In a blog post by the founder of Buffer and One Page, Joel Gascoigne, which uses the domain bufferapp.com and MyOnePage.com, entitled “How to Name Your Startup”, he tells readers that “domain names don’t really matter”
I see many, many founders limiting themselves with the domain name. ”
“One thing I’ve learned and embraced with naming my own startups is that the domain name doesn’t matter at all.”
“The name itself matters much more than having the same domain name. ”
“Pick a great name, go with a tweaked domain name.”
“My current startup is named Buffer, but the domain name is bufferapp.com.”
“My previous startup was named OnePage, but the domain name was myonepage.com.”
“The most interesting part is that having a matching domain name seems to have no bearing at all on whether you will succeed with your startup. Chris Dixon said this recently:
Names are underrated, but domains names are (increasingly) overrated. Square, Dropbox, Box.net all started with temp domains.
“Just take a look at all these successful startups which either had a temporary domain name, or which still have a different domain name to their name:”
- Square was squareup.com
- DropBox was getdropbox.com
- Facebook was thefacebook.com
- Instagram was instagr.am
- Twitter was twttr.com
- Foursquare was playfoursquare.com
- Basecamp is basecamphq.com
- Pocket is getpocket.com
- Bitly was/is bit.ly
- Delicious was del.icio.us
- Freckle is letsfreckle.com
“Pick a great name, then add something to get a domain name. It really doesn’t matter all that much – whether you get the domain later or don’t. Then get building!”
Of course what the author fails to connect is if domain names are unimportant then why did all the companies named above by the author go out and spend a lot of money to rebrand themselves based on a new domain.
The same Chris Dixon made that clear when he later tweeted:
“domain matters, but too many people choose domain over good name. buy the .com once you are well funded.”
The moral of the story is if you can’t afford your dream domain, then build your business, make money and then buy the domain, at what will often be many times what you could have bought it for in the 1st place.
…”Pick a great name, then add something to get a domain name…”
like slapping a UDRP on the owner of the domain name, I would asume…
“if domain names are unimportant then why did all the companies named above by the author go out and spend a lot of money to rebrand themselves based on a new domain.”
Great point! One the author ignored.
I would like to know if any got by UDRP or tried.
But this is the reason that some of our domains will have value beyond anything we have dreamed of.
He is right on one hand and basically he is saying your idea and profit making business plan trumps the domain name early on. But he fails to look at the entire picture. He fails to identify the things that could change the equation.
My advice to anyone doing business with anyone…..don’t take seriously or do business with those that don’t consider all options. That don’t give weight to both sides. That don’t articulate all the pros and cons.
What is his advice for the saveme.com.br boys? Kinda blows a hole in his entire argument.
He is wrong, the math shows that premium domains convert better and get higher ranked on average, compounding that value against your competitors falling lower in ranks for years will indeed payout much greater than the cost of the premium domains, which will most likely be going up in value while you are using it and making your company also go up in value, again much more upside than the marginal original outlay for the killer domains, “Domain Bias in Web Search” by Microsoft explains scientifically what he fails to understand.
Here is the document that should be the guidepost for our industry, scientifically proving the great value of premium .Com domains,
http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/155941/domainbias.pdf
btw I invented that term “premium domains”, ones that are more valuable than registration cost. And I “invented” other terms, “domain investing”, “domain speculation” “domain scammers?”
You ever notice that quite often those that outwardly give advice to the public have no idea what they are talking about?
And, those that don’t aggressively give advice quite often are the real experts?
These are the pinheads that offer you $100 for your generic .com and then freak out when you send them to dnjournal for “enlightenment”.
I always tell them to reg the hyphen or the .net and voila more traffic to my .com…..
No one is going to re-invent the English, Spanish, Chinese etc. languages any time soon so generics look like the easiest and quickest way to get immediate traction on the internet.
The premium domains are obviously better, but they are out of reach for most of the startups. Some of them buy the premium domain/exact match domain later on after they raise money. But it is possible to build a successful company without having premium domain that can give you type in traffic and/or has keywords in the domain name with high search volume.
The premium domains are obviously better, but they are out of reach for most of the startups. Some of them buy the premium domain/exact match domain later on after they raise money. But it is possible to build a successful company without having a premium domain that can give you type in traffic and/or has keywords in the domain name with high search volume.
What he is really saying is that start ups should Infringe on current domain registrants.
Then, if your start up becomes successful, you would claim that you have some sort of right to the domain that you really want and should have purchased to begin with.
So, you try to steal it from the person who was smart enough to see the value in the domain long before you ever even thought of it.
After all, there is NO Penalty for reverse domain highjacking.
So, the UDRP system actually encourages this type of mentality and behavior.
Again these idiots fail to consider that even if they become wildly successful, beyond their wildest dreams, that they may have been EVEN MORE successful with the premium domain name.
How many failed startups on “randomdomainthatsoundslikeagruntingbaby.io/.me/.ly” may have actually made it if they had a powerful .COM ? There is simply no way to tell, but I think plenty of them would have had a real chance if they did.
there are enormous numbers of premium .Coms in context for only $350 at my site and others, never an excuse to use a nonpremium domains, stupidity
“After all, there is NO Penalty for reverse domain highjacking.
So, the UDRP system actually encourages this type of mentality and behavior”
MAJOR PROBLEM that still is not fixed.
It appears that the arbitrators, lawyers etc. have every reason to stop serious penalties from being enforced for reverse highjacking. IT WOULD STOP FRIVOLOUS DOMAIN THEFT ATTEMPTS and reduce THEIR INCOMES.
a$$hole$
What a silly business.
Author is trying to tell you to go for your dream…dont let a domain name stop you…
I agree with this author.
The author knows that 99 out of 100 times your website is not going to be a great success…so why spend thousands on a great domain name first…
You need to fail first 99 times out of 100 … then when you found success, go out and buy that premium domain … you might have to pay more now…but you have plenty of money coming in…so no problem.
If you buy a premium domain at first and fail…it will be game over for you.
So the author is 100% correct.
Anunt wrote:
> The author knows that 99 out of 100 times your website is not going
> to be a great success…so why spend thousands on a great domain name first…
—
If you can’t afford “thousands” on a great domain name, you’ll never be able to afford the costs of hiring people, what it takes to create a great website, and doing the eventual marketing needed to get your name out there.
Probably better just to get a regular job working for someone else, if that is the case. Or simply hope that luck favors your one or two person anonymous venture, over thousands of others in the same boat.
Saying the “domain name doesn’t matter at all” is definitely incorrect.
If you are a start up, perhaps getting the pure generic of your domain isn’t critical, but in his examples above, the start ups did choose domains that had their name in it (using a prefix or suffix like ‘My’ or ‘Get’ or ‘App’). Or the domain was a deliberate misspell of the company name, like twttr.
The best advice would be to get a .com, and if your pure company name isn’t available, then have your company name in the domain with a suffix or prefix that makes sense. If you become wildly successful, then go buy the pure generic .com of your name.
If you have a great idea for a site or business then that should be the focus, just get the best domain you can in the starting phase. I can’t imagine anyone starting a business would seriously get held up because they can’t get the perfect domain right away.
The problem is tribal thinking. Most people are totally caught up in intellectual modality, they never explore other ways of thinking. It eventually devolves into simplistic mantra chanting.
We see this in politics with the two party system, where ‘partisan thinking’ never devises an actual solution to an actual problem but does develop a lot of “experts” who exist solely to offer half-baked theories, criticisms and unfounded expertise on the basis of a tiny bit of knowledge.
Domainers, for all they do not know, have developed a few credible (albeit esoteric) intelligence types. Once you get past the fantasists, retards, carnival barkers and basement dwellers that tend to make up 95% of the ‘industry’, the remaining 5% are people who ‘get it’ on domain name related issues and arrived at domaining by virtue of being ahead of that curve.
The objective of marketing is occupying a space (and hopefully, eventually, a habit) in a persons already cluttered, busy and overflowing mind. It’s a lot easier to find your place there if you’re dealing in devices that were learned in the first 8 years of life. You want the line between your brand and your brands external devices of identity to be as straight forward as possible.
“Domainers” think of this in the context of someone potentially ‘mistyping’ a web address but really, it has more to do with how memories and habits are formed in their early stages and how easily a years worth of ‘subtle marketing implication’ can be undone in a single event.
I don’t see what domainers like Mike Mann are complaining about. The author is basically telling people to build a business using a “less desirable” domain name, then pay a king’s ransom once your company is successful to secure the “premium” name.
Isn’t that what greedy domainers want? Someone to pay them a king’s ransom? Domainers should agree with what this guy is saying.
I would take it a step further and say “Don’t pay a king’s ransom, period.” If you build a successful business around something.net, don’t pay a king’s ransom for something.com. If the holder of that dot com is willing to take a reasonable amount, perhaps. If not, to heck with them. For example, I recently offered a reasonable amount for a dot com. The holder shot back $125k. Are you kidding me? Spin on it. I won’t pay this person one thin dime anymore. My offer is off the table permanently. And I’m probably the best bet that domainer had. But he got greedy. So I’m gone.
So what if the dot.com gets some misdireted traffic? YOU have the success business, not them. Your website shows up on google search, not their dot com (loaded down with junk advertising). Who actively types in dot com anyway?! I do a google search, the company comes up, I click the link.
What determines top search placement is NOT having a dot com. It’s having a viable business. Case in point, google search “Joe Rogan”. JoeRogan dot net comes up as #1. The owner of JoeRogan dot com (some Realtor) doesn’t even show up (I stopped trying after 5 pages). It’s not about owning the dot com. It’s about building a successful business.
If you can get the dot com, great. But don’t reward people who paid $10 for a domain with a $125k payday. That will never happen at my expense.
Paul
“So what if the dot.com gets some misdireted traffic?”
guess it depends on your business and how many visitor or potential customers your losing to the .com.
If your a lawyer and you just lost a visitor who had a $5 million dollar claim we you just lost $1.5 million fee.
what’s a customer worth to you?
If your losing thousands of visitors every month, and will continue to do so for many years or for the next 20, then not spending the money might be the worst decision you ever made.
@ Michael
Say I am a lawyer, and my potential client literally types in (again, I don’t know why he/she would not just perform a google search) something.com. Up pops a website loaded with ads and a “This website may be for sale” sign.
I get the feeling my client would know that’s not my legal website. So they do a google search and bingo, there I am at #1. Did my business suffer? I don’t think so. I think 9 out of 10 clients would have done a google search anyway.
I’m not against someone making a reasonable profit… even domainers (gulp). I’m against someone being greedy beyond belief. Which is why I refer to a “reasonable offer” vs. a “king’s ransom”.
Paul
I don’t get that logic.
The question is what is the asset your considering buying worth to you.
Why would the “worth” of the domain to you or your company be dictated by what the current owner paid for the domain?
If you buy 100 shares of Apple today your buying them from someone.
Would you pay less than say $630 a share because the guy selling the shares bought them 4 years ago at $80 or last week for $620?
Also as all domainers can tell you domains do get type in traffic.
Type in traffic separate and apart from search engines.
We get millions of visitors a month all from type in traffic.
“The moral of the story is if you can’t afford your dream domain, then build your business, make money and then buy the domain, at what will often be many times what you could have bought it for in the 1st place.”
amen to that 🙂
> don’t reward people who paid $10 for a domain with a $125k payday.
You probably would admit that this isn’t quite the right point. The time to make a stand is simply when an offer has been declined that is probably higher than any other that will ever be made. It sounds like this was the case for you.
A problem with the domain market is that sometimes the top bidder is willing to pay a multiple of anyone else (buyer’s best bid should be irrelevant, he should only have to just beat the second highest bidder). Sellers can be tempted to wait for these overpayers, with little incentive to offload domains at market value.
“Paul”
“I don’t get that logic.”
————————-
I suggest that it is not Logic.
Rather, it is Emotion.
I don’t think Paul is alone when it comes to negative feelings and resentment towards domain investors.
Thinkers vs Doers is nothing new.
So, 9 out of 10 doers may see no value in the creative thinking of the domainer.
They look past the fact that a good domain is part of your branding.
They look past the fact that a good domain part of your advertising.
They look past the fact that a good domain is an Important Part of how the public sees, remembers and grows to trust your company.
Their feelings prevented them from objectively contemplating these things.
But, along comes their Competition …Doer number 1 out of 10.
Maybe he feels the same way about domainers.
But, he is aware that it exists and has value.
So, he gets past his emotions.
Doer number 1 makes the deal to acquire an important part of his business.
Yes, it is hard to put numbers to creativity. It’s objective.
Think of all the famous advertising slogans that companies paid Millions for.
They are nothing but words …so, how could they possibly be valuable?
It’s The Real Thing
Be All You Can Be
Just Do It
Got Milk
You’re In Good Hands
That last one just gave me the idea to type in Mayhem.
Yep, you guessed it.
@ Micheal
I question how much “typed in traffic” 99.9% of registered domains actually get. Most people use search engines. Be it Google, Bing, etc.. I have NEVER typed into a URL any search related function.
Who searches that way? Very few people I suggest. If I want to buy shoes, I type “shoes” into a search engine and the results are ranked according to a number of factors. Being a dot com is not critical to that ranking.
I’ll skip past the top results (i.e. the “sponsored” links) and I’ll look for a shoes website that interests me. Maybe I’ll focus the search down more… men’s shoes. Maybe even more… men’s wingtip shoes. But you will never find me typing into my URL, “menswingtipshoes” dot com. Which by the way I see is a “premium name” asking $450 on GoDaddy. lol
But now, do a search for men’s wingtip shoes on google. Where does that domainers dot com rank? It doesn’t. Because he has no viable business. How many typed in hits to his domain page does he get? None, I suspect.
It’s about the BUSINESS and where you stand in the search engines.
Having said that, I don’t discount the value of branding. If I did not want the dot com I mentioned in a prior post, I would not have made an offer. But it’s not worth $125k to me or anyone else. Not even close.
Again, I question how much typed in traffic certain domains get. Can anyone share with me a search function for that? How does one ACCURATELY verify the amount of typed in traffic a domain gets? I’m not just going to take the seller’s word for it, but maybe doing some research on typed in traffic will change my opinion.
However, I suspect it will only support my theory… that typed in traffic is overrated. The value lies in search.
I am happy to be proven wrong.
There is no moral.
Del.icio.us didn’t require Delicious.com to be acquired by Yahoo! (http://tcrn.ch/9Hltrc), Instragr(.)am didn’t require Instagram.com to be acquired by Facebook (who made the change), Frid(.)ge didn’t require Fridge.com and Mi(.)lk Milk.com to be acquired by Google, the list goes on.
dot-com domains are expensive antics and I say this as both an investor in so called “domain hacks” (they are much more than just that) and generic dot-com.
Paul, imho almost everything you said was insightful, just a little too absolute. Type-in traffic to keyword domains is still real, G isn’t completely omnipotent. And examples of leakage have been posted here and iirc by Rick too, the stats were not inconsequential. Perhaps they can chime in.
But note that they own top-end domains which are more likely to get direct nav, as well as leakage from the .net, .org etc. Leakage can also be from mybuffer.com to buffer.com so branding domains are not immune to the discussion.
To your point, direct nav stats for menswingtipshoes.com would most likely be negligible (in general). Those types of domains were more for SEO purposes in the old days, before G laid down the gauntlet.
Re: “But it’s not worth $125k to me or anyone else. Not even close.”
Even if you’re right, again, too absolute. DNJournal is chock full of counter-examples, each transaction serves as a successful exercise of price discovery.
Successful Entrepreneur (I assume): Domain doesn’t matter
Domainer: Of course it does
Vegan: I can live without meat.
Butcher: Vegan diets are stupid.
Every business is different ever type of user is different. It’s not all about type in vs google, it’s much deeper than that. Both sides are right and both sides are wrong. Entrepreneurs are likely not interested in random type-ins because they’re filling specific holes.
Paul is correct.
No need to pay $125k for a dot com.
Dot com will get few extra leakage type-ins per day…but when they see a parked page, that same customer will use google and find you…so u lost nothing by not owning a dot com.
The guy with a full blown developed business on any domain extension ALWAYS beats the premium dot com guy with a parked page collecting nickels and dimes for each click.
With the new gTLDs coming…more and more people will use search engines…no need for dot com…just need a good developed website with a nice google ranking.
To be successful a company needs to hit on all cylinders at all times, especially in the marketing department, which starts with a great investment in a great contextual .Com domain which will get indexed, the domain converts customers, staff, investors, profits, which compound over time while the domain also gains in value, it is true if you cant afford it then you also cant afford a great staff and web site and you should get a day job. BTW, I am not complaining about anything just telling you how it works in the real world.
So u are saying Amazon.com needs to buy ALL the premium one word dot com domains???
I don’t think so.
A great recognized brand is much better than ALL your premium one word domains.
You think Ebay.com needs auction.com … I don’t think so.
You think google.com and yahoo.com need search.com … don’t think so.
Domainers need to think outside your little boxes.
what Paul has good points, but that’s because he is not a prefectionist. Heres what a well-funded prefectionist will do: have a great business plan, have the best .com domain, have the best marketing – eventually – has the most edge
and if paul thinks we all got our domains for $10 he has not industry knowledge at all, domainers pay 4 figures for decent domains in d2d auctions every day to be able to secure good names
I will pay google $100 for google.com to that it could move to getgoogleitnow.com and notice for a month time that the search engine has moved to a new url to avoid confusiion
Domainer –
Pardon?
people, keep it stupid simple.
everyone in this world travels in public transport, or there’re pips who drive their asses in Cadilac Escalades, Ferrari , Mercedes?
all live in slums, ghetto, or there are people who prefer to live in their Manhattan apartments ?
all dine in McDonalds, or some prefer to dine in expensive restaurants?
that’s why there are handregs and there are premium domains. And with premium domains there’s o such thing as market pricing ok? dudu.com, ok?
to live happily you do not need money, good house, beautiful wife, yacht etc…
=
to have a business going you do not need dropbox.com instead of getdropbox.com etc…
^^ @paul, But don’t reward people who paid $10 for a domain with a $125k payday>>
so you would not buy a luxury Manhattan apartment for $200k today because Indians sold the whole Manhattan to the British for a set of knives, but would rather
have your grandchildren pay $20 mln as per your logic
There is no market pricing, but that’s because the domain market doesn’t work properly. Normally, I get to buy something if I’m willing to pay a bit more for it than anyone else. Domainers can ignore this rule because the .com exact match affords a monopoly. Monopolies should be kept in check, and perhaps new TLDs will serve this purpose.
Exact match vs tweak: If business name is common word like ‘Square’ then squareup.com credibility hit is not too bad. Also, even if squareup.com succeeds, square.com was a valuable name to begin with so price may not go up too much. ‘Dudu’ meanwhile looks slightly ridiculous without owning the exact match .com.
PS. Owning getdropbox.com rather than dropbox.com will reduce business success (although saves funds for other purposes). Having few possessions may not reduce happiness. Depends on the person.
Excuse me if someone above already pointed this out. Indeed, the blogger didn’t present a convincing argument. I agree if his premise is to secure a name and build a great product, if resources are limited, and you don’t have the funds to purchase the .com, or the premium .com version of your company/site/app/product moniker. If the product catches on, with subsequent funding (Series A), then use some of those resources to acquire the great name. Of the companies sited above, the Founders of Square.com were the only ones who could afford a name like that, coming out of the box. At the time, they were thinking of calling their mobile payment app “Square Up”, hence, the reason. The other founders of the companies above are all rockstar hackers, and had limited resources at the time, so they focused on product, iterations, traction, and subsequent funding — then as advised by their branders and investors, went after the .com names, after having enough funds in their arsenal.
I like the point in the last that It doesn’t matter how the domain name is it could be created after making the business stable and then make a good domain name according to the business only getting a name is not sufficient.Thanks for sharing.