As I approach a new phase in life (I'm leaving my current job, if you didn't know) the thought of starting something new keeps creeping into my head. I keep looking around at all the people that are flourishing in the startup world and am simply jealous. So, as I daydream I come to the realization that I don't have a ton of million-dollar ideas, and often fall back on trying to come up with awesome domain names and hoping an idea sprouts out of that (not really.. but perhaps a side project could). So, today I wrote a little app that could fuel my time-wasting past time. Check it out at
domain.joewegner.com
The idea was actually fueled by my love for
Gumroad (and a bit of jealousy). As the story goes,
Sahil Lavingia had this awesome idea for a startup. So, he hacked away for a couple nights, and came to the point that he was ready to show the world an MVP. If I understand it correctly, he had the domain gumroad.com sitting in a stockpile somewhere, and it just happened to be abstract enough to work. Man, I wish I was that cool.
Speaking of Sahil and Gumroad, did you hear that he recently closed a
$7.7 million round of funding? Congrats, man.
If you're interested, the source for this app can be found on
Github, and is written in Node.js. There's a little portion that I wrote in PHP and haven't shared, but it's incredibly simple. The only important part is that it's calling from a database of 200,000 possible words (that I may open source at some point).