Radio Test

Say the domain out loud once, to someone who's never seen it. If they can type it right the first time, it passes the radio test. If they have to ask "is that with a K or a C" or "is there a hyphen," it doesn't.

The name comes from radio advertising, where the listener has no screen and one shot. Podcasts and word of mouth work the same way. A name that fails costs its owner a little traffic every single time it's spoken, and that adds up over the life of a business.

The common failures: creative spellings, numbers that could be words, words that could be numbers, hyphens, and any pair of letters that sounds like a different pair. Flickr and Tumblr got away with it because they were famous. Your buyer's startup won't be.