Rob's Workshop

Your domain is the most important decision of your startup's life

(Yes, I'm exaggerating. A little. Stay with me.)

Here's a scene I keep seeing. Someone builds an AI agent on a Saturday. It works. It's good. They show it to a friend, the friend says "wow, what's it called?", and the founder goes quiet, because the product has been called `proyecto-final-v3` for six days.

So they open a registrar and start typing names. .com taken. .com taken. .com taken. .ai is $80 a year, and it's also taken. Three days later the product that took a weekend to build still has no home.

If you build with AI tools in Latin America, you know this pain. The barrier to making software has collapsed. The barrier to naming it has not. There are only so many short, pronounceable, free .coms on Earth, and every one of them was claimed by someone who was thinking about naming in 2009.

I got tired of watching smart builders lose a week to this, so I built a small tool: nombra.la. ("nómbrala" — "name it". The .la is Laos's country code, and also the Spanish "la". I'm very pleased with myself.)

Why short domains matter more than you think (the exaggerated version)

A domain is the only part of your product that a human has to type with their thumbs. It's the thing you say out loud in a voice note, spell in a WhatsApp message, squeeze onto a QR code, put on a slide, and hope an LLM cites correctly.

Every extra character is a tiny tax you pay forever, on every share, by every person. A six-character domain isn't a domain; it's a seed round of free marketing. A seven-character domain is a Series A. Anything longer than your grandmother's phone number is a hobby.

Okay. Obviously a short domain won't save a bad product. But a long, forgettable one will quietly tax a good product for years, and the cost of fixing it is zero if you do it on day one and enormous if you do it after launch. That asymmetry is the whole argument.

The trick: stop looking for yourname.com

The shortest domains aren't .coms. They're domain hacks — where the TLD is part of the word — and they're hiding in plain sight, especially in Spanish:

Examples: You type [ nombra.la finds] mercado [merca.do] pronto [pron.to] negocio [negoc.io] hola [ho.la]

It also does word-as-TLD (best coffee → best.coffee; type coffee and it suggests best., my., el. in front), and smart compressing — drop the vowels, -er → r, ck → k. Feed it flicker and it finds flic.kr, which is exactly how Flickr did it. Type british and you get brit.sh.

Rank everything by the number of characters in the domain you'll actually see — dot included — and the shortest available ones float to the top, with the yearly price next to each.

And it knows the future. ICANN's 2026 round has roughly 1,600 applications for about 980 new TLD strings. .agent has 13 applicants fighting over it. nombra.la lists those separately under "Coming later" with their stage and an honest estimate (industry guesses say 2028 at the earliest, not ICANN-confirmed) — and it never pretends you can register them today.

The clever part: AI where it helps, and nowhere it doesn't

I built this with Claude Code, and the most important AI decision was a restraint: don't call an LLM when a regex and a 540 KB file will do.

Rules first. The name generators are plain, tested code. They're fast, deterministic, and free.
Meaning in your browser. To rank which TLD fits your idea — cafetería → .coffee, .cafe; pizza shop → .pizza; abogado → .lawyer — the page runs a small multilingual embedding model on your device. The TLD vectors are pre-computed at build time into a file smaller than a photo. Inference cost to me: $0, no matter how many people use it. It works in Spanish and English, because that's how people here actually think.
Name ideas, three tiers, all free. If your Chrome has built-in AI, it can brainstorm on-device. If not, a server tier uses OpenRouter's free models — a daily job re-picks the best three, because free models rotate — behind a cache and a hard daily budget. If neither is available, you still get everything above. The AI is the seasoning, not the stove.

The frugal part

This whole thing runs on Vercel's free tier plus free databases. Total infrastructure bill: $0 (the domain name itself aside, obviously — I'm not that frugal). That's not a flex, it's a design constraint that made the product better:

Every search result is cached for a day, so the popular names cost nothing the second time.
Availability checks go through one batched call, not hundreds.
When someone hits the rate limit, the search box turns itself off with a countdown instead of failing mysteriously.
Heavy work (syncing 1,437 delegated TLDs and ICANN's application list) happens in once-a-day jobs, not on your request.

Frugality forced me to be clever instead of expensive. I'd take that trade every time.

The customer-obsession part

I kept asking: what would make this feel built for the person in front of it?

Spanish by default, auto-detected from your browser, with English, French, German and Chinese one tap away.
Mobile-first. The domain, its price, and a big Buy button, with 44-pixel tap targets. Most of your friends will find this from a chat link on a phone.
Honest about uncertainty. An empty DNS record does not mean a domain is free, and a wrong "available" is worse than no answer. When it can't verify a domain it says unverified and gives you a Verify button instead of guessing.
No account to search. Signing up only adds a saved shortlist and a TLD watchlist. If you do sign up, there's a Download my data button and a Delete my account button that works instantly. No dark patterns, no cookie banner, no ads.
Accessible. I ran an automated WCAG 2.2 AA scan (axe) across the main pages in light and dark mode and fixed what it found. (A scanner isn't a screen-reader test; I still want real people to try it.)

What it isn't (and the honest caveats)

It's not a registrar. You buy at the registrar; the Buy button just takes you to Vercel's domain search for that name.
Availability changes minute to minute. Treat results as a very good lead, not a contract. Results are cached up to a day (there's a Refresh button).
Many short hacks live on country-code TLDs, which have their own rules. Read them before you build a company on one.
The French, German and Chinese translations are mine plus AI. They'd love a native reviewer. (Spanish and English: use as you like.)

Go name your thing

If you've shipped something this month and it's still called proyecto-final-v3: go to nombra.la, type the idea in your own words — in Spanish, in English, a messy half-word — and see what's actually free.

The best part of building in 2026 is that making the thing takes a weekend. The least I could do was make sure the name doesn't take longer.

Made with ❤️ in 🇲🇽 por Talacha.dev. Feedback, weird edge cases, and better words for "domain hack" very welcome.