Last year, I started two companies (great idea, totally recommended, definitely not too much to take on). And in the process, I accidentally ended up stumbling upon the best way to buy a domain and rank first on Google for it:

Use more than one word in your name.

It flies in the face of logic, of the trends of naming your startup a single English word. Paper was all the rage for a bit there: there was the notes app Dropbox Paper, Facebook’s experimental Paper app, and the veritable iPad drawing app, Paper by 53. Apple borrowed all the arithmetic values for their Numbers spreadsheet; Microsoft did one better decades earlier, claiming the final Word for itself.

The newer trick is redefining a less commonly used word into a brand name. Notion rebranded “a concept or belief” into a notes app; Coda claimed “the last word” on notes. That’s what we did with Reproof, the collaborative writing platform, shifting “an expression of blame or disapproval” into proofreading again.

Skip the dot com

That’s still a single word, one you’ll be hard-pressed to snag the dot com for. But maybe you don’t need one; less than half of YC-backed startups use .com nowadays, after all. And once you start looking at alternative TLDs, the .app and .tech and .ai’s of the world, you’ve suddenly added an ext