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Change Your Name

paulgraham.com

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Re: Change Your Name

#181

Post by alialkhatib »

dshankar wrote: post #151

PG is recommending you get the X.com, but that doesn't mean you need to pay $50,000 for X.com on Day 1 of your startup. I see people making this mistake all the time, buying expensive domains before validating their startup in the first place. Think about what Dropbox, Stripe, and AirBnB did! getdropbox.com -> dropbox.com devpayments.com -> stripe.com airbedandbreakfast.com -> airbnb.com

Graham mentions this in a footnote, essentially not to assume such a thing unless the domain squatter has actually given an ask price. I'll extend on his argument by pointing out that Nissan and Tesla still don't own their .com names, and evidently Houston (of Dropbox) went through a lot of pain to get dropbox.com well after it'd been validated.

If your idea seems worthless, a squatter might figure this is the time to shed a worthless domain for a few hundred or thousand bucks. If you're at the helm of a runaway multi-million-dollar success, I imagine the squatter is going to try and squeeze you for significantly more.

Re: Change Your Name

#182

Post by bbrazil »

nostrademons wrote: post #124

"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…

I have recent experience in this, as I spent 4-5 hours trying to name my new company.

I was first looking for some reference on prometheus.io and a transliteration for the Irish for "fire" looked free - but turned out to be to a derogatory term for Indians so that wasn't an option (always check Urban Dictionary). Next I looked for something with the initials AE (which means "liver" in Irish), and even after trawling through a thesaurus and /usr/share/dict/words nothing worked that was available in DNS.

Finally I had a list of ~100 words that were candidates. Single words were out as they weren't easily Googleable, and all were taken. I played with word pairs a bit, and the 3rd or 4th I really liked was free in DNS and not popular on the web. I now have robustperception.io, with the .com and plurals to be safe.

People I've talked to have liked the name "Robust Perception", and it ties into what we do, so it seems to have been worth all the hassle. Name pollution is a real problem.

Re: Change Your Name

#183

Post by melvinmt »

flylib wrote: post #79

this is telling Just take a look at all these successful startups which either had a temporary domain name, or which still have a different domain name to their name: Square was squareup.com, DropBox was getdropbox.com, Facebook was thefacebook.com, Instagram was instagr.am, Twitter was twttr.com, Foursquare was playfoursquare.com, Basecamp is basecamphq.com, Pocket is getpocket.com, Bitly was/is bit.ly, Delicious wa…

Uber was ubercab.com

> With characteristic sense of profitable timing, it bought the domain name Uber.com from the Universal Music Group for 2% of the company then later managed to buy back the shares – today worth hundreds of millions – for $1m.

http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2014/dec/21/travis-ka...

Re: Change Your Name

#185

Post by dis123233 »

I'm skeptical to see that PG wrote this article. There is no doubt that owning a snazzy .com domain is good but saying this

    If you have a US startup called X and you don't have x.com, you should probably change your name.
doesn't make sense. Sorry.

Re: Change Your Name

#186

Post by TeMPOraL »

rwallace wrote: post #156
cpeterso wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Maybe never. The Homo Economicus model of human behavior as optimizing for expected economic return is only a first approximation. In some cases, human behavior is more accurately modeled as "Mine! My precious!"

Even if Tesla is not willing to pay the amount the squatter wants, he may be hoping that Tesla's competitor will.

By the way, the coolest thing Tesla could do, that would buy them a lot of love and good press, would be to buy tesla.com and donate it to Nicola Tesla Science Center.

Re: Change Your Name

#187

Post by nostrademons »

pc wrote: post #177
nostrademons wrote: post #124

"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…

So were Stripe and Parse, as it happens. We reached out to the owners of domains that looked unused / potentially for sale.

How did you start that process, and (if you don't mind saying) around how much did it cost? I've been looking at what it would take to buy some domains that are marked as taken and get pointed to domainagents.com by my registrar, but it's $199 minimum bid with a $30 deposit (with $10 going straight to the seller simply for responding), and I worry that they'll ask for like $100K, which I'm obviously not going to pay at this stage in the company lifetime.

Re: Change Your Name

#188

Post by brianmurphy »

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…

Remember this is in the context of startup businesses who may not have much on the web. Your position works out okay if you are confident in google's "I'm feeling lucky" kind of search. For everybody else, having a solid .com name still reigns supreme.

Re: Change Your Name

#189

Post by ThomPete »

natch wrote: post #159
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…

You completely ignored PG's argument about it signaling weakness. This is one of those perception versus reality things, where people's perceptions (those who are judging a startup) ARE the reality, whether those perceptions are theoretically refutable or not. In other words, let's say you're right, and owning the .com domain name is becoming less meaningful (an argument that PG already addressed, by the way). That d…

signaling weakness is an important factor for a fraction of companies for most others that is the very least of their worries.

PG talks from a perspective that does not apply to most companies in this world.

Again if you get a .com name that is great. But whether it's worth the effort of finding one it if you don't have it already is another discussion all together.

Re: Change Your Name

#190

Post by petercooper »

baddox wrote: post #103
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…

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.

Insiders usually have ungainly phrases for things that outsiders sense but cannot/do not put into words themselves.

The public are hugely influenced by branding, advertising, look and feel, and experiences. They might not put the feelings they have into words like insiders do, but those things absolutely exist and insiders to the retail, advertising, and similar industries have all sorts of jargon to analyze the behavior of the public.

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