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Change Your Name

paulgraham.com

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Re: Change Your Name

#241

Post by a3_nm »

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…

I suspect that your parent is conjecturing that the fact of not having X.com will eventually stop being perceived as a sign of weakness.

I do not know to which extent I agree. I find it sad but likely that people may eventually stop paying attention to URLs altogether; the main counter-argument I would have would be phishing, because, no matter what, you'll still have to check that you are on the right website at some point. That said I do believe that if it may happen for the general public, it may not happen before a long time for more knowledgeable people (prospective funders, employees, partners, etc., as you mentioned).

Re: Change Your Name

#242

Post by mehrdada »

tajen wrote: post #169
squiggy22 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All combinations of 6 letters .com are taken. All 16k words of the dictionary are taken in English. It wasn't even the case 2 years ago. I wonder whether pg's impression that if is possible to get a .com is outdated.

> All combinations of 6 letters .com are taken.

Do you mean this literally for any 6 random characters? It rings true for 4, but I believe you can easily find a 5 character domain name even now. In fact, I just registered three five character and a six character domains without much trouble.

Re: Change Your Name

#243

Post by cjbarber »

devanti wrote: post #240

Is there a way to start a name consultancy? I'm fairly good at coming up with names, and wouldn't mind offering my services, but I'm not sure how to secure my idea before selling it. I would also be open to testing my skills for anyone looking for a company name.

You could do an Offer HN I'll help you come up with a name?

The other thing to do would be just to have a gentleman's agreement where they sign something (TBH I wouldn't worry with a legal contract initially, if you work with honest customers the gentleman's agreement is OK, and worst case if it was a big deal you could take to court and likely win)

So the agreement would be something like: I'll come up with a name for you, I won't make you pay upfront, but if I come up with one you like and you haven't already thought of it [make them list all the ones they are currently considering upfront], then you'll pay me $500. Reply to this email with your full name if you agree. And then just make sure you follow them on twitter and connect on linkedin or such so that they feel that you would notice if they screwed you over, but like I say I think most people are nice and worrying about getting screwed over is likely premature optimization :-)

Re: Change Your Name

#244

Post by BreakoutList »

nostrademons wrote: post #187
pc wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> After sending a bunch of these emails by hand, I wrote a Bash script for the process in my old Harvard Computer Society shell account (sending from a .edu address would make us seem reputable while not flush with cash). I tested it out, but having forgotten both “set -u” and to provide any inputs, it sent an email with all variables blank. The to: address defaulted to mailer-daemon@, an administrative list that all of my former HCS colleagues were on. They were pretty confused to see my email asking if I could buy “.com” from them, and I was suitably embarrassed. I figured the cost of further similar embarrassment would be higher than the manual time I'd save, so I kept sending emails manually.

> In total, I sent several hundred emails that day. Of the plausible responses I received, stripe.com was the clear winner. (Incidentally, I also got a reply from the parse.com owner; months later I sent my accumulated domain name list to Tikhon Bernstam, which is how Parse got its name.)

http://www.quora.com/How-did-Stripe-come-up-with-its-name/an...

Cost:

> We'd rather not disclose the amount, but it was less than you might think.

http://www.quora.com/How-much-did-Stripe-com-spend-on-their-...

Summary: They sent emails from a student email address to the domain contacts as listed in the Whois details. Cost was perhaps in the range of $2-20k (which I realize is a big range).

Re: Change Your Name

#245

Post by J2K »

ThomPete wrote: post #13

Great 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…

It’s also strange to me since more then once when discussing startup naming I’ve quoted this earlier article Paul wrote where he makes nearly the opposite argument: http://aux.messymatters.com/pgnames.html

Re: Change Your Name

#246

Post by BreakoutList »

mbesto wrote: post #221
pc wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Care to share how much you paid for it? I typically see north of $5k. For a very early stage company its hard to justify even just $5k.

Was answering the question above and came across this so figured I'd share -- though maybe Patrick/Stripe has changed his/their mind since then :-)

> We'd rather not disclose the amount, but it was less than you might think.

http://www.quora.com/How-much-did-Stripe-com-spend-on-their-...

Re: Change Your Name

#247

Post by GuiA »

brudgers wrote: post #176
booruguru wrote: post #117

If the .com name you want is already registered, you can always buy it later once you business is successful enough to justify the investment (much like betali.st and getdropbox.com). There's no point in buying an expensive domain name for a company that may not survive past the startup stage. Note: a large swath of web users don't even understand the concept of a domain name or address bar...instead they google term…

My reading was that at an early stage it's just better to come up with another name and be done with it...if airmatressbreadandbreakfast.com is taken, just buy airBnB.com. Consumers won't care. In cases like Stripe, where the target is B2B and the businesses are mostly small businesses, then a good name matters because it's marketing and its cost is just a cost of doing business. To push it further a .io domain is si…

That's a bad example though. If airbnb.com is taken, should you take airbnb.io or airmatressandbreakfast.com? Paul's argument is: neither, get a different short name for which you can get the .com.

Re: Change Your Name

#248

Post by scosman »

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?

Dropbox was GetDropbox.com < at least 1 counter example.

Re: Change Your Name

#249

Post by dweekly »

booruguru wrote: post #117

If the .com name you want is already registered, you can always buy it later once you business is successful enough to justify the investment (much like betali.st and getdropbox.com). There's no point in buying an expensive domain name for a company that may not survive past the startup stage. Note: a large swath of web users don't even understand the concept of a domain name or address bar...instead they google term…

The good news is that if paulg was testing to see if HN was just an echo-chamber that applauds everything he says even if he gives terrible advice, HN just passed the test with flying colors. :-) Hooray for critical thinking!

Re: Change Your Name

#250

Post by rl3 »

booruguru wrote: post #117

If the .com name you want is already registered, you can always buy it later once you business is successful enough to justify the investment (much like betali.st and getdropbox.com). There's no point in buying an expensive domain name for a company that may not survive past the startup stage. Note: a large swath of web users don't even understand the concept of a domain name or address bar...instead they google term…

This is what Product Hunt did.

Originally it was producthunt.co, and once there was sufficient traction, producthunt.com was acquired for a few thousand dollars (if memory serves).

I don't think anyone would argue that Product Hunt should have chosen a different name because the corresponding .com was taken.

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