A selection of names acquired over the last six months. Hundreds of hours pouring over domain drop lists and navigating the auction sites so that you don’t have to. For more information or to make an offer, email me (If you don’t hear back it slipped into the spam folder – please try again).
More great names here and here! Contact form, or… Links to Buy It Now Prices at DAN.com
Most of my domains are priced low to mid 4 figures.
I’m up for creative deals.
Like the names but not your niche? I can find you a great name for a reasonable price.
Lots more elsewhere in the blog or email me!
Rand Fishkin, SEO expert-founder of Moz.com, reviewed choosing a domain name recently. If you’re about to launch a company the video provides an excellent approach to finding the right domain. Rand doesn’t discuss the costs of his various examples. You can bet, for example that Gusto.com cost ZenPayroll an easy quarter million when they rebranded last year (2015).
Here’s the list of acceptable domains that Rand comes up with in the video. For fun, lets have a look at what it might take to get one of these.
PastaLabs.com is taken. In fact it’s registered to Moz! It’s parked using Enom DNS servers. PastaLab.com is owned by someone in Korea.
LandOfNoodles.com Congratulations, LandOfNoodles.com is available for registration fee! 7/26/16
MyPasta.com Is owned by the Campbell Soup company and forwards to Prego.com
PastaScience.com Hey, another Moz registration! About a year old. Again, parked with ENOM.
ThePenneIsMightier.com Registered to someone in LA who, considering they also have penneismightier.com, is probably starting a business.
PastaPerfected.com Hmm, not in the Whois database, but also not available? In transition? PastaPerfect.com has a private registration and doesn’t resolve.
Gusto.com Discussed above. Can’t get anywhere near Gusto except for obscure new TLDs.
HandCut.com Forwards to a crystal glass company.
Well, we found one at least! Certainly it’s pronounceable. Rand liked this one. I’m not crazy about it.
But the point wasn’t to find a great domain, it was to demonstrate what to look for.
1) Make it brandable.
2) Make it pronounceable.
3) Make it as short as you possibly can, but no shorter.
4) Bias to .com.
5) Avoid names that infringe on another company or another organization’s existing trademark or could be confused with that trademark.
6) Make the domain name instantly intuitive.
7) Use broad keywords when sensible, but don’t stress keyword inclusion.
8) If your name isn’t available, it’s okay to append or modify it.
Uniregistry recently shared a list of domains and prices they sold over the last year or so for a total of $42 Million! Namebio published the list on their blog.
Recent unpublished comments to this blog remind me that a lot of people hate anyone who owns a domain they’re not using (let alone companies like Uniregistry that hold millions). These people are confused and this excellent article from Bill Sweetman might help them get clarity. Taken: The Myth of Domain Name Unavailability
Jason Goldberg is the founder and CEO of FAB. In this excerpt from an interview with Kevin Rose, Jason tells us how he was able to get Fab.com for a ‘low six figures’ and Kevin tells us what he paid for Oink.com.
[Update 6/16/17 From DNGeek.com]
Virtual Piggy Rebrands As Oink – Oink.com Virtual Piggy, a payments service aimed at minors rebranded as Oink in late 2013 after buying the domain, trademarks, and social marks from Kevin Rose for $57,500. Founder and CEO Jo Webber told TechCrunch that the reason was strategic: “Piggy” sounded too infantile but “Oink” lets them retain some of the branding association with piggy banks while sounding more punchy in a way that will resonate better with the older end of the youth market –or so the company believes.
For more information or to make an offer please email me. More great names here!
(Where a Twitter handle is mentioned, I’m happy to transfer it to you for free at the conclusion of a domain sale.) Contact form, or email me… Links to Buy It Now Prices at DAN.com
Building an SaaS that matches coders and founders? CodeFounder.com @Code_Founder
Most of these domains are priced low to mid 4 figures.
Need a domain to run a market test? I’ll point the DNS to your test if you’ll share the data.
Are these domains an appropriate quality/price point, but not in your vertical? I can find you a domain.
Lots more elsewhere in the blog or email me!
I’m still here. Still have a few hundred what I feel are awesome names for sale. Others I’m getting closer to being able to develop myself. I sell a handful a year. Some of the names on this blog have sold. I keep hoping one will turn into a Unicorn. But a few things have happened that have caused me to pull energy out of domaining.
I have absolutely no interest in the new gtlds. None.
It seems to me the market has gotten a lot tighter over the last year. It’s harder and harder to pick up a decent dot com using my previous methods. The wholesale prices I’m seeing being paid for crap domains makes me feel like a handful of players with deep pockets and clever bots are intent in owning the entire domain space (though Chinese domain investors are certainly adding to the froth).
But what led me to cut back drastically on my domaining is that Godaddy quit displaying closing prices on domains in my Watching List! It started in March. A Godaddy Twitter response said it was due to the ‘quiet period’ around the IPO. Then the IPO ended.
Aww C'mon @godaddyauctions@Godaddy The IPO is over. Give us back closing sale prices in our Watching list. You're taking the fun out of it!
If I spend an hour combing through thousands of domains to find a handful that are interesting, shouldn’t the platform reward me by allowing me to confirm my hunches? Or conversely, If Godaddy doesn’t value my time on their platform enough to even share price data on the domains I decide to watch, what does it say about their attitude towards me, their loyal customer?
I would guess that a new manager took over the auctions at Godaddy after the IPO and decided that too many domains were slipping through their fingers for $12. And so decided to pressure users to make bids in order to see results. That’s what it felt like and that’s low!
And then they bought Afternic! Plunging head first into the domain resale business. Yuck!
How long do you think it will be before they start warehousing drops and putting premium pricing on those?
Godaddy was the last bastion of the fair shake for the little guy when it came to domains. But the lure of just a little more profit seems to have dragged them into the slime with all the rest.
From the always excellent Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series at Stanford, this excerpt from a recent talk by Leah Busque describes how RunMyErrand.com became Taskrabbit.com.
We came up with hundreds and hundreds of names, so many names, it was such a grueling exercise. We had naming parties at our house, an we brought our friends over, and we had pizza and beer, and we’re like, ‘Come up with names!’.
I recently reached out to a popular podcaster (Brandon from Automate My Small Business, awesome podcast!) when I discovered a valuable keyword domain dropping in his niche. We were able to acquire the domain in auction. I hope to blog in the future about our experiments to discover how best to put it to work. In the meantime he mentioned to me that he and a partner were in the midst of developing a new business. Basically, the company would capitalize on their design and marketing experience to help inventors bring their products to market. They had both decided that they liked ‘Mind To Market’, but the domain was gone, and would I care to help them look for a name? But of course!
Let’s refresh, from my last post… I’m looking for a name that invokes the spirit of the experience the company hopes to create; Passes the ‘radio test’ (could type it in your browser after hearing in a podcast); Is ‘easy to remember’; Has the exact-match Twitter handle; No Trademarks; And is available for $10 on GoDaddy!
My sandbox: ideas, invention, imagine, engineer, incubate, tinker, prototype, innovate, iterate, lab, garage, market.
Very broad! Also challenging in that we’re not building a ‘better mousetrap’ here. The concept is easily understood and communicated, but there aren’t a lot people doing this as a business, so you face the additional challenge of trying to communicate what it is you do in the name.
I looked around for inspiration and found a couple of amazing stories. The Russians Used a Pencil tells the story of how two guys built a physical product – an iPhone tripod, from idea to market in five months. They used Kickstarter to fund and market it! They used 3d printing to prototype!
And there’s Quirky! This is so amazing! Founder Ben Kaufman turned the experience of creating hit iPod accessories into a business built around the process of discovering new hit products. The Quirky community comes up with the ideas, vets them, evangelizes them, and buys them! Ben tells the story here.
Alright! Creative juices flowing and a clear picture of our naming goal. Let’s get busy with the tools. Market Samurai for keyword, niche value, and competition. A whole lot of Thesaurus.com, MoreWords.com, TheFreeDictionary.com. Throw in a little Rhymezone.com. my Excel column combination spreadsheet, and voila. Over 1200 possible candidates. Run through the GoDaddy bulk checker and… Hmm, a smattering of acceptable candidates. Now the Twitter check and… a pretty miserable collection of leftovers.
cc by fostersartofchilling
With one exception. I mentioned I listen to a lot of podcasts. Over the last few months I’ve tracked down at least a half dozen Eric Ries interviews. Eric has worked very hard getting the word out about his book. There’s a startup education in these interviews. This Week in Venture Capital #65 with Eric Ries, Author of ‘The Lean Startup”mp3 audio Eric Ries of The Lean Startup on This Week in Startups #199mp3 audio
Eric Ries (BestSeller) – On Mixergy mp3 audio
Eric Ries (LeanStartup) – On Mixergy mp3 audio
Evangelizing for the Lean Startup – Eric Ries (Author) Stanford mp3 audio
There’s actually quite a few others, but that will get you started. At this point I’m well versed in the notion of ‘lean’, which derives from the idea of ‘lean manufacturing’ pioneered especially by Toyota in the 90s.
Eric applied it to startups and called his book, “The Lean Startup”. The idea so perfectly captured the idea I was going for, and it was available.
So did they like it? Yes, but not as much as a name they’d found in the meantime. I’m having trouble remembering it 😉 (I know there was an animal in the logo!) I’ll post a link when they launch and you can tell us what you think.
Links to Buy It Now Prices at DAN.com
