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Change Your Name

paulgraham.com

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Re: Change Your Name

#61

Post by Animats »

The latest "new TLD" thing was a money-making scheme for domain registrars. Nobody goes to those domains. Even the previous round of TLDs (".museum", ".aero") are not used much; ".aero" has entries for all the major airport codes, but they're redirects.

Amusingly, even if you have your very own TLD, it doesn't help you. Most browsers send single-word lookups to a search engine before they send them to DNS. Try "ca" in a browser. There is a web site at "ca". But to get there, you'll have to use "ca.", to force a DNS lookup from the root. Nobody knows to do that unless they're into how DNS works. There are some low-level bugs embedded in very common C libraries which cause problems with single-word domains, and they probably won't be fixed.

As for the original poster's advice, the price of the domain you want in .com is probably more than YCombinator's initial funding. With all of today's domain hoarding, the ".com" domain usually comes later. Facebook started as "thefacebook.com".

Re: Change Your Name

#62

Post by mynameisvlad »

jimminy wrote: post #7

> "Whereas (as Stripe shows) having x.com signals strength even if it has no relation to what you do." I would contest that it has no relation, I could be wrong since I have no knowledge. That said I always saw it as a relation to the cards themselves and the magnetic-strip on the back of the card.

Yep, I agree, that's what I thought it referred to the entire time (and even commend them on a smart name because of it)

Re: Change Your Name

#63

Post by dylanjermiah »

hyperpallium wrote: post #41
arihant wrote: post #22

> 100% of the top 20 YC companies by valuation have the .com of their name. 94% of the top 50 do. But only 66% of companies in the current batch have the .com of their name. Which suggests there are lessons ahead for most of the rest, one way or another. I wonder how much of that is due to the fact that landscape has changed in past 8 years and top 20 YC companies are all at least a few years (5-ish?) old. I apprecia…

yes, didn't dropbox used to be trydropbox.com? And, tho non-YC, delicious.com was del.icio.us (or something). Successful companies can buy their domain. But I agree with pg; a startup by any other name would succeed as sweet, so why not choose one you can get.

Dropbox was getdropbox.com and airbnb was airbedandbreakfast.com

Re: Change Your Name

#65

Post by ThomPete »

loceng wrote: post #60
ThomPete wrote: post #13

Great names are made not found. I think Paul for once have it the wrong way around. If you become big enough and happen to have enough of a market you might need to .com name to optimize your numbers. If you happen to find a good name you can afford that you still think represents you and is .com you should most probably change your name. But for most people just like their logo it's it's not that important until you…

There are different strategies and it certainly can be an advantage if you have a single word .com domain that encompasses a core value or offering.

A lot of things can be advantageous. But lets keep in mind that 99.99% of all companies are not going to be unicorns with budgets to buy +100K domain names anytime soon.

That doesn't mean they can't become a hugely successful company.

My general point is just that you shouldn't prematurely optimize because you end up spending a lot of time on it. Unless you stumble on a great name that you can afford it's most of the times simply not worth the effort.

Re: Change Your Name

#66

Post by ThomPete »

blazespin wrote: post #51
ThomPete wrote: post #13

Great names are made not found. I think Paul for once have it the wrong way around. If you become big enough and happen to have enough of a market you might need to .com name to optimize your numbers. If you happen to find a good name you can afford that you still think represents you and is .com you should most probably change your name. But for most people just like their logo it's it's not that important until you…

Little details are always important as long as they don't require big effort.

Agree. Problem is changing your name, to most people, is a big effort :)

Re: Change Your Name

#67

Post by creeble »

BinaryIdiot wrote: post #52

I couldn't disagree more with this article and am kinda surprised Paul wrote about this. Domain names are transitioning into becoming useless. When you open any web browser or mobile phone and go to look for a company it does a search. The most relevant results come back at the top. This type of trend, as we abstract away from using TLDs, is only going to continue. Owning a .com isn't nearly as meaningful today as it…

Yeah. I heard this 13 years ago too. http://shirky.com/writings/domain_names.html

Re: Change Your Name

#68

Post by Tepix »

Animats wrote: post #61

The latest "new TLD" thing was a money-making scheme for domain registrars. Nobody goes to those domains. Even the previous round of TLDs (".museum", ".aero") are not used much; ".aero" has entries for all the major airport codes, but they're redirects. Amusingly, even if you have your very own TLD, it doesn't help you. Most browsers send single-word lookups to a search engine before they send them to DNS. Try "ca" i…

There is no website at "ca". Did you mean www.ca? That redirects to circa.ca

Re: Change Your Name

#69

Post by ThomPete »

blazespin wrote: post #47
rjvir wrote: post #33

> 100% of the top 20 YC companies by valuation have the .com of their name. 94% of the top 50 do. But only 66% of companies in the current batch have the .com of their name. That's not a straight comparison. A better stat would be, what percentage of the top 20 YC companies had the .com while they were in the active YC batch?

No, because his thesis is "change your name", not "start out with .com"

Change your name isn't enough you have to first find a name that you can afford. And so while it's true your current name isn't that important it doesn't mean that you can find any "good" .com names that are affordable.

Re: Change Your Name

#70

Post by declan »

The advice seems like a bit of an anachronism in the mobile world.

Nice, short .com domain names were probably more important for desktop web browsing -- and I suspect are less relevant to startups that are focused on the iOS App Store, Google Play Store, third-party app stores, Twitter, Facebook, etc. for discovery.

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