Earlier today, Alex Standiford was looking for a plugin that sent email newsletters through WordPress. He couldn’t remember the name of the plugin or the person who built it, but he remembered “something about pizza”.

The day before, my brother-in-law told his kids, “say good bye to aunty pizza!”

When I’m a guest on podcasts, I sometimes accidentally get introduced as “Lesley Pizza” cause people forget my actual sir name.

I am almost always asked for the “Lesley Pizza” origin story in interviews.

As you can see… Branding yourself has its perks! It makes for an interesting backstory and helps people remember you, or at least, remember the most unusual parts of your online name! 😂

The history of lesley.pizza

Tbh the history of the name and URL is somewhat mundane.

That sounds like a downer, but it actually means that the rewards I’ve reaped from this single silly and boring idea are readily available to you too.

Here’s the backstory:

Namecheap used to have a search tool that let you go through all available top line domains (TLDs – for example “.com” “.org” are TLDs. It’s the last bit in a URL).

One day, I put “lesley” in the search, and saw what was available for cheap.

There were many fun ones available, but lesley.pizza appealed to me most, so I bought it.

From there, it made sense to change my social media handles to lesley.pizza (or lesley_pizza when dots were taken or not allowed).

Thus branding myself as Lesley 🍕.

Dumb, right?

The best ideas tend to be a little dumb. Happily, I’ve reaped lots of “brand recognition” (in inverted commas cause I find it a little cringe too 😅) from it.

If you’d like to brand yourself something, head to porkbun.com (they allow you to see all available TLDs, namecheap sunset this feature, unfortunately) and look for a TLD that resonates with you.

Here are some of my favs:

.camp

.coffee

.pizza (of course!)

.rocks

.tips

Special thanks to Zack Katz who encouraged me to write this.