A year ago I started the project SafePush.com, for this project I also bought RegistrarPush.com

My idea was the following:
Most domainer sales are doing registrar pushes and making PayPal mass payments, it’s easy and fast. The only problem is the lack of safety.
So I decided to create a service to secure such transactions that domainers could use daily to secure their daily sales/purchases.
At this moment I was also working on another project for which security was an important factor.

So I don’t remember if it was searching a photo related to one or the other project when I found this photo:
http://ecop.com/banners/800×733.jpg

All the persons who saw the photo for the first time said the same: OUCH!
So I decided I absolutely wanted this photo for my site.
This way when people visit, they will not immediately forget the site.
The challenge was to find who was the owner and had the right on this artistic photo. After a deep search I found he was:
S. Demmitt, a photographer from Los Angeles. I contacted him to negotiate the rights to use it for my site.
The negotiation was friendly, and we quickly found a deal of mutual interest.

But I put the project on hold as I was busy with other projects.
As I wanted to give a name to my in house escrow service used in my vertical marketplaces. I found SafePush.com was too restrictive and I needed a better name to hold the service.
So I bought CloseSale.com and soon after, CloseDeal.com with the idea to also offer exchange escrow service.
But the project continued on hold as that is when I started to launch my auctions… so I was busy.

In September, I decided to launch an escrow for domain exchange because there was a serious lack in the domaining world to secure such transactions.
I purchased SwapDomains.com and decided to use the SWAT photo for the site design, I commented the idea to a friend who outlined that SWAT was a typo of SWAP, so I also registered SwatDomains.com to prevent cybersquatting.
But after a week I realized it was smarter to directly launch the full service that allowed escrow of complex domain transactions and not just a service to escrow exchanges.

So again, the problem about what domain to use.
I no longer liked CloseDeal.com as much as I liked it a few months ago.
There was 2 names I had some interest in: SafeDeal.com and MiniEscrow.com.
At that time I only wanted to escrow domain sales under $1K and refer Escrow.com for larger ones so the MiniEscrow.com made sense.

But I was unable to make a decision. Neither was appealing enough for me spend what each owner wanted.
Ideally I wanted to buy both and decide later but for that I needed to lower the price to minimize losses, MiniEscrow.com owner accepted further but it was too late.

As I wanted to accelerate the process. One morning I contacted Vern (he handles Frank Schilling’s domain sales) to propose my last offer for SafeDeal.com
But just an hour after, I got that “genius idea” that the photo was in fact a cop and iCOP or eCOP could be a great name for the project.
The first was used by an established alarm company and the second was for sale by a domainer so I send him an email and after a pair of offers/counter offers I got the name.
Not only did I have the perfect name for the photo but a name that outlines the “secure” spirit of the service.

The name is short, just 5 letters, and my experience is that people type-in your domain when short (we are all a little lazy).
The name is associated with a cop photo which helps to remember the domain name (the photo helps the name and the name helps the photo).
The name and photo help convey the idea that we SECURE domain transactions.
So I probably spent +5 times more buying the mockup domains but finally get one worth much more than what I totally spent.

I am now really happy with the domain name and design!
Even if the other day I should admit I found me contacting the owner of COP.com…

…

PS:
At a moment I considered DomainEscrow.com but I did not pursue on this one as by experience the owner use to ask a fortune for any name he owns and my motivation will probably not have matched his usual huge expectations.
I also purchased DomainEscrowService.com but I do not remember exactly when, more a way to secure the description of a service concept as it was never a real candidate (too long + look likes too much the name of my main competitor, which also leaded me to discard MiniEscrow.com even if at a moment I found it catchy).