Change Your Name • Hacker News Board

Re: Change Your Name

#121

Post by jim_greco » Sun, Aug 09, 2015, 7:26 PM UTC

I have some personal experience with this. Our company is Direct Match. We used to use the directmatchx.com website. Adding an X on the end isn't that odd in the trading world, but we would get comments on it all the time. directmatch.com ended up costing us $8k and well worth the purchase.

For me it came down to, how can I tell customers, recruits, or investors that I'm going to be this huge impactful startup if I didn't even own the .com of my name? I couldn't. And now I never get a question about if my company's name is "Direct Match X" or why there's an X at the end of the domain name.

Re: Change Your Name

#122

Post by aryamaan » Sun, Aug 09, 2015, 7:26 PM UTC

jsalit wrote: post #97

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'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 dont have the data but I would argue such minority is very less and even if they are unable to find what they are looking for in first attempt (by using .com), they do check search engines result afterwards.

Re: Change Your Name

#123

Post by rhue » Sun, Aug 09, 2015, 7:27 PM UTC

ikeboy wrote: post #25

>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. How much of that is due to the pressure that he admittedly puts on them to change names? (And that higher valued ones are likely to be older and have had this pressur…

correlation is not causation...

Re: Change Your Name

#124

Post by nostrademons » Sun, Aug 09, 2015, 7:31 PM UTC

"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 APIs are rate-limited, so I couldn't get as far as I wanted, but in a random spot check of 30 or so words off the word list, every single one of them was taken (as was the word-pair that I'm actually using for my startup). Even things as out-there as absurder.com or tektites.com.

I think it's a good bet that somebody has already done this and registered every single English word and many word pair in the .com TLD.

The good news is that by shitting all over .com, there will be no more startups founded with .com domain names. Either companies will buy them as they get bigger, creating a big transfer of wealth from startups to domain squatters, or more likely they'll just give up and we'll get more .ly, .io, or other gTLD domains in the future.

Re: Change Your Name

#125

Post by matt1 » Sun, Aug 09, 2015, 7:33 PM UTC

If you're struggling to find a solid available .com for your startup, I'd encourage you to check out my free service, Lean Domain Search [1]. The site asks you for a keyword then pairs your keyword with 5,000 other words and instantly shows you which are available. For example, if you search for "food" [2], it will pair it with "free" and check "FreeFood.com", "hub" and check "FoodHub.com", and so on, and it also allows you to sort the results by length or popularity of that additional word. With a few searches you should be able to find a great domain, saving you a lot of time and potentially a lot of money.

[1] http://www.leandomainsearch.com

[2] http://www.leandomainsearch.com/search?q=food

Re: Change Your Name

#126

Post by linky123 » Sun, Aug 09, 2015, 7:33 PM UTC

If you don't have .com, it looks lame, with few exceptions. Also domains that are impossible to spell correctly if you just hear the name.

Re: Change Your Name

#127

Post by JoBrad » Sun, Aug 09, 2015, 7:36 PM UTC

dpcan wrote: post #49

sivers wrote: post #14

Best advice I've ever seen on naming a business is from this old Seth Godin gem: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2003/06/naming_a_bus... I read that in 2003, and have never forgotten the "Lemon Pie" example since.

I was developing websites in 2003, so I feel like I should be able to relate here, but he has this comment at the bottom that I can't figure out... "Use a stock photo CD and find cool pictures that match your name BEFORE you pick the name. If you can find a bunch of $30 images that work with a name, grab the pictures, then the name." Huh?

I think he's saying that once you have a set of potential names, get some stock photos/pictures that match up to those names, and then pick a name that you like AND has cool stock photography. That will keep you from picking a name and then having to spend even more time picking photos that go along with your name.

Re: Change Your Name

#128

Post by alexandros » Sun, Aug 09, 2015, 7:39 PM UTC

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?

It's also wrong because it implies that having the .com today is as important as when those companies got their .com. Anecdotally, many (most?) developer tools companies go for .io, so much so that a .com sounds strange these days.

Re: Change Your Name

#129

Post by danneu » Sun, Aug 09, 2015, 7:41 PM UTC

matt1 wrote: post #125

If you're struggling to find a solid available .com for your startup, I'd encourage you to check out my free service, Lean Domain Search [1]. The site asks you for a keyword then pairs your keyword with 5,000 other words and instantly shows you which are available. For example, if you search for "food" [2], it will pair it with "free" and check "FreeFood.com", "hub" and check "FoodHub.com", and so on, and it also all…

Another favorite tool: http://impossibility.org

You feed it a word and it will prefix/suffix it with random verbs/nouns/adjectives + '.com'.

Re: Change Your Name

#130

Post by metadata » Sun, Aug 09, 2015, 7:42 PM UTC

matt1 wrote: post #125

If you're struggling to find a solid available .com for your startup, I'd encourage you to check out my free service, Lean Domain Search [1]. The site asks you for a keyword then pairs your keyword with 5,000 other words and instantly shows you which are available. For example, if you search for "food" [2], it will pair it with "free" and check "FreeFood.com", "hub" and check "FoodHub.com", and so on, and it also all…

I love it, thanks. One suggestion, though - make it mobile friendly.