@DomainNoob If you can take a screen shot, but blur out any sensitive info, and send it to us via http://x.co/support  ..

Well here you go @GoDaddy!

I have literally thousands of hours invested in acquiring a few hundred domains I feel add value to your business for the advantage they will give you in marketing. I’ve done my homework! Add hundreds of hours in SEO experiments that prove the value of a good name in Google ranking.
If you don’t have any money and you still want a good name, prepare to spend a LOT of time ‘waiting’ for one. With about 100,000 domains expiring every day there’s a good chance an appropriate domain for your business will eventually drop. Unfortunately, you’ll be in competition with extremely savvy, highly motivated, professional domainers for that domain, if it’s really good.
So, again, if you have time but no money, here’s what to do: Join the GoDaddy Auction platform. Build and save your search queries. Check back every day. Eventually you’ll find something decent. Then grab the Twitter handle lol.

Just for perspective… The domain market is only a little like the used camper market, but there are similarities, and your own experience buying a used vehicle might help you better understand how to think about buying a domain.

This is a 1981 Westfalia going for $8500. I only have a few domains listed on this site that I would expect to sell for more.

Here’s an 82 Westy going for $3995. Most of my domains sell around this price.

Lower than that you can’t really buy a Westy, but you could get a camper for your pickup. This one’s going for $1500.  I try to only buy domains that would be worth more than this but I do have some lower quality domains that would sell around this price.

GofBot.com

Click arrow to play audio. Psyching Out a Domain Horder

Tony Conrad and Kevin Rose

Click arrow to play audio. It’s All In A Name

Notes:
Code name About.Me was incorporated as Pumpkinhead.
Tony sold About.Me to AOL.
About.Me had been reserved by the .Me registry.
Strategic deal making over time. 14 late night calls!
Sphere.com owner loved his domain! ‘Impossible to track down.’
Tech support dude was a Yankees fan.
Equity deal. ‘He made great money.’
‘It’s all in a name.’

Let’s refresh, from my last post… I’m looking for a name that invokes the spirit of the experience the company hopes to create; Passes the ‘radio’ test (could type it in your browser after hearing in a podcast); Is ‘easy to remember’; Has the exact-match Twitter handle; No Trademarks; And is available for $8 on GoDaddy!

My sandbox: ideas, invention, imagine, engineer, incubate, tinker, prototype, innovate, iterate, lab, garage, market.
Very broad! Also challenging in that we’re not building a ‘better mousetrap’ here. The concept is easily understood and communicated, but there aren’t a lot people doing this as a business, so you face the additional challenge of trying to communicate what it is you do in the name.

I looked around for inspiration and found a couple of amazing stories. The Russians Used a Pencil tells the story of how two guys built a physical product – an iPhone tripod, from idea to market in five months. They used Kickstarter to fund and market it! They used 3d printing to prototype!

And there’s Quirky! This is so amazing! Founder Ben Kaufman turned the experience of creating hit iPod accessories into a business built around the process of discovering new hit products. The Quirky community comes up with the ideas, vets them, evangelizes them, and buys them! Ben tells the story here.

Alright! Creative juices flowing and a clear picture of our naming goal. Let’s get busy with the tools. Market Samurai for keyword, niche value, and competition. A whole lot of Thesaurus.com, MoreWords.com, TheFreeDictionary.com. Throw in a little Rhymezone.com. my Excel column combination spreadsheet, and voila. Over 1200 possible candidates. Run through the GoDaddy bulk checker and… Hmm, a smattering of acceptable candidates. Now the Twitter check and… a pretty miserable collection of leftovers.

cc by fostersartofchilling

With one exception. I mentioned I listen to a lot of podcasts. Over the last few months I’ve tracked down at least a half dozen Eric Ries interviews. Eric has worked very hard getting the word out about his book. There’s a startup education in these interviews.
This Week in Venture Capital #65 with Eric Ries, Author of ‘The Lean Startup”   mp3 audio
Eric Ries of The Lean Startup on This Week in Startups #199  mp3 audio
Eric Ries (BestSeller) – On Mixergy mp3 audio
Eric Ries (LeanStartup) – On Mixergy mp3 audio
Evangelizing for the Lean Startup – Eric Ries (Author) Stanford mp3 audio
There’s actually quite a few others, but that will get you started. At this point I’m well versed in the notion of ‘lean’, which derives from the idea of ‘lean manufacturing’ pioneered especially by Toyota in the 90s.
Eric applied it to startups and called his book, “The Lean Startup”. The idea so perfectly captured the idea I was going for, and it was available.

So did they like it? Yes, but not as much as a name they’d found in the meantime. I’m having trouble remembering it (I know there was an animal in the logo!) I’ll post a link when they launch and you can tell us what you think.

Update 4/14/12 One of the names I looked into for this project just dropped.
MakeItToMarket.com @MakeItToMarket Like it?  Update 12/10/12 Or perhaps this closer to what you had in mind.

IBM 1620 by Twid

I’ve tried most of the online tutorials. I broke my brain getting Ruby 1.92 on my Mac. I have Eclipse set up for PHP and Python. But so far I end up bailing out of the book, tutorial, video course. They’re not working for my brain! That’s why I was so excited to hear about Codecademy. Codecademy is a Y Combinator startup. They’re a couple of young guys with a great idea who seem to have caught a wave. The thing is, now four months and $2.5 million invested, they have all of three courses that took me an hour to complete. Yes they’re good, but…  Meanwhile the press just keeps on coming! (Isn’t this a startup no no – getting all this press before they really have a product?)

The namer/domainer in me couldn’t help but notice… Look at the spelling, codEcademy. Not codeAcademy. Not only that but CodeAcademy.org is a Chicago startup that has an intense immersion how-to-code course in Chicago. Oh oh. What? CodeAcademy.com now forwards to CodEcademy.com. They somehow acquired it in the last month or so (I’d like to know that story). When I first looked, there was a forum there. IMO it would be hard to trademark Code Academy, I think (too generic), but looking around today I found that the CodeAcademy.org people seem to be in the process of obtaining one for ‘CA Code Academy’. The plot thickens- and gets murky, and maybe they should merge now before too many lawyers get involved. (Might a Domain Diligence Report from DomainNoob have saved a lot of trouble and headache?)
[Update 6/21/12: The lawyers have spoken! Andrew Allemann of DomainNameWire puts it succinctly: "The panel ruled that it (Code Academy) didn’t show it had any trademark in the term “Code Academy”. It was a victory for Codecademy, but the fight may have devalued both names. In making its argument, Codecademy suggested that Code Academy is merely descriptive. That could come back to haunt it as it tries to fight off cybersquatters in the future." Here's the actual WIPO ruling.]
[Update 10/6/12: Again from Andrew Allemann. Codecademy rcenetly bought CodeClass.com for $1,000.]

Anyway, the media attention Codecademy is getting should serve as a siren song for entrepreneurs. Coding is being called ‘the new literacy’. If you love to code, and think you’re a better teacher, or have a twist on how to do it, let’s get started. First, you’ll need a name.

My basic toolkit?
MarketSamurai for keyword/value/competition research. Thesaurus.com. MoreWords.com which is great for searching words that end with or start with. And my weird brain.

First, a look at keywords.
Initial keyword research indicates that ‘code’, as a verb, isn’t as popular as ‘program’.
‘Learn’ helps a keyword phrase score for larger click payouts, i.e. makes it more ‘valuable’.
Ads don’t really start to pop up until you drill down past ‘program’ to specific languages.
Running my list of keywords through the GoDaddy Bulk Checker. Hey! A couple of keepers.
LearningHowToProgram.com, Market Samurai tells me, is potentially the most valuable of the available keyword domains. LearnToCodeOnline.com This strikes me as the best of the availables in terms of branding a keyword domain. OnlineCodeSchool. Like this one too. Also CodeSchoolOnline.com.
Not bad! But they’re all more than 15 letters, so the exact-match Twitter handle is off the table. I’d still buy them. While the definitive word is still out on domains and SEO, they could be useful for focused mini-sites and Adwords experiments.

Then a look at what the competition is doing for “Learn to code online”.
Top Scoring Organic: lcwo.net (Morse code!), codeschool.com, & w3schools.com
Mostly you’re getting articles about learning, rather than actual places to learn. The articles lead to online Berkeley, MIT, Mozilla and Google’s Code University.
Paid (that mention coding specifically, not just online learning): www.polymathlectures.org, programming.justanswer.com

CodeSchool.com is by far the best url we’ve seen so far. Kind of ideal. They’re a subscription based video/tutorial/community ‘learn by doing’ site with a very popular free tutorial Rails For Zombies (interesting, which came first?). While we’re here, we should mention Treehouse, (TeamTreehouse.com), which launched recently (with help from VC money) and is gaining a lot of traction. They have a two-tiered subscription model. And of course there’s Lynda.com which has 69,000 tutorials for $25 a month!

Next up in our naming process is keyword combos. This is where I match the word ‘code’ with my collected list of internet destination words like ‘hub’, ‘works’, ‘planet’ etc. Very hit or miss, but in this case–it’s picked clean! Nothing worth mentioning available. Just as well, they’re not very good.

On to the brainstorming session. This is where I dig into the thesaurus to create brandable made-up names, portmanteaus, domain hacks, and word tricks. I’m playing in a ‘learn how to program code’ sandbox.

Let’s go over the criteria: Evokes the spirit of the experience your product hopes to create; Passes the ‘radio’ test (could type it in your browser after hearing in a podcast); Is ‘easy to remember’ (this often simply translates into ‘short’); Exact-match Twitter handle; No Trademarks. And again, in our case, $8 on GoDaddy!

And the winners are…

Acodemic.com @Acodemic

Codsy.com @CodsyCom

I really like Acodemic. Codsy is a little bit trendy (Artsy, Etsy) but it’s five letters! Try and forget it. You can spell a five letter domain out loud (radio test).  Pity about the Twitter, but five letter Twitter handles are pretty much a thing of the past. I also picked up three of the keyword domains, for SEO and Adwords experiments. CodeSchoolOnline.com, OnlineCodeSchool.com, and LearnToCodeOnline.com.

So what do you think? What would be a fair price for this package of domains? Think you can do better? I’d be happy to list your newly-registered domains in this post.  I do think I got a little bit lucky with this niche–not picked quite as clean as most. For comparison, here’s something just in today from Twitter. (Will be interesting to see if Bill manages to get the Twitter as well.)
Is there a niche you’d like me to do a case study on?

[Update 4/12 I'm a couple of weeks into the Udacity CS101 class (free and now open enrollment). It's awesome! See Also: O'Reilly School of Technology, (article, school), Bloc, Hitchiker's Guide To Python, HackerSchool, really liking InventWithPython and LearnCodeTheHardWay.]

FixIt.Tv @FixItTv	Read it together! GroupReads.com @GroupReads	I ‘Swipd’ it! Swipd.com @Swipd
Yowio.com @Yowio	SolarPowder.com @SolarPowderCom	Osoyo.com @OsoyoCom
Do you use it? iuzit.com @iuzit	KillerWebApp.com @KillerWebApp	WeedApp.com @WeedApp now with PotApp.com
NFCcoupons.com @NFCcoupons	Five letters, 9 years old, exact-match Twitter. Stokt.com I’m @stokt	LucidStreaming.com @LucidStreaming
Is your startup a Japan related app? @appanese	Is your startup to do with ads in video? @Vidiads	Nice, corporate-quality near field communication domain. @NFCSystems
Oh, like an app for pets? appets.com @appets	Send them a HeyTo! @HeyToCom	Mobile sharing app? OneTapp.com @OneTapp
Type? Fonts? Typly.com @Typly	Louzy.com How was the service? @LouzyCom	Yayno.com Yay, or no? Something to do with making a choice. @YAYNO
Affly.com Affiliate related company? @AfflyCom	Charging station startup? iChrg.com @iChrgCom	Filterly.com Aggregating and filtering? @FilterlyCom
Social bar-hopping app? Bar-hopping limousine service? A band? Lots of possibilities. @BendrCom	Inspired by names like Blekko. They may hate it, but they won’t forget it. @Orbno	Giving it away? @GivlyCom
@_TDrop	Did you develop an edgy game? @Fukrz	Also ShareMyBicycle.com @ShareMyBike
Did your company discover Hapium? @Hapium	Down and out? Send them a HugTo! @HugToCom	Basketball game, app or startup? @HoopMe
Calories? Burning Man? Burnly.com @BurnlyCom	Poker anyone? Pokibot.com @Pokibot Pokbot.com @Pokbot	Building an SaaS that matches coders and founders? CodeFounder.com @Code_Founder
iSpy.Tv @iSpy_Tv

Most of these domains are priced low to mid 4 figures.
But if that’s still too high, I can work on lease-to-own type deals.
Need a domain to run a market test? I’ll point the DNS to your test if you’ll share the data.
Are these domains an appropriate quality/price point, but not in your vertical? I can find you a domain.
Lots more elsewhere in the blog or email me!

FixIt.Tv
Swipd.com
iuzit.com
Pokibot.com
Pokbot.com
KillerWebApp.com
WeedApp.com
Burnly.com
NFCCoupons.com
Stokt.com
HugTo.com
HoopMe.com
LucidStreaming.com
Appanese.com
Vidiads.com
NFCSystems.com
Appets.com
HeyTo.com
OneTapp.com
Typly.com
Louzy.com
Yayno.com
Affly.com
iChrg.com
Filterly.com
Bendr.com
Orbno.com
Givly.com
Fukrz.com
ShareMyBike.com
Hapium.com
LePetitOiseau.com About 1,610,000 exact match search results.
Luka.tv Great if your name is Luka, but a nice sounding, easy to remember, 4 letter brandable video domain either way.
GetLA.com Building a Los Angeles related blog or event? @_GetLA
CodeFounder.com
iSpy.Tv
GroupReads.com

(Click arrow to play audio) Naming Twitter
(Click arrow to play audio) Naming Square
(Click arrow to play audio) About Square.com
[Update: Square.com now redirects to SquareUp, so it looks like Jack got the domain.]