I've heard the argument: The name doesn't matter, the business does. Build a great product, make something useful, rank in Google, and the domain is just the label you stick on the front.
It's not wrong. A good name won't save a bad product, and it won't fix a founder who loses interest in month three. Plenty of great names sit on dead projects. That part hasn't changed.
What changed is that the building got easy.
Somebody with an idea and a free afternoon can now spin up copy, a logo, a landing page, a couple of working tools, a whole welcome email sequence, all of it AI-assisted, and have something live by dinner. That used to take weeks and a budget. Now it takes a prompt and some patience. I think that's mostly a good thing.
But it created a problem nobody really planned for. When everyone can build fast, everyone's stuff starts to look the same. The pages are clean, the copy reads fine, the screenshots look real. You can't tell from the surface whether you're looking at something three people have been pouring their lives into or something that got assembled last night between other tabs.
So the question becomes what's actually left to separate one thing from another before anyone has clicked around.
I keep landing on the name. Not because a name is magic. It isn't. But it's usually the first thing a person processes, before the about page, before the demo, before they've decided whether to care. A name that sounds like it belongs in the category buys you a second of attention. A name that sounds temporary quietly tells people to treat the whole thing as temporary, and they will.
Here's where I think the conversation usually goes wrong. The industry hears "names matter" and immediately jumps to the seven-figure one-word .com. That's not the part I'm talking about, and most founders are never going to play in that pool anyway. They're not dropping twenty-five grand on a name. But they also don't want something clunky they have to spell out loud twice.
That gap, between the premium .com nobody can afford and the hand-reg that makes people wince, is enormous. It's where most of the actual building is happening right now. Side projects, newsletters, small SaaS, the vibe-coder crowd, somebody testing a concept before they know if it's even a company. Those people still need a name that's good enough to start with and clear enough that someone remembers it the next day.
A couple of weeks ago somebody bought practicalcrm.com off NotRenewing, and there's already a real business sitting on it. It's a social-and-reviews CRM aimed at small operators, the realtor and salon and auto-shop crowd, twenty bucks a month, pitched as the calm alternative to bloated enterprise software. Look at what the name is doing for them. The whole brand voice is basically the name said out loud, right down to a tagline that just tells you it's time to get practical. You read "practicalcrm" and you already know what it is and roughly who it's for before you've scrolled a single screen. The name didn't build the product. But it handed the founder a place to stand on day one, and it cost less than the lunch I'd have talked myself into instead of buying it.
That part of the market is the part I find genuinely interesting, and I'll admit the obvious bias, because it's also the part I built NotRenewing around. So take it for what it's worth. I came to the marketplace because I thought the gap was real, not the other way around, but I'd be lying if I said I was a neutral party here.
Maybe I'm overcorrecting because I've got a horse in the race. Maybe the tools get good enough that names blur into the noise too and this whole argument ages badly inside a year. I don't know. The building got easier, the hard part moved somewhere, and I'm still working out exactly where it landed.