Man, this advice may be tough to hear, (especially for someone like myself who currently only owns sellervision.net for the app I've been working on for ten months) but if the 'Godfather Of Startups' PG believes it's vital to have a dot com, then I'd change the name of my app in a heartbeat. Now I'm just waiting for YC to take me on to their Fellowship or main intake so I can have some budget to buy a cracking new name...ha ha!
Change Your Name
131–140 of 355 posts
Re: Change Your Name
#132"It turns out almost any word or word pair that is not an obviously bad name is a sufficiently good one, and the number of such domains is so large that you can find plenty that are cheap or even untaken." So, after reading this advice, I decided I'd actually try it out - it's easy enough to download a word list and write a script that pings a WHOIS API to check every single word or word pair. Turns out most such API…
There are still a few one-word domains left in the .com TLD (e.g. naziisms.com, regularizing.com, castigators.com). I myself registered one earlier this summer.
Re: Change Your Name
#133>Don't believe a domain is for sale unless the owner has already told you an asking price. One of my favorite examples: http://nissan.com
or tesla.com
I've always wondered how long will domain squatters wait before they negotiate. Surely Tesla Motors has approached tesla.com and apparently been turned down. Telsa Motors has shown they don't need that domain name to succeed. So when will the squatter, if ever, cave to Tesla Motors' offer?
Re: Change Your Name
#134"It turns out almost any word or word pair that is not an obviously bad name is a sufficiently good one, and the number of such domains is so large that you can find plenty that are cheap or even untaken." So, after reading this advice, I decided I'd actually try it out - it's easy enough to download a word list and write a script that pings a WHOIS API to check every single word or word pair. Turns out most such API…
Yeah.
I have quite a lot of experience trying to find names and is fairly good at coming up with them. Actually finding available names that have the proper quality is very very hard and time consuming.
Re: Change Your Name
#135I 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…
It sounds (unsurprisingly, of course) like the perspective of an investor or other tech industry insider. Notice the phrases like "it signals weakness" and "suggests you're a marginal company." Those don't seem like phrases most people are ever going to think about a company, and especially not based only on their domain name.
I disagree.
My parents are typical web users. Fairly tech savvy, but not tech insiders. I recall telling them about bit.ly. It took a while to explain that it wasn't bitly.com, bit.ly.com, etc. They ended up just searching for it instead of typing in the domain name.
Think of the added friction this causes... and as we all know, every added interaction detracts from the conversion funnel. Taken in aggregate, many startups cannot afford the attrition of a shitty domain name.
Re: Change Your Name
#136Great 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…
Couldn't agree more.
Google, Yahoo, Twitter.
Three global brands that aren't dictionary names, and don't have to be. You don't need a dictionary word .com to survive either.
Re: Change Your Name
#137I like how esoterically, the footnotes imply you may want to consider changing your nationality or religion, as well.
Re: Change Your Name
#138I 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…
You're assuming most people search first; many users don't even understand the difference between entering a search term versus a URL in a browser address bar. Yet, non-techy people know ".com".
I think it is the opposite. Among most of the "non tech" people I know, they enter a name at a google search box rather than a URL. Even if they know the URL, they enter it at a search field!
Re: Change Your Name
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
> do you know anyone who actually types in a domain name anymore that isn't a technie? That's a problem. It means we rely more and more on search engines, thus centralising the web (and with it, the internet) more than it needs to be. Centralizing the network means centralizing the power. Not a good idea. It never was.
DNS is already centralized.
Yes, and that is a problem. But that's not nearly as bad as having Google and Bing have the same role. DNS goes through a highly decentralised network of name servers, many of which aren't at all controlled by the ICANN. Each country based top level domain has its own set of servers, and there name requests are generally cached on other servers still.
But when you type "company name" in a search engine, you give away your search to an ad supported private company in real time. Juicy profiling, no privacy. Much worse than using DNS.
Besides, when you click on a link from your favourite search engine, you're still using DNS. Now you have two single points of failure.
Re: Change Your Name
#140There is another problem with Paul's suggestion, which is that it only really works for very young startups that don't have many customers or other business relationships yet.
Once you sell product and have established partnerships changing your name just doesn't make sense any longer and becomes a measure of last resort, e.g. if your brand is so damaged that continuing business under the old name becomes very complicated. But then again, if you're in that kind of a situation you probably have a lot more things to care about which are at least as important.