What we learned renaming ourselves

Domaincool worked for fourteen years. Here is the brief we wrote for our own rename, the ninety candidates that did not survive it, and the three arguments we had before GoDotly won.

For most of those years the name was not the problem. People understood we worked with domains, and they came to us to buy one. The trouble was that it described a transaction, and by 2024 the transaction was the smallest part of what we did. Clients were asking what their company should be called and whether that name could actually be owned. Domaincool had no room in it for invention. It sounded like a marketplace, and we were running a studio.

So we did to ourselves what we do for clients, in the same order and under the same rules. We wrote the brief and agreed it before anyone suggested a word. Then we ran the invention, cut hard, and bought the dot. The cutting is where most self-naming exercises fall apart. It is easy to be ruthless with a client's favourites and much harder with your own.

The brief we held ourselves to

The brief ran to five lines. We kept it short on purpose. A brief with twenty conditions lets everyone find a clause that supports the name they already like, and the argument never happens in the open. Five lines forces it into the open early, when it is still cheap.

• It had to carry two syllables of action, something you could say as an instruction.
• It had to put the dot inside the name, so the extension read as part of the word.
• It had to be coined, not descriptive, with room to grow past domains alone.
• It had to be clean in six languages, with no collisions and no unfortunate near-words.
• It had to be the .com, or nothing, because we were not going to preach and then settle.

The last line did more work than the other four combined. A naming firm on a compromised dot is an argument against itself, and every one of us knew it. That condition removed candidates before anyone had time to grow attached, which is what a hard constraint is for. It also meant we were designing inside what was gettable from the first hour, the same discipline we ask of every client.

Ninety candidates that did not survive

The candidates went through the checks a client's names go through: dictation, meaning across the languages we had committed to, trademark exposure and availability. Most of the ninety died for ordinary reasons. Some described the old business too well and left no room for the new one. Some looked fine on a page and fell apart when a stranger heard them once and tried to write them down. Some carried a near-word in one of the six languages. Some were simply held, on the one dot we had said we would accept.

A few of the ninety were our own favourites, names people on the desk had argued for with real conviction. We killed them on the same evidence we would use on a client's shortlist, and it was uncomfortable in exactly the way it should be. That discomfort is useful information. It tells you the process is doing its job rather than confirming what the room already wanted.

Three arguments before GoDotly won

The first argument was the oldest one in naming: descriptive or coined. A descriptive name would have told people what we did on first hearing, which is the one thing Domaincool had always done well. But a descriptive name in a crowded category is the hardest kind to own, as a mark and as a dot, and it describes the business you are today rather than the one you are becoming. We had just spent a decade outgrowing a name for exactly that reason.

The second was about the dot itself. Putting it inside the name risked sounding like a domain company again, the very thing we were trying to leave. What settled it was the choice of word. 'Domain' is technical and cold. 'Dot' is what people actually say out loud when they give you an address. Once the object was the vernacular word rather than the industry word, it stopped reading as a category label and started reading as part of a name.

The third was about what we would lose. Fourteen years as Domaincool meant fourteen years of people who knew the name, recommended it and searched for it. Walking away from that is a real cost, and we say so to every client who comes to us for a rebrand. We decided the equity was better carried across in plain words than preserved inside the new name. So we say it directly: GoDotly began life as Domaincool, same people, same desk.

Why the survivor held

GoDotly is built from three parts. 'Go' is an instruction rather than a description, the shortest verb of intent in English, and it carries the same meaning in every market we work in. It opens on a hard consonant, which sets the rhythm. 'Dot' is the object of the whole practice. The '-ly' turns that object into a manner of doing something. Dotly is not a thing you buy, it is a way you operate.

The suffix gave us a second surface too: Dotly.ai, the platform, sitting under the same root. Because the name was coined, it cleared trademark quickly. It is seven letters, and it was spelled correctly on first dictation in our tests. And the .com was gettable, which mattered more to us than anything else on the list. We had spent years telling founders not to settle for a compromised dot. It would have been hard to keep saying it from one.