All those link exchange requests you get? Unless I know the site, or they’re advertisers, I don’t respond. But what if there was a site where you could interact with other developers, around sharing backlinks?
Buy It Now Price At DAN
Author: John Humphrey
How We Acquired Groupon.com
Mixergy’s Andrew Warner recently interviewed Groupon’s Andrew Mason. This clip discusses how Groupon got Groupon.com.
Full interview with video and transcription can be found at Mixergy.
Andrew calls it ‘the perfect name’, but another fellow with a similar idea already owned Groupon.com. He didn’t want to sell it and he didn’t want to work together. Only later, after obtaining a trademark for ‘Groupon’, which extended to the domain owner’s home country of England, were they able to talk him into selling. Did they pay too much? Andrew doesn’t think so. It helps to remember that Groupon is now doing hundreds of millions in sales annually, but in the interview he states, “We bought it in May of 2009 or something like that, for maybe $250,000 dollars, which seemed like a lot at the time, but now seems cheap.”
(Click arrow to hear clip) How We Acquired Groupon.com
Is a Hyphen Worth $15,000 Dollars
Mixergy’s Andrew Warner recently interviewed Blank-Label.com‘s co-founder Danny Wong. This clip discusses Danny’s frustration with trying to acquire the domain BlankLabel.com
Full interview with video and transcription can be found at Mixergy. [Note: Danny was Skyping in from China so the audio clip is a little funky.]
Danny calls the owner of BlankLabel.com both a ‘squatter’ and an investor. Using the real estate analogy, a squatter would be someone living in a house someone else actually owns. The person who owned the house might be a ‘slum lord’ but nevertheless, anyone can see he’s holding the property as an investment. So sure, in my opinion, the guy who registers Gooogle.com would be a squatter- looking to profit from someone else’s property, but the guy who owns BlankLabel.com (and 29,000 other dot coms) is an investor. The problem seems to be that when people’s passions around building a business are involved, they lose sight of the fact that domain names are simply another product a market grew up around. That some domains are available at registration price somehow allows people to imagine buying the domain they want at that price. Well, you can get a house in Detroit for next to nothing! It might have all the pipes and wiring ripped out, but the city is giving them away in hopes people will move in. That doesn’t make anyone think the house in Beverly Hills should be free does it?
(Click the arrow to hear the clip) Is a Hyphen Worth $15k?
PS $15k seems like a lot, but it’s all relative. IMO it would be worth maxing out a few credit cards or doing another round of friends and family to get the domain.
Netribution.com
What if we could focus our ill will like a laser beam and simply (virtually) destroy evil-acting entities in one fell swoop? The internet enables that. The problem is in the details. Here’s the vision so far.
It’s a non-profit.
Anyone can ‘vote-up’ evil-doers for Netribution consideration.
Paid subscribers can ‘vote-up’ evil-doers at the second tier level. Their subscription fees pay for top-notch independent Investigative Reporters (like WhoWhatWhy.com or Spot.us) to thoroughly research the evil-doers doings.
Upon completion of the Investigative Reporters research, a set of demands is generated.
This top tier of evil-doers having been decided, the Netribution community now choose an ultimate evil-doer for a Day of Netribution.
The Day of Netribution is announced, and on that day the extended community goes Gladiator (think Twitter, Facebook, blog posts, etc. not DOS) on the evil-doer, virtually destroying their online credibility forever.
The evil-doer will have recourse to make amends, but only upon having met the Netribution demands.
Only after satisfying the considerations of the Investigative Reporter is the matter then returned to the Netribution community where another vote would determine whether the candidate could remove their ‘evil-doer’ status and return to the interwebs.
NFCHere.com
Buy It Now Priced at DAN.
NFC is coming. This domain registration is around an idea where a store or restaurant owner creates an NFC Here! sticker encoded with the information they want to share via NFC. That simple- log in to NFCHere.com, fill out a short form, and pay for the number of stickers you want. A few days later, the stickers show up at your door.
It’s very likely that there will be many competing NFC payment/deal portals made available to retailers. The idea here is to give the store owner themselves some control over exactly what is shared, in addition to what Google or Mastercard are doing.
Naming Your Company – A Venture Capitalist Tells You How
Mark Suster is a 2x entrepreneur turned Venture Capitalist. He joined GRP Partners in 2007 as a General Partner after selling his company to Salesforce.com. He focuses on early-stage technology companies. He is also the host of This Week In Venture Capital, a new show on Jason Calacanis’s ThisWeekIn.com network of web shows. In the chat room recently I had the opportunity to post a question both he and his guest, fellow VC, David Travers spent a few minutes answering.
(Click arrow to play audio clip) Naming your company.
1. Choose a name that doesn’t box you into a corner. (i.e. As a startup your focus may change over time.)
2. Make sure your website matches your company name.
3. Is your name pronounceable in other languages.
4. Don’t pick a name that sounds like bunch of other companies, ie. don’t use the word ‘blue’ or ‘labs’ or ‘360’. (Or a word that ends with ‘ly’)
5. It does take some capital but for $10-15k (a lot of money for company with no funding, but once you’ve raised a little bit of seed capital) you can get a reasonable name.
6. The money you save marketing an easy to remember name will more than make up for the $10-15k you spend to buy the name.
7, If you’re using the hyphenated or the not exact match domain, expecting to purchase the parked version you really want later on, remember that the price will be correlated to your success.
8. You can make a deal with the domain owner. $5k plus 2% of the company. Or a payment stream tied to success with installments towards an agreed upon price in the future. If you don’t pay the agreed upon amount by a certain time, the domain remains the sellers. Get creative.
Especially interesting to me is the idea of not naming your company too tightly around the focus of your initial startup intentions. I really like a name that is a close fit with a company’s product or service. It makes marketing easier and less expensive. Also it’s been shown that online ad campaigns are much more effective when the company/url matches what the person was searching for. Mark uses the example of a company he’s working with who purchased Bedrock.com. They also discuss the name WildFire.com. These are great names with obvious metaphoric significance that lend themselves to branding but also leave enough room for the company to shift focus if need be.
Giant Enemy Crab! GiantEnemyCrab.com
“Giant Enemy Crab” shows over a half million results in Google. The downside of an instant brand for your band (startup, app, game) is that you’ll have to work a little harder for that top score in the search engines.
Crowdsourced Recipe Platform Wecipe.com / Wecipes.com
Sure it’s a little wonky to say, but in fact, it is a perfect name for a crowdsourced cooking site. Short, defensible, and unforgettable. A recipe we made, a wecipe!
Perfect name for a crowdsourced cooking site. Short, defensible, and unforgettable. A recipe we perfected, a wecipe! Wecipes.com as well, best to have both! Buy it now priced at DAN Wecipe.com Wecipes.com
@Wecipe @Wecipes
photo credit: Emily Barney
If You Didn’t Know What An Mp3 Is, Why Did You Register The Domain?
Ultimate early internet domain name play story. In this excerpt Michael Robertson tells how he came
to own mp3.com and what happened when he ‘turned on’ the traffic.
(Click arrow to play audio clip) Michael Robertson tells the story of mp3.com.
In addition to starting mp3.com (later sold to Vivendi), Michael Robertson founded Lindows
(Linspire) and SIPphone (becamse Gizmo5, recently sold to Google). He’s now focused on
building mp3Tunes.com which allows users to store their music in the cloud and access it from
anywhere. Check out the entire interview at ThisWeekIn.com.
Freak Magnets
I think this is a very powerful name for a band. I love the built-in merch angle.
