Available is not the same as brandable

The most common way a startup gets its name is that somebody types ideas into a registrar until one comes back green. The green means the .com is free to register. It is read, almost every time, as meaning the name is good. Those are different facts, and the gap between them is where most weak names come from.

A domain that is available today at the registration price is available because nobody, in thirty years of the .com, wanted it enough to hold it. Sometimes that is because it is genuinely new. More often it is because it is hard to say, hard to spell, means something unfortunate, or is two ordinary words in an order nobody would guess. Availability is a fact about demand. Brandability is a fact about the word. The first tells you nothing about the second.

What brandable actually means

It is not a compliment; it is a list of jobs. A name is brandable when it can do five things without help.

1. Be said once and typed correctly. If a name needs spelling out on the phone, every customer who hears it before they see it is a customer you may lose to a typo.
2. Be recognised as a name. Some words read as a company, some read as a description, and some read as a mistake. The first is what you want.
3. Fit the category without describing the product. A name that says exactly what you sell today is a product name, and companies outgrow products.
4. Survive the small sizes. An app icon, a favicon, an invoice footer. Names that are all one letter height go grey at that size; names with a mix of tall and round letters hold.
5. Be owned. Not just the .com, but the handle, the trademark class you trade in, and the search results, which should show you and not somebody else.

The registrar's green tick answers a fraction of the fifth job and none of the first four.

Why available names are usually available

Think about who has looked at any given .com over three decades: registrars, investors, every company that considered a similar name, every generator that has churned through the dictionary. A short, sayable, meaningful .com has been looked at thousands of times. If it is still free, there is normally a reason, and the reason is usually one of the five jobs above.

This is why the free options cluster into recognisable types: the two word compound that describes the product (fast, clear, forgettable), the real word with a letter swapped (reads as a typo on an invoice), the real word with a suffix bolted on (dates quickly), and the string of letters that means nothing and cannot be said. Each of those can work. Each starts with a handicap that a name chosen for its own qualities does not carry.

The other direction: brandable names that are not free

The names that pass all five jobs mostly belong to somebody already. Some belong to companies using them, which settles it. Some belong to people who hold names in order to sell them, which is where a curated marketplace comes in: a name that was chosen because it could carry a company, waiting for the company. Whether that is worth paying for depends on which of the five jobs the company most needs done, and how much a startup should spend on a domain is a question with its own answer. The point here is narrower: a name being for sale rather than free is not a mark against it. It is often the opposite.

A five minute check that beats the green tick

Run this before you register anything, on the free candidate and on the one you would have to buy, and compare.

• Say it to two people who have not seen it and have them type it. Count the misspellings.
• Write it at invoice size in plain black type, next to the names of three companies you admire. Does it look like the fourth, or like a note in the margin?
• Describe the company in five years in one line. Does the name still fit, or does it name the first product?
• Search the exact name in quotes. What comes up, and would your customers be confused by it?
• Check the .com, then the handle you would actually use, then the trademark register for your class. The full order of checks is a piece of its own.

If the free name passes and the paid one does not, take the free one and be pleased. That does happen. It is less common than the registrar's green tick makes it look.

Names chosen for the five jobs

Everything on Webba was picked because it could do the jobs above, not because it was free; being short is the property that helps most with the first, second and fourth. The short .com names are the clearest examples: five letters or fewer, each chosen to be said once and remembered.

Short .com namesFive letters or fewer, chosen for the jobs a name has to do.