Category: Domaining

Startup Social Proof Number One – Your Domain Name!

Marco used credit cards to put 30% down on a $36,000 domain name. Financed at 6%, he used Moniker’s escrow service to purchase Thumbtack.com – before he even had a product!

Marco used credit cards to put 30% down on a $36,000 domain name. Financed at 6%, he used Moniker’s escrow service to purchase Thumbtack.com – before he even had a product!
Jason Calacanis tells you why it was a smart move in this discussion with local services hub Thumbtack.com’s Marco Zappacosta.
Excerpt from This Week In Startups #68.
(Click arrow to play audio clip) Domains as Social Proof.

jason-calacanis-marco-zappacosta.jpg

Takeaways: People who know startups know domains well enough to have an idea of what you paid for it.
Save countless dollars and hours in branding/advertising costs by buying an easy-to-remember domain.
Some registrars (In this case Moniker) will finance your domain acquisition. If you’re not getting traction you can default on the purchase and only be out the down payment.

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.

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.

NFCHere

Naming Your Company – A Venture Capitalist Tells You How

TWiVC-04-Mark-Suster-Dave-Travers-Mike-Bracco

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.

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

Thai Sweet Corn Fritters - Ingredients
photo credit: Emily Barney

If You Didn’t Know What An Mp3 Is, Why Did You Register The Domain?

Jason Calacanis and Michael Robertson TWIST 42

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.

Inane Domain Names – InaneDomainNames.com

I’m starting a collection of inane domain names. InaneDomainNames.com will resolve to this page on the blog. If it generates enough interest I’ll move it to it’s own site at some point. Please send me your favorite Inane Domain Names (and why you think they’re inane)!

TaskRabbit.com? Are you kidding me? Task + Rabbit = TaskRabbit! Perfect Tommy, fire up the bong!

Andy Sack, a smart, successful VC, and co-founder of VC fund and incubator Founder’s Co-op, recently ran a few articles on the difficulty of re-branding Revenue Loans. He painted the picture of he and his team of developers burning the midnight oil for weeks trying to come up with a name that the ‘domain squatters’ hadn’t snatched up. In the end they chose Lighter Capital. I must say I was highly underwhelmed and, but for the remark in the comments suggesting a cigarette lighter would make a great logo, had forgotten the name by the time I closed the tab. Why would a VC with millions of dollars at his disposal tie up his time and the time of his development team for upwards of three weeks trying to come up with a very average available domain? Why not invest some cash and get something really cool! Honestly, IMO, Andy didn’t just come up with an average name, but he sent a signal to potential future partners about his priorities.

Just listened to a great interview with the founder of Pachube.com, pronounced “Patch Bay” throughout the interview. [Wow! The very day I post this TechCrunch announces that Pachube has been acquired by LogMeIn for $15MM.]

An article I read today suggest we bow our heads for a handful of startups that fell into the deadpool in 2010. While I am not even suggesting that there is a direct corollary between their names and what happened, it is interesting to note that the domains themselves are probably worthless. Wattzy UserMojo YouCastr Riotvine Sponty Shortbord Rangle.me Geolenz If you can’t find a genius available domain (Hipmunk comes to mind) you can get a pretty good domain for a couple of grand. Your name is social proof number one – resist the urge to build out on a crappy available domain.

This just in. Kevin Rose is launching a subscription email newsletter. Granted, once you’re signed up you’ll probably never have to see it again, but for the purposes of talking about it at least he’s got to have a url. It’s being called Foundation, but the url is foundat.io/n. I think that actually raises the bar! Top that inane domain namers!

25 million in venture capital so far and the best we can do is Blekko.com. Are you kiddin’ me?

I’m overwhelmed. Just watched ThisWeekInVentureCapital and one after another Mark Suster is rolling out these recently funded multimillion dollar companies whose names are, IMO, horrific!
Xobni.com   Sendgrid.com   Swipely.com   Assistly.com Burstly.com Telepart.com? Earlier in the day Jason Calacanis talked about paying @$18k for ThisWeekIn.com (for his network of shows). He gets it! A good name is going to cost you a little dough. If VCs are pouring in cash- stop! Get a new name! Your customers will thank you- they won’t be embarrassed telling their friends about you (and then spelling the url, and then spelling it again).

10/20/10 Deal site Postabon.com relaunched today as SignPost.com. Nice! Are we seeing a pattern emerge- startup-> traction -> Angel round -> more traction ->A round – NEW DOMAIN NAME!

Sorry, even the press articles covering the launch are calling it unvarnished.com, but it’s actually GETunvarnished.com I feel for these guys, that’s one crappy domain name. [Update 10/19/10 There is a god! Unvarnished has just changed its name to Honestly.com. Thank You!]

Kevin Rose just sent out a tweet announcing his investment in a new startup. He links to a NY Times article about said startup. I’m just sayin’, if Kevin Rose is investing in you and the NY Times is writing about you it’s probably too late to change your domain/company name, but give me a break! formspring.me? For another question/answer site? Amazing.

This looks like a great product and I loved Andrew Warner’s Mixergy.com interview with Harry Lin that hipped me to it but, really, Lottay.com? Described as a cross between lottery and latte. More like a cross between can’t spell and can’t remember. I think this was one of the situations where by the time they had some money and momentum to run with the idea, they’d actually become fond of the name.

The Crunchpad fiasco is ongoing, but in the meantime the manufacturer is offering the tablet pc for sale as the Joo Joo. Bad enough they don’t even own the domain name joojoo.com but doubly inane because of the the.
theJooJoo.com

This has been mentioned elsewhere on the blog. Vark itself isn’t all that bad a domain name. The problem here is that the company is called Aardvark.
vark.com. (Wow! Aardvark/vark.com sold to Google for $50 Million! Wonder if they’ll keep the name.)

See also: http://goodurlbadurl.blogspot.com/