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How and why we acquired our .com domain

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Re: How and why we acquired our .com domain

#71

Post by pronoiac »

JohnFen wrote: post #61
pronoiac wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been looking at the domain lifecycle lately, and it can take a couple of months after the expiration date for it to actually become available for registration. I'd check with whois on the command line.

I've had my domains for decades now, and once or twice I've accidentally failed to renew in time. My registrar has a grace period during which they won't release the domain for others to register it, just to let people who accidentally let it lapse have a chance to renew it first. In my case, I failed to notice the renewal notice and only realized that I missed it once the domains stopped resolving. The grace period…

I was trying to keep it short! I like grace periods and redemption periods, but they vary so widely by TLD and registrar, that I wanted to avoid that rabbit hole of conversation.

I've been working on going from calendar reminders to, at least, semi-automating checking a list of expiration dates, and then checking regularly. I'm still making mistakes, I'm just trying to avoid repeating them and instead make exciting new mistakes.

Re: How and why we acquired our .com domain

#72

Post by slig »

ryan29 wrote: post #66
evanmoran wrote: post #43

Curious for fellow founders with the .com, how many of you defensively buy the .net, .org names as well? I find it hard to resist getting at least those three if I'm settled on a name/brand.

I was trying to decide this a few years ago when I found the best .com I'll ever own. It's only 8 characters and I was able to get matching social media handles everywhere but Twitter. My main concern was that someone with more money than me could come along, start using it, trademark it, and make it unusable for me. I've been thinking about trying to trademark it, but it's expensive and complicated, especially if I…

>My main concern was that someone with more money than me could come along, start using it, trademark it, and make it unusable for me.

This happened recently with substack.net.

Re: How and why we acquired our .com domain

#73

Post by ceejayoz »

vxNsr wrote: post #59
ceejayoz wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IIRC (it was long ago): Expired card, broke college student, procrastination, and at a time where domain squatting was somewhat new.

Yea expired card is what scares me the most, I think these days theoretically that shouldn’t be a problem because cc companies will proactively send out the new info to companies charging recurring payments (which can be good and bad).

All my current registrars support backup cards, and they've gotten a lot better about warning in advance.

If they really matter, extend registration for 10 years and keep adding one annually.

Re: How and why we acquired our .com domain

#74

Post by ryan29 »

JohnFen wrote: post #70
ryan29 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was trying to decide this a few years ago when I found the best .com I'll ever own. It's only 8 characters and I was able to get matching social media handles everywhere but Twitter. My main concern was that someone with more money than me could come along, start using it, trademark it, and make it unusable for me. I've been thinking about trying to trademark it, but it's expensive and complicated, especially if I…

> I've been thinking about trying to trademark it, but it's expensive and complicated, especially if I can't get a trademark personally and transfer it to a business in the future Trademarks are a bit of a pain, but you totally can get the trademark registered to you personally and transfer it to a different entity later. The main things people miss about trademarks is that they're category-specific (If I have tradem…

> You can't register the trademark until after you've been engaging in commerce with it.

Is that US? I'm in Canada. I think we can register before commercial use [1]:

> Another of your responsibilities as the owner of a trademark is to use the trademark in Canada. If you do not use it, the registration could be expunged from the Register of Trademarks by the Registrar. The Registrar could start summary expungement proceedings, after three years beginning on the day on which a trademark is registered

To me, that sounds like you have to use it within 3 years of registering and I didn't see anything requiring commercial use prior to registration in the linked info.

We also have a ~3 year backlog for applications and I don't know if the trademark ends up registered with the filing date or the issuance date. It's the kind of thing that's complicated enough that I wouldn't want to risk screwing it up, so I'm waiting until I can pay someone that knows what they're doing.

TLDR; It's complicated and expensive, especially compared to the simplicity of pulling out a credit card and registering a dozen TLDs. Lol.

1. https://ised-isde.canada.ca/site/canadian-intellectual-prope...

Re: How and why we acquired our .com domain

#75

Post by ryan29 »

yde23 wrote: post #67

Wouldn't it have been easier if you had the trademark rights to get the domain name without forking over the $8k through legal means. I guess you'd still be looking at around $4k for the legal fees but wouldn't that be a better option?

There's a good chance it would be considered a "bad faith" complaint. It's called reverse domain name hijacking [1] and is specifically addressed in the UDRP.

If you lose the dispute, you'll never buy the domain for a reasonable price after that, so it's a really risky move.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_domain_hijacking

Re: How and why we acquired our .com domain

#76

Post by CharlesW »

horsawlarway wrote: post #32
CharlesW wrote: post #29

> There was no doubt that .com has a better brand than .io. Ten years ago, there was still some merit to this. Given changes to browsers and search engines, I believe this has a "vanity license plate" level of importance today. > There is no definite way of isolating the importance of the .com but it is likely to have played a part. "We have no way of knowing if traffic would be as high or higher if we stuck with .io…

I think this section is fairly compelling: "One of the first things we noticed was that the traffic patterns between supertokens.io (our actual domain) and supertokens.com were nearly identical. Whenever our .io traffic had a big spike, so did the .com, even though there was nothing on it yet. More importantly, these spikes meant that a significant portion of potential users went to supertokens.com directly." If they…

That's interesting, and I wish the author would've dug into that more. The claim is that people were typing .com when searching for them, but a search would've resulted in a search page, not direct traffic.

As far as direct traffic, they migrated to .com on 1/15/23, at which point supertokens.com already had 1,473 referring domains and 16.6K backlinks. I think it's more likely that the traffic they saw was the result of that instead of people typing the exact domain name (which is relatively rare).

I'd also submit that this is the story as told by their agency, who probably also told them to write this content marketing piece based on that explanation.

Re: How and why we acquired our .com domain

#77

Post by JohnFen »

ryan29 wrote: post #74
JohnFen wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been thinking about trying to trademark it, but it's expensive and complicated, especially if I can't get a trademark personally and transfer it to a business in the future Trademarks are a bit of a pain, but you totally can get the trademark registered to you personally and transfer it to a different entity later. The main things people miss about trademarks is that they're category-specific (If I have tradem…

> You can't register the trademark until after you've been engaging in commerce with it. Is that US? I'm in Canada. I think we can register before commercial use [1]: > Another of your responsibilities as the owner of a trademark is to use the trademark in Canada. If you do not use it, the registration could be expunged from the Register of Trademarks by the Registrar. The Registrar could start summary expungement pr…

Oh, yes, I'm sorry. I was talking about the US.

Re: How and why we acquired our .com domain

#78

Post by jbc1 »

querez wrote: post #34

Slightly off-topic, but: Gandi was my registrar of choice, but I read some months ago that they've sold out. Who do people go to these days for registering domain names?

Even more off topic: A lot of very large companies (eg. Google, Reddit, Microsoft) use Mark Monitor as their registrar rather than either being their own registrar or using one of the providers everyone else does. Anyone know what they're getting that makes that particular company so appealing?

Re: How and why we acquired our .com domain

#79

Post by lostlogin »

thrtythreeforty wrote: post #53
lostlogin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did the broken do more than offer a couple of opinions? That $4k seems steep.

Sounds like the broker got paid for his advice on not poking the bear. That could easily have saved $4k.

But the asking price was $8k - you’d have to go in very hot to get yourself a 50% price rise (which would justify the broker’s fee in this instance).

However I am aware of how squatters behave, so this could actually happen.

Re: How and why we acquired our .com domain

#80

Post by dhosek »

When I came up with the idea for finl, I was not entirely surprised that finl.com was squatted, and given that finl is unlikely to ever make money (since my business plan is to not be a business), the asking price of $53,000 is entirely out of line. I maybe will switch to a different tld than .xyz at some point in the future, but for now, barring a lottery win (which would require buying a lottery ticket, I suppose), I’ll never have the .com and that’s fine.
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