The Social Business Answer To Getting The Domain You Want

 

Jason Calacanis interviews Jon Ferrara
Jason Calacanis interviews Jon Ferrara This Week In Startups #189

After he and his partner sold their bootstrapped company, Goldmine, for close to $100MM, Jon Ferarra took 8 years off to raise kids. Now he’s back with a new startup called Nimble. It’s an all digital CRM platform with a thick layer of ‘social’. A single seat is free so check it out. Jason expertly extracts in story and detail, the history of Goldmine and Jon’s plans for Nimble. It was refreshing to see a founder with some grey hair for a change and encouraging to hear him liken building his company to a guy building a project car in the garage. I was fortunate to catch Jason’s eye in the chatroom with a direct question about Jon’s domain. Here’s how he got Nimble.com.
Click arrow to play audio. Jon Ferraro on getting Nimble.com

You Have To Go In Covert (To Get Your Domain Name)

Jake Winebaum shares what he paid for Brighter.com with Jason Calacanis.

Once again the always excellent This Week In Startups provides a gem of wisdom around the subject of domain names. Whether buyer or seller this short exchange will help you formulate a strategy. Jason proves he knows of what he speaks with his guess for what Jake Winebaum paid for Brighter.com. Some of you will remember Jake from his Business.com days and the story of how he bought that domain from Marc Ostrofsky. If you don’t know that story I highly recommend you check out Andrew Warner‘s interview with Marc on Mixergy.

Jason-Calacanis-Tyler-Crowley-Jake-Winebaum

(Click arrow to play audio) You have To Go In Covert

 

Re-Branding Walk-Through, Sean Harper of FeeFighters Mixergy Interview

I love Mixergy and Andrew Warner’s interviews. Over the last few years I’ve listened to Andrew interview hundreds of startup entrepreneurs. I’m sharing this particular interview because it’s covers my favorite territory – domains and naming your company. You can find this interview, a transcript, and an audio version at Mixergy.

Sean Harper kept hearing that people didn’t like his company name, which at the time was TransFS.com. They’re a credit card processing price/feature comparison engine that helps you get the best deal for your merchant services. Somewhere around the time Sean heard his father mispronounce the company name, Sean and crew decided to go ahead and begin the painful process of renaming.
If you want to cut directly to the discussion of finding a name and then acquiring the domain, that starts around the 11 min mark. By the 24 min. mark, Sean has acquired the domains and then begins discussing implementing the changeover.

These are my notes. The process Sean describes is helping me formulate a process for an idea I’m working on called CrowdNamer.

FeeFighters.com is a service that helps it’s customers, usually merchants, optimize their credit card processing costs.
Formerly TransFS –Transparent Financial Services
Understanding we had a problem with the name.
They would say things like “How do you spell your name again? What’s your domain name?” Or, “I mentioned you to one of my friends.”
Started keeping track of how often the difficulties around their name came up.
Sean’s father mispronounced the old name.
It was more than a quarter of our customers that were having confusion with our name, when we looked at the data.
“Basically the methodology we followed was one of coming up with lots and lots of ideas and then filtering those ideas according to a methodology. The one we used the most is this methodology called Igor   I-G-O-R, which is a methodology for branding and scoring each name and then keeping a list of the ones that scored the highest.
http://www.igorinternational.com/
Free naming guide:
http://www.igorinternational.com/process/naming-guide-product-company-names.php
I called them Vectors -for naming.
Two word name. One describes, the other more emotional.
A lot of time with the dictionary. Bugged our friends, a lot.
Name brain storm.
Crossword dictionary- synonyms, by number of letters
Paper on the wall, writing all over them, hundreds of names.
Narrowed down in batches.
Ranked them by IGOR
Factors: Memorable, easy to spell, emotional, how close to your value proposition, how descriptive
8 variables.
Y axis all the names they’d thought of
X axis all the criteria
Rank them in a Google spreadsheet, independently of each other
Trying to add an objective framework on top of something fundamentally subjective
Personally loved CostHammer but the rest of the team didn’t like it.
Very exhausting. After a week. All start to sound the same.
Whittled it down to about a dozen names.
Used Survey Monkey to get opinions from friends, advisors etc. using same framework they’d used themselves.
Had people rate 12-15 names by survey with a small section for opinion
Tabulated the numbers.
Scores made clear: best, medium, dogs
Wanted a .com with no hyphen
Weren’t going to pay more than $10k
Some of the names were being used legitimately, some they couldn’t reach the owner,
some owners wanted too much.
Contacting and pricing domains very time consuming, lots of back and forth.
Needed to buy Feefighter.com and Feefighters.com Different owners, took days to contact each.
Ended up paying about $8k total for both names. ($4500 +$3500)
Were very happy (with the price) thought they’d have to go higher.
Had a few names they could have lived with. But going into it, everyone liked FeeFighters.
Had already thought through the whole branding, imaging, process for the top few names.
Sean then goes into details about getting the word out, switching the domain over etc. etc.
Thank you Sean and Andrew for sharing such excellent information.