Ask HN: How do you decide a name for your product or side project?

As far as websites go, this is getting harder all the time. It seems the majority of domain names are owned by domain squatters.

Related (a bit) http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html

I'm founder of Tesults (at tesults.com) and the name is a portmanteau of test results. I put naming off until quite late and used a code name internally when developing the product. I hated the Tesults name on launch because I would have preferred to have a real English word. Having a newly coined word needs explaining and adds an extra hurdle. However there was nothing better I or anyone else could think of and we wanted to launch. After almost two years, I'm happy with it, it's short and easy to remember, especially for anyone who remember it is short for test results.

There are problems with almost any name though. Search for tesults on google and it will show you results for results instead and you have to click the link that says 'did you mean tesults?' This changed briefly and then reverted, I guess we are not big enough yet and google found people really did mean results and made a typo :-) This is not a huge problem though because new users don't find us this way.

We have some plans in the pipeline to do things adjacent to test results reporting and the name Tesults will be basically meaningless in that context but really so are so many names when you think about them. I don't think the name is that important, I do like having the .com though as the Paul Graham essay suggests, however even that is not a requirement for success as others have proved.

Some other generators I like are;

https://www.leandomainsearch.com

https://www.nameboy.com

I've done this a handful of times. Sometimes you luck out for a quick win. Most of the time it's hard sweat like you wouldn't believe, especially if you want to cover the main domain options.

If you time poor and have some funds, consider buying something from those sites that have business name packages.