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Rich Barton, Founder of Zillow and Expedia, Shares How He Finds the Best Domain Names for His Companies

Rich Barton, Founder of Zillow and Expedia, Shares How He Finds the Best Domain Names for His Companies

long title, great info

Shane Cultra
April 18, 2025

This is as exerpt from the recent Tim Ferris/Rich Barton podcast. Rich Barton is one of my favorite people. He’s founded Expedia, Zillow, Glass Door and many other companies. But he’s my age, a family man, a health guy but not over the top. He’s my best role model in a person I’ve found. I’ve chosen my names based on a post he wrote in 2009 on how he names companies and its made me hundreds of thousands of dollars. He does a great job explaining it on the podcast. Worth a listen, not just for this, but overall.

I have a few rules about naming. First, when you’re trying to brand a company, if you’re building a consumer brand especially, you have kind of two broad ways you can go, the easy way and the hard way. And I’ll forgive the 4-Hour Workweek and the 4-Hour Body, you know, but I’ll tell you that there are no shortcuts. You take the shortcut to the long road, my coach Jimmy says.
Anyway, the easy way is if you’re building a travel site to call it hotels.com, airlinetickets.com, you know, you name it, every category has a literal word.com. And the advantages to that are it’s easy to explain to people what you do. And the disadvantages to that are you don’t own any brand equity, because you can’t own a word that previously exists. And so you’re non-distinct and non-distinctive.
There’s an in-between way, which is to use an existing word, but make a new application of it, Apple, computer, amazon.com, and that’s viable. But you have to build a new definition for that word, which those companies obviously did successfully.
The hard way and the best way, I think, for consumers is to make up a word, which is super hard, because you have to tell people what the word means. You have to define it for them. But once you do, you own that word. The definition of that word is yours and only yours. And so I like the hard path because I like building brands.
And with provocation marketing, I think I can get a big audience early, which begins to familiarize people with the brand. So I was confident in my ability to, my and my team’s really ability to do that.
Okay, so now when you’re making up a word, what do you do? And I think this is what you’re referring to. Okay, so high point Scrabble letters. Do you play Scrabble?
It’s been a minute, but yes, I play Scrabble.
Okay, you know that there are different point numbers on each letter as you play Scrabble. And do you remember what the high point ones are?
I don’t.
Okay, Z is 10, X is 10. That’s the highest point you can get. A, E, I, O, U are one. Here’s why. Q is 10 too. Here’s why. Z, X and Q are super rare letters. A, E, I, O, U are super common.
And so rule number one is pick the super rare letters and pick them because they’re very distinctive. They jump off a page when you read. They stick in people’s brains in a way that’s not crowded. So all my stuff has Zs and Xs and some Qs actually too.
Rule number two, fewer syllables is better than more. I kind of learned this lesson with Expedia. Expedia was too many syllables. It’s worked out fine. We’ve overcome that. The company’s overcome that now. But it was, in hindsight, was a lot.
I liked it because of rule number three, which is it was evocative of positive things—speed, expedition. So it said adventure and speed, and that all felt good in that word.
But fewer syllables. I think two syllables is the sweet spot because I also want it to be a good dog name. So if the word could be a good dog name, you’re on to something—like you can call for it. Zillow.
Anyway, another one is it can be turned into a verb pretty easily. So pick a word that can be turned into a verb. So it probably—the dog name and verb probably means it ends in a vowel sound.
And then the last one is people, double letters and palindromes are good too. So anything that is unique, a unique word form—double letters people remember, they jump off the page. And palindromes are words that are the same forward and backward spelled, right? So just interesting, interesting words.
Anyway, that’s my handbook.
A Few Posts of Interest

Long read today so no links. Happy Good Friday to all those who celebrate

Quote of the Day: “The name should work in a bar, not just a boardroom. If you can’t say it over a drink, change it.” — Naval Ravikant

Domain of the Day:GoLocksmith.com As I discussesd HERE

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