Choosing the name of your child is hard. Arguably, selecting the name of your business is harder.
When I was choosing the name of the company, I knew a few things. I knew I wanted it to be cool. I knew it needed to have a kickass domain name. And I also knew that everything I thought of was already taken.
So like any other proudly geeky person, I set about programming my way through the problem. I wrote a little script that tested to see what domain names were available for every possible combination of Domain. I started with all the known TLDs (Top-Level Domains such as .com) and then the script added characters to the front. I ended up with a reasonably long list of possible domains, and I needed to narrow it down. My next step was to take the Domains I had identified and gather a screenshot of the first page of Google when searching for each of them. I was looking for inspiration. When I searched for YGHT, I spotted an article in the Urban Dictionary titled “You Gotta Hit That”. I instantly knew the name of my company and how I would brand it: “You Gotta Hack That”.
Something inexplicable happened along the way, possibly caused by my inner nerd, and I stook with the shortened version of the company name: YGHT. For several years using YGHT has been fine, but, it is more and more evident that on its own this only means things to those of us in the company.
We are now relaunching ourselves with the full version of our name, “You Gotta Hack That” but we won’t be losing our favourite short domain name…