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Answers on Startups (a Stack Exchange site)

May 17, 2011 in 4 out of 5 stars, A community, A website, Business Intel, Business Planning, Expert Advice

What is it?

Answers.OnStartups.com BrightJourney.com: A question and answer site focused on Startups and Entrepreneurship.

Who makes it?

Stack Exchange (with a dash of clout from Dharmesh Shah)

Why is it the killerest?

Stack Exchange (the company behind this) have built a highly effective Question-and-Answer gamification format offering. They started with the absurdly successful Stack Overflow which is focused on answering software development questions, and applied the model to various other topics, including startups.

All of us have questions as we venture into these challenging startup waters, and Answers OnStartups is a productive place ask them. Because of the reward system built into the site, you will typically get high quality, and varied answers from experienced folks who know what they're talking about.

It also skews heavily toward online and software startups, which is where my own passion lies (as it does for many of you).

What could be improved?

I've been watching and participating for a few weeks now and I've had a great time, but two things could be improved:

1) The number of participants. What it has now is great, but I would love it to reach the level of some of the higher volume Stack Exchange sites. I know a bunch of you reading this have valuable insights to share, so get over there.

2) Some repetition in questions. Equity splitting, marketing, and funding questions occupy a large percent of the questions. That said, there are still interesting and helpful questions posted frequently.

How much does it cost?

Free

Rating?

Reviewed by Carson McComas

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How to find a good domain name

May 5, 2011 in Happy Links

Finding a good domain name is hard. If you're like me, you've spent absurd amounts of time on this task. Including time which would be much better spent building your product/website/company. 

Here are a list of tools I use which have significantly reduced the time I spend looking for a good domain, and have also significanly improved the quality of the domain names I end up with.

  1. Domain Hole
  2. Panabee 
  3. Name Station
  4. Bust a Name - takes a little getting used to, and is a bit painful to use, but can be valuable at getting you to think about connected ideas
  5. Value Drops, these guys update every day with quality domain names recently expired.
  6. Domai.nr helps you find creative url structures for that name you really, really want to use.
  7. Wordoid helps you make up names.
  8. Avail.io
  9. LeanDomainSearch - punch in a word, get a bunch of pairs
  10. Domize.com
  11. NameMesh

And finally here's an even more comprehensive list of tools - dozens deep.

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