Smartynames uses AI to find you the perfect domain name

There’s a lot of weird and wonderful uses for AI applications. In the last few weeks, we’ve seen AI powering better marketing emails, more smartly understanding the context of video content, and getting the most from customer feedback. It shows no sign of slowing: OpenAI announced it is pouring $10 million into the ecosystem to accelerate things further. Now, Kirill Zubovsky is taking on the challenge of picking the perfect domain name, with a service he calls Smartynames.com.

It’s free and super easy to use; you type in a prompt (say, “My company will be a news site that covers all things startups and technology”, just to pick something completely out of the air), and the AI will process the prompt and come up with a bunch of ideas for domain names, then check if they are available. The availability checker itself isn’t entirely reliable; it will show domains that are ‘for sale’ as ‘available’ – technically, that does mean they are available, of course, but it’ll be left as an exercise to the reader whether a domain that costs $10,000 is available or not.

We still prefer TechCrunch, but this isn’t a bad spread of domain names. Image Credit: Smartynames (screenshot)

The service is powered by OpenAI in the backend, more specifically by its GPT-3, which was recently launched version 3.5.

“You just tell it what your business is all about, and boom, you get domain names back. It’s not rocket science, but one a great way to use robots for something useful,” Zubovsky told TechCrunch. “that would have take humans hours of brainstorming and ideation.”

Unlike most other domain name searches, Smarty takes input in a form of a business description, and uses the AI tools to expand into core concepts and phrases that can make decent domain names, before doing a search to see if those domains are actually available.

“You don’t have to think of the words for your business, Smarty will do it for you,” Zubovsky writes.

He shares that more than 120,000 domain dames have been shown to experimenting customers on the first day of launching.

Zubovsky even has a simple business model for his novel approach to finding the perfect domain name: if you register one of the names through the registrars he recommends, he collects an affiliate finder’s fee. The cost of running the service is limited; for around 40,000 requests, he shares it cost him around $10 in OpenAI charges, and $100 or so for the service he uses to do domain availability checking.