I just wanted a domain. It took weeks.
I had a product. I needed a name. I opened ChatGPT.
"Names for an AI coding workspace for marketers." It gave me fifty. Some were funny. Some I actually liked. I opened Namecheap. Started checking.
Taken. Taken. Taken. Premium, $3,200. Taken. .com is parked at $4,500. Taken. Taken.
Twenty minutes in, I had zero candidates.
I went back to the chat. "Try shorter." Another fifty names. Same dance. Two okay names survived the registrar check. Both felt forced.
I tried a different angle. "What if the name was a place?" "What if it was a metaphor for safety?" "What if it was a verb?" The model was patient. The registrar wasn't.
Hundreds of ideas. Maybe a dozen still available at the .com. Available didn't mean good. aibakery.com was free. So was secureshell.dev. Neither felt right.
At some point I started keeping the available ones in a notepad on my desktop. A graveyard for "checked but didn't pick." Just so when the next round of brainstorming spit out something I liked, I had a pile of pre-checked names to anchor against.
The notepad grew faster than my conviction did.
What the registrar kept saying
How I finally picked
Eventually I stopped trying to be clever. Short. Pronounceable. Not a real word. Couldn't be confused for someone else. The .com had to be free without a "premium" upcharge.
I picked Nodbay. I didn't hate it after saying it out loud ten times. That was the bar. Bought the .com that night.
What about the rest
I looked at the notepad. 3,841 names sitting in a file called maybe.txt. All checked. All available at the .com. All written down in case my first pick fell through.
Felt weird to delete them. So I'm putting them here. Yours. No login. No newsletter. No catch. If one of them is the name you've been looking for, take it.
If you ship something with one of these names, send me a link. I'd genuinely love to see it.
Kristjan, founder of Nodbay