

Here's the dumb thing about naming a product in 2026: the hard part isn't coming up with a name you like. It's coming up with one whose .com isn't already sitting on some parking page with a "make an offer" button.

I'd settled on a clean two-word name. Loved it. The .com? Registered. Fine, I thought, I'll just pick another good one. So I brainstormed a list — short, wordplay, the kind of names that feel like real products. Notably. Sourcely. Citely. A dozen more.

Every single one was taken. Every one.

At some point I stopped checking them one at a time in the browser like a sucker and just wrote a little script to hammer a domain registry API and print which ones were free. Fed it forty names. Watched them come back one after another: taken, taken, taken, taken. It was almost funny. Whole categories of English wiped out by squatters and dead startups from 2014.

The two that came back available were the ones nobody would ever want. You know the type.

So I did the thing everyone eventually does. I stopped hunting for the clever single word and just described what the thing is. My extension makes your notebooks bloom into something more useful — so, NotebookBloom. notebookbloom.com was actually free. Not because it's genius, but because it's specific enough that no squatter bothered.

Is it the sexiest name? No. But here's what I've made my peace with: nobody has ever bought a product because the name was clever. They buy it because it solves their problem. Stripe is a stripe. Notion is a word that means "vague idea." Slack literally means "not working." The name earns its meaning after the product is good, not before.

I spent an embarrassing number of hours on this. Hours I could've spent on, you know, the actual product. If I could go back I'd give myself a rule: one evening, pick something with a free .com that isn't cringe, move on. You can always rebrand later if you somehow get big enough for it to matter. Most of us won't have that problem.

Anyway. It's called NotebookBloom now. On to the stuff that actually matters.

Fellow builders: how long did you waste on naming? And did you ever regret the name you landed on, or did it just... become the thing?

— building NotebookBloom in public, #4