Shopstead is live. It is a static site builder for small businesses: hours, menu, photos, contact form, schema.org JSON-LD validated against the real spec at publish time, downloadable artefact pack so you are never locked in. The product has been built for a while. The thing left was the name.
We had been calling it Shopfront. The word does the descriptive work, but every other small-business website company has used some variant of it. We could not own it.
Moniker is the other tool we shipped recently. It is a naming canvas for founders: branch from a seed word by meaning or sound, run feasibility on each candidate (RDAP for .com, .io, .app, plus GitHub, npm, Bluesky, USPTO and IP Australia), park survivors on a board.
We seeded with words like shopfront, corner, awning, village, kiosk. From the resulting graphs we built about thirty candidates by hand and Moniker checked each one against the registries.
A few patterns showed up:
.com-squatted. A graveyard for SaaS..com more often than ones built on common bases. The mining of the namespace is uneven.shop+X or front+X pattern cleared every handle registry cleanly, even when the .com was taken.Shopstead was a compound winner: shop plus the suffix stead ("a place, a position", as in homestead). The .com is taken but every relevant TLD plus GitHub, npm, Bluesky and the App Store handle were available, and IP Australia returned zero results. The reading is "your business has a permanent address here", which lines up with what the product does (hosted static site, downloadable artefact, your data your ownership).
If you run a small business and want a real website that you own outright, shopstead.app is open today.
New posts and projects, by email. Double opt-in, unsubscribe anytime.