What about for non dot com domains, any advice?
Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name
61–70 of 225 posts
Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name
#62My mind works exactly the opposite way. If I see a domain like BikeTours.com, I immediately assume that the business is built primarily on the domain name, and the quality of the product or service is inferior. Hence I don’t click it. But I assume the majority of internet users don’t think this way, so it can be a profitable strategy. Edit: Well, thinking about it, it’s not always true, but at the very least I check…
Agreed, especially what I often see from search engines related to health and fitness. Many blogs with short, descriptive domain names, that are completely over-optimizing in SEO, changing publish dates of articles and offering bad UX in general (invasive ads, popups, trackers, ...)
Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name
#63My mind works exactly the opposite way. If I see a domain like BikeTours.com, I immediately assume that the business is built primarily on the domain name, and the quality of the product or service is inferior. Hence I don’t click it. But I assume the majority of internet users don’t think this way, so it can be a profitable strategy. Edit: Well, thinking about it, it’s not always true, but at the very least I check…
Maybe it's terrible, but when I hear something like "GoSojourn" I think, Ah, VC money! Let's see how subsidized this is....
Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just a business expense, right? If you're actually going to be building a business on a domain name, it doesn't necessarily make sense to cheap out, just like any other business expense.
It's not about cheapening out, it's an exorbitant amount without much real customer value. "news.ycombinator.com" apparently works just as well as if this was "techtalk.com" or "bizchat.com" or whatever. Yahoo isn't about cowboys, Amazon isn't about rainforests, uber isn't a firm from Germany, Google isn't about mathematics... It really doesn't seem to be correlated with business success. Any made up name will do. Bl…
Yeah all this agonizing over domain names makes me think of middle school "bands" I was in where we spent more time riffing on possible names than we did practicing.
Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name
#65All I can say is that I wouldn't go into this business today without either lots of automation (someone a while back had a script that flagged single-dictionary-word dot-coms as they expired) or some statistics-backed way of identifying keywords likely to pay off down the road.
Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name
#66What is a great domain name? Decades ago it was essential to have an e in your name (eBay et al), then it was cute to replace that e with i, but the whole while the golden rule was to definitely whatever you do, do not use a name out of the dictionary, to make it easier for consumers to identify your product and to save you legal headaches. Nowadays, companies seem to love having a real dictionary name. Lemonade: ref…
>Decades ago it was essential to have an e in your name
howabout turbobiking2000.com
Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name
#67I feel attacked! I was scrolling HN, not Facebook!
Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name
#68You don't need to bid up the price of existing .com domain names. Even in 2020 there are plenty of perfectly good ones that nobody has claimed yet!
All you need are two or three words that satisfy the following criteria:
1. The words, when spoken, should be easy to spell.
2. The words, when read, should be easy to pronounce in any English dialect.
3. The words, when concatenated, should not create any ambiguity (a la expertsexchange.com)
A tool that generates these kinds of domains is available for your convenience at https://startupname.website
Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name
#69I tried to register a really cool name. Suddenly it was registered after all. Funny how that goes... Thought me to never trust a domain name registrar again. Could I have sued them? Perhaps, but at the time that was way too economically risky a prospect for me to undertake, while most likely having to pay court costs even if I won.
Re: Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name
#70That's the worst advice ever. Domain parking is a business and if you specualte randomly you are probably going to lose money.
Did you RTFA? He isn't parking the domain, he is picking one and then building something small around that.
To me domain parking is akin to real estate investors just buying up land and hoping some large company suddenly wants it and offers you a ton of money.