Change Your Name | Hacker News Reader

Change Your Name

paulgraham.com

355 pointsfranze336 comments

If the .com name you want is already registered, you can always buy it later once you business is successful enough to justify the investment (much like betali.st and getdropbox.com).

There's no point in buying an expensive domain name for a company that may not survive past the startup stage.

Note: a large swath of web users don't even understand the concept of a domain name or address bar...instead they google terms like "Gmail" and "YouTube" thinking this is how they are supposed to visit web sites.

What's more, tech-savvy users wouldn't think twice about visiting domain name ending in ".io", ".ly" and so on. (Hence their proliferation.)

I can't help but wonder if this article is some kind of prank--it's far too ill-considered compared to Graham's usual standards.

My reading was that at an early stage it's just better to come up with another name and be done with it...if airmatressbreadandbreakfast.com is taken, just buy airBnB.com. Consumers won't care. In cases like Stripe, where the target is B2B and the businesses are mostly small businesses, then a good name matters because it's marketing and its cost is just a cost of doing business.

To push it further a .io domain is signalling and that's what makes it attractive.

That's a bad example though. If airbnb.com is taken, should you take airbnb.io or airmatressandbreakfast.com? Paul's argument is: neither, get a different short name for which you can get the .com.

Airbnb.com actually did come later.

It was originally airbedandbreakfast.com.

I take it that the article is aimed at early stage startups and is premised on the idea that choosing a name is worth about 20 minutes of time by a founding team and an experienced investor. I find Airbnb useful because "air" has nothing to do with the current company. Any connotations to air mattresses are probably non-positive at this point and the company's success came after pivoting away from low quality low cost accommodations.

The good news is that if paulg was testing to see if HN was just an echo-chamber that applauds everything he says even if he gives terrible advice, HN just passed the test with flying colors. :-) Hooray for critical thinking!

This is what Product Hunt did.

Originally it was producthunt.co, and once there was sufficient traction, producthunt.com was acquired for a few thousand dollars (if memory serves).

I don't think anyone would argue that Product Hunt should have chosen a different name because the corresponding .com was taken.

Facebook originally operated under "thefacebook.com" and bought "facebook.com" for $200,000 in August 2005.[1]

Looking at Crunchbase, they had raised around $13M at that point, so I'm sure spending $200,000 seemed like a lot at the time.[2]

[1] http://mashable.com/2006/08/25/facebook-profile/

[2] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/facebook/funding-rou...

Well, that's 13M that you don't need to give back personally (unlike some bank loan). And .com is pretty important for a site like that. Fb.com is even better though.

.co is pushed hard in the startup world. I can't stand it though. It's way too close to .com, and results in a lot of messed up traffic.

"There's no point in buying an expensive domain name for a company that may not survive past the startup stage."

This is exactly why the .com domain wins. They do not have this attitude. Their attitude is to be in it to win it and do what it necessary to be successful. That's the .com signal.

It also depends on your market.

If ProductHunt disappeared tomorrow, I'd be sad, but that's it.

Stripe and Parse on the other hand both needed to signal strength to their customers from day one. There are many customers that would not entrust their payment details with getstripe.ly.

I've never really thought about it until now but I don't think I'd even pay for a service on .ly et al even if it was using stripe/PayPal

Maybe I'm just getting old but the .com wins it for me, at an absolute push for online services I'll trust a .net

What about https:\\ though?

It's trivial to get a cert for HTTPS. That doesn't tell me if the people behind the site are trustworthy, security conscious or going to be around in a year's time

I know that the dotcom doesn't do that either, it's not a rational thing - just a thing

.ly is particularly bad because Lybia's maintenance is a real risk.

Not everybody finances a startup with a mountain of cash. If you're funding your business with your life savings and credit cards, it's difficult to place a premium on a domain name while contemplating how long you can pay your mortgage and put food on the table.

Also, blind optimism is not required for success. And no domain name is an antidote for a shitty idea that nobody cares about.

You are right about the chitty idea, but decent .com names are dropped every day. (You need to scout for names every day though, but will become a nasty habit in no time.) I have found that people, outside of tech, will remember weird, odd .com domains. I got people to remember physibles(and how to spell it.), and these were senior citizens. (I guarantee these people have never been on the mother site either!)

I tried a different domain with a .io domain; and it just wasen't worth it the effort.(they knew about .net. ,org, but that's it.). There's almost a anger that comes up when a domain ext. gets to specific, like .photography?

You basically make the case for .com. It signals funding and optimism (whether you wrongly think it's bind or not).

Most people don't know what .com is. So sure if you are talking about a bunch of VCs your might be right but for most people it doesn't have that value.

How do you explain that pretty much every very large successful company has its straightforward .com? And why do you not place any significance in that?

It's .com for historical reasons. Today most startups wont be able to afford a proper .com name, but as they grow more and more successful they will.

So PG is right that a .com is important but not for the reasons he seem to indicate.

That you can acquire a proper .com is a manifestation of your success it is not the base of your success. And that is how his essay comes of at least to me and many others.

Maybe that was 2 years ago. Most people google the product/service nowadays, so if you have a better product/service, your company might be on top of some .com domain doing the same thing. I think that the .com fever is over.

It has nothing to do with how you find the website.

thefacebook.com also comes to mind.

So I started with a non .com address, after watching a client trying to find my homepage with .com my heart sank. The first thing anyone does is write in abc.com or their local country tld (in my case .co.nz).

3 weeks ago I purchased the .com after the original owner let it expire, cost me more than I wanted to pay bet less than I would have paid. I was ecstatic, feels so much better to say abc.com ... !

I wondered about the tone too ... perhaps we've got a fake-paul-graham in our midst? The thought experiment referenced by [1] is pretty weak. I don't think it's the attachment to a name but more commonly the lack of a better name - and it's especially hard to find a name you like that still has a .com domain available. Having a .com name like stripe indicates a position of strength because (at this point in time), someone paid extra for the privilege.

Exactly - his statistics are missing the important number, how many of those late stage YC startups had purchased the .com after they had raised substantial funding? (ie, could it be the pattern rather than the antipattern)

It's a good point, but I think empirically not many. Dropbox is the only one I can think of; they were originally getdropbox.com.

> There's no point in buying an expensive domain name for a company that may not survive past the startup stage.

The point (and title) of the essay is "change your name," not "make sure you get the .com."

You're thinking of customers looking at your company. Could it be that pg is actually talking about investors looking at your startup?

That seems to be more of what he's getting at here:

The problem with not having the .com of your name is that it signals weakness. Unless you're so big that your reputation precedes you, a marginal domain suggests you're a marginal company.

I read this and honestly thought that it's kind of bizarre that he seemingly "randomly" came out with this post. My first impression was that it was a publicity stunt by Verisign.

Nonetheless, Paul's point about naming is a good one. You have to have a good name. But, I see no evidence (and he didn't provide any) why the name has to be associated with a .COM domain. His only 'evidence' that he mentions is the fact that "100% of the top 20 YC companies by valuation have the .com of their name. 94% of the top 50 do. But only 66% of companies in the current batch have the .com of their name." This doesn't mean that 94% of the top 50 are right (in owning the .com).

Yes, you would think it would be easy to analyze two yc portfolios, one with .com, the other with every other domain, controlling for the time since formation, and compare results, both survival and valuation. That would probably be a lot more meaningful, since the most highly valued companies are almost certainly also the oldest (surviving) companies.

However, I do think the point he is making is correct, that there are a number of constraints, but that the optimal decision involves a different weighting of them to that of many founders (my interpretation). I would argue that the constraints for startup founders naming companies are: 1) short and easy to say & remember 2) available (cheaply) 3) domain (.com vs others) 4) intrinsically meaningful 5) related to the business

Some founders compromise on 3 and give more weight to 4 and 5: what I think he's saying is that 1,2,3 are much more important than 4 and 5, to the point that "almost any word or word pair that is not an obviously bad name is a sufficiently good one".

Great names are made not found.

I think Paul for once have it the wrong way around.

If you become big enough and happen to have enough of a market you might need to .com name to optimize your numbers.

If you happen to find a good name you can afford that you still think represents you and is .com you should most probably change your name.

But for most people just like their logo it's it's not that important until you become big and you can become big without .com name. Whether you can stay big is another discussion.

Far too often we fool ourselves thinking the wrong things are important.

But just as you most probably can easily find another name because your current one isn't as great as you might think, you can probably also wait a little until it becomes an actual issue.

and even when you stay big, your brand name is big enough that your domain doesn't matter (e.g., teslamotors.com)

Correct.I am trying to think of one instance where someone would refrain from working with Tesla, buying from them, or doing any sort of business with them because: Teslamotors instead of Tesla.

Little details are always important as long as they don't require big effort.

Agree. Problem is changing your name, to most people, is a big effort :)

There are different strategies and it certainly can be an advantage if you have a single word .com domain that encompasses a core value or offering.

A lot of things can be advantageous. But lets keep in mind that 99.99% of all companies are not going to be unicorns with budgets to buy +100K domain names anytime soon.

That doesn't mean they can't become a hugely successful company.

My general point is just that you shouldn't prematurely optimize because you end up spending a lot of time on it. Unless you stumble on a great name that you can afford it's most of the times simply not worth the effort.

How many jokes have been told about 1990s-era dot-coms spending $200k on domain names and then going under 6 months later.

Color.com :)

Definitely, prioritizing is important - $100k on development will bring your startup much further along and having a great domain may be an artificial crutch.

For entrepreneurs, the domains name should be the least concern.

Couldn't agree more.

Google, Yahoo, Twitter.

Three global brands that aren't dictionary names, and don't have to be. You don't need a dictionary word .com to survive either.

All companies that have their .com, and have had since the beginning as far as I know.

'Yahoo' and 'twitter' actually are words that existed in the dictionary before the respective companies.

All combinations of 6 letters .com are taken. All 16k words of the dictionary are taken in English. It wasn't even the case 2 years ago. I wonder whether pg's impression that if is possible to get a .com is outdated.

I agree - he even signals to that by noting that only 2/3 of the current batch owns their dot com. I predict this number will go down for the next batch, and the next one, and ...

> All combinations of 6 letters .com are taken.

Do you mean this literally for any 6 random characters? It rings true for 4, but I believe you can easily find a 5 character domain name even now. In fact, I just registered three five character and a six character domains without much trouble.

we registered a new 6 letter .com 8 months ago for 20 dollars.

I found an available 6 letter domain name ( http://TapRun.com ) about a year and a half ago. I've found others since then...

this is nonsense. I registered normally a good speakable 5 letter .com domain just 3 weeks ago.

BoxGal.com is currently available. I'm sure others are as well.

This sounds implausible to me. I have acquired a couple five letter domains in the past year or three. They kind of suck and are hard to pronounce but they exist.

Sorry but that's complete nonsense. That's over 2.5 billion domains. You probably mean all 6 letter English dictionary words -- which might be true.

It's hard to find an available .com. But that doesn't mean you can't get one: https://instantdomainsearch.com/aftermarket/

Twitter and Yahoo are dictionary words, and Google is just a misspelling (intentional or accidental, it's unclear) of a dictionary word.

All three did own their .com domain names from the very beginning.

> All three did own their .com domain names from the very beginning.

Twitter did not; it started out as twttr: http://techcrunch.com/2006/07/15/is-twttr-interesting/

And Twitter started as twttr, if I recall.

And Facebook as thefacebook.com

> Great names are made not found.

> But for most people just like their logo it's it's not that important until you become big

Exactly this. If you look at the most successful companies in all sectors out there, most of them have logos that range from plain to just ugly, and many of them feel like they were initially created as a formatted company name on top of some document, back when the company's secretary first discovered Microsoft Word.

The more I see things and think about them, the more I believe that this whole talk of logos being "very important since it's what your customer looks at all the time" is a big scam perpetuated by graphics designers, because they make (a lot of) money on you believing you need the slick, $expensive new brand image.

> The more I see things and think about them, the more I believe that this whole talk of logos being "very important since it's what your customer looks at all the time" is a big scam perpetuated by graphics designers, because they make (a lot of) money on you believing you need the slick, $expensive new brand image.

Patio11 has actually A/B tested two different logos. His conclusion was that "Your logo could potentially add or subtract 10% from enterprise value"[0].

[0] http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/08/04/does-your-product-logo-a...

I'm reminded of Mr Plow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OElW2BrB6So

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTY5EKN6bzM

The new logo is bad because it doesn't communicate what the product is.

I wont even get into the amount of issues with testing a logo via A/B testing. Patios A/B test is anecdotal not by any metrics statistical.

> "Your logo could potentially add or subtract 10% from enterprise value"[0].

...for a very small enterprise with 0 previous brand recognition, choosing logos at random.

BCC site's main goal is to not look like a scam, so people understand it's a legitimate product, not a "steal $10 and disappear" site. That's important, but not as important if your product is already more substantial and credible than "pictures you could download free from the internet, for a small price."

Check out this short video by a well known graphic designer (Michael Beirut). He explicitly talks about how logos are inherently NOT important and are overemphasized in the world. Rather it is the consistent actions of a company that give a logo meaning and builds a "brand": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0jw-Q7r-ng

Exactly. It's the same reason there is no such thing as branding per se. Everything you do is branding. From your packaging to your customer service to your employees.

That's exactly how I see it. Your logo has an important function - of an anchor. It's a symbol that can bring up all the feelings and memories people have associated with your operation. But it isn't magic, it has no power if people's feelings aren't there.

I don't think the logo is important but that's a different topic. If you at most successful companies in all sectors out there, they have their .com.

Yes but thats exactly the wrong point to make. The question is whether the name made them big or whether they got a good namer after they had success.

Great names are made not found.

If you didn't know Tide was a brand of laundry detergent, what would it mean to you?

It’s also strange to me since more then once when discussing startup naming I’ve quoted this earlier article Paul wrote where he makes nearly the opposite argument: http://aux.messymatters.com/pgnames.html

I think it's still relevant. That was before most of the TLD expansion so .com was just about the only option. I the gist of the article is that you have a lot of options in naming and many/most of them will be fine (as long as you get the .com).

I guess to me the main point of the new article seemed to be that the prestige and “signaling of strength” associated with the .com is what makes it important, while the older article argues having a traditionally prestigious name can actually be a negative, in signaling that maybe the founders “have more money then brains”. (I understand he's referring here to names that are obviously bought from squatters, but still the main point seems to be don't worry if a name fits into the traditional mold or seems 'prestigious' as long as its unique, memorable and ideally communicates something about your business. I'd also never expect a newer startup to be able to find "stripe.com" or "parse.com" without paying significantly for them today.)

I’d also say the proliferation of new TLD domains has made them more, not less acceptable for new companies, especially ones like .io and .ly that have come to be pretty closely associated with the startups in general. Like you say, in 2006 nearly everything still was .com so a non .com might have stood out more as a negative, and even then pg says he still had no problems with del.icio.us

Also the last section stood out for me as a contrast with the title of this one:

"Whatever name you choose, be careful. Names stick. You need a way to refer to things, and whatever you call something rapidly becomes its name."

Since pretty much every huge, successful company has their .com, I suppose the question is when they acquired it and the compensation.

> 100% of the top 20 YC companies by valuation have the .com of their name. 94% of the top 50 do. But only 66% of companies in the current batch have the .com of their name.

That's not a straight comparison. A better stat would be, what percentage of the top 20 YC companies had the .com while they were in the active YC batch?

No, because his thesis is "change your name", not "start out with .com"

But he's implying that having a .com correlates to success - so % starting with a .com would be a more apt comparison.

Except for the spate of domain names that are .coms but are not the company's actual name, ala "Bootstrap" and "getbootstrap.com".

rjvir said the .com though. getdropbox.com doesn't count, but they managed to get dropbox.com after they raised enough money for lawsuits.

http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/13/dropbox-acquires-the-domain...

Change your name isn't enough you have to first find a name that you can afford. And so while it's true your current name isn't that important it doesn't mean that you can find any "good" .com names that are affordable.

I think a lot of the comments here are missing the point.

If somebody is already using the <yourname>.com domain, then that name is already being used for something and creating a new business with the same name is a bad idea. I guess in the worst case scenario they could file a lawsuit claiming that you're infringing their trademark.

People can try to justify it by saying everybody just searches anyway, but if the .com name is already established it'll be a never-ending battle to keep your name in the top search results.

I mean, nobody would try to use ford.io or yahoo.tk for their startup, doing the same thing but with a smaller company is an equally bad idea.

Yea, I would agree that this is really the key point. If it's a fallow .com name (that you can't afford), then maybe you'll be lucky with an alternative TLD. But it's probably a poorer choice than changing your name.

In principle, agreed, but you are neglecting the huge role played by domain squatters.

The correlation might be backward: the top 20 YC companies by valuation probably have enough cash to buy the domain name that matches their company name.

It's also wrong because it implies that having the .com today is as important as when those companies got their .com. Anecdotally, many (most?) developer tools companies go for .io, so much so that a .com sounds strange these days.

Exactly. Maybe it's because the top 20 stuck around in YC long enough to be badgered by Paul Graham into getting a .com?

That said, I don't disagree with him on .com, I just don't think this particular factoid adds anything to the argument.

And for at least some these, it's definitely come post-success.

Twitch.com redirects to twitch.tv, but was a music site as late as the end of 2014.

Dropbox was GetDropbox.com < at least 1 counter example.

Best advice I've ever seen on naming a business is from this old Seth Godin gem:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2003/06/naming_a_bus...

I read that in 2003, and have never forgotten the "Lemon Pie" example since.

I've done some scuba and I don't get the Lemon Pie name in that context. Care to explain?

It's the whole point of the linked article.

> The LESS it has to do with your category, the better.

Apparently I'm still really, really bad at this.

:). Just think to yourself what apples have to do with computers and phones.

The Apple name did have a somewhat contrived connection with computers when the company was first started.

Back in 1976, Steve Jobs explained the name to me: "Take a byte of the Apple, get it?" And that's where the famous shape of the logo came from.

(I almost ended up working for him at the time - but that is a whole other story!)

That's cute! I didn't know that, thanks.

To me I don't think it has anything to do with Scuba per se.

More like it's a simple and easy name that you can build your scuba tour business around.

In other words - pick a good and easy English name or two and go from there. Avoid hard to pronounce words or smash two words together to make up a new word that means nothing.

At least that's how I see it.

easy as lemon pie

I was developing websites in 2003, so I feel like I should be able to relate here, but he has this comment at the bottom that I can't figure out...

"Use a stock photo CD and find cool pictures that match your name BEFORE you pick the name. If you can find a bunch of $30 images that work with a name, grab the pictures, then the name."

Huh?

I think he's saying that once you have a set of potential names, get some stock photos/pictures that match up to those names, and then pick a name that you like AND has cool stock photography. That will keep you from picking a name and then having to spend even more time picking photos that go along with your name.

The name "lemon pie" makes a clear image in your head. This makes it easier to remember. This is why "peg" mnemonic systems work.

It's how I came up with the name "Big Blue Saw".

>Don't believe a domain is for sale unless the owner has already told you an asking price.

One of my favorite examples: http://nissan.com

or tesla.com

I've always wondered how long will domain squatters wait before they negotiate. Surely Tesla Motors has approached tesla.com and apparently been turned down. Telsa Motors has shown they don't need that domain name to succeed. So when will the squatter, if ever, cave to Tesla Motors' offer?

Maybe never. The Homo Economicus model of human behavior as optimizing for expected economic return is only a first approximation. In some cases, human behavior is more accurately modeled as "Mine! My precious!"

Even if Tesla is not willing to pay the amount the squatter wants, he may be hoping that Tesla's competitor will.

By the way, the coolest thing Tesla could do, that would buy them a lot of love and good press, would be to buy tesla.com and donate it to Nicola Tesla Science Center.

Shouldn't that be tesla.edu rather than .com? Their current .org would also be more appropriate than a .com...

It can't be, unless time travel...

From Wikipedia: "Since 2001, new registrants to the [.edu top level] domain have been required to be United States-affiliated institutions of higher education, though before then non-U.S.-affiliated—and even non-educational institutions—registered, with some retaining their registrations to the present."

Yeah. I imagine if the offer and counteroffer are rebuffed, the squatter enters "well, now you're never gonna get it" mode.

Nissan.com is a great example. I am sure Nissan offered them a lot of cash for the domain name before going hostile on them.

You should probably read up on the case then.

must be killing it with that huge insurance ad

Similar thing happened here in Minneapolis back in the early 2000's with our local Amazon Bookstore (great bookstore, btw) and amazon.com

steam.com is another

To anyone naming their company and moving on when the Whois comes back as registered -- if you're really like the name, you should follow up with whoever owns it!

I was recently trying to come up with names for a website / app I've been working on and wanted to finalize a name. The couple of ideas I had were already registered, including the name I really wanted. I ended up sending out emails to the contact on record for the domains I was interested in and ended up buying the exact name I wanted for around $100, which was far less than I was expecting them to settle for. The name had been registered for 13 years and nobody who owned it ever did anything with it.

"It turns out almost any word or word pair that is not an obviously bad name is a sufficiently good one, and the number of such domains is so large that you can find plenty that are cheap or even untaken."

So, after reading this advice, I decided I'd actually try it out - it's easy enough to download a word list and write a script that pings a WHOIS API to check every single word or word pair. Turns out most such APIs are rate-limited, so I couldn't get as far as I wanted, but in a random spot check of 30 or so words off the word list, every single one of them was taken (as was the word-pair that I'm actually using for my startup). Even things as out-there as absurder.com or tektites.com.

I think it's a good bet that somebody has already done this and registered every single English word and many word pair in the .com TLD.

The good news is that by shitting all over .com, there will be no more startups founded with .com domain names. Either companies will buy them as they get bigger, creating a big transfer of wealth from startups to domain squatters, or more likely they'll just give up and we'll get more .ly, .io, or other gTLD domains in the future.

There are still a few one-word domains left in the .com TLD (e.g. naziisms.com, regularizing.com, castigators.com). I myself registered one earlier this summer.

http://www.randomdotcom.com/

I can just see it now.

"Certainly there are some unfortunate connotations with our name, but we feel that the advantage of having a memorable, one-word dot-com domain name is worth it." - Bob Q. Startup, Founder and CEO of Naziisms, Inc.

Probably not for long - with 1.4 thousand domains and $10/domain, it would only take $14K to complete the corner of the .com TLD. Was tempted to do it myself, but my wife would probably have an issue with dropping $14K on the likes of blotchier.com, naziisms.com, ossiffies.com, chastens.com, etc.

(BTW, after clicking through random domains 50 or so times, I had some of them come up 3 times, which makes me think that there are more like 50-100 untaken .com domains than the 1.4K they say.)

I purchased a domain a few months back that I found on that site. Still debating on using it as my company's name, just not the best to spell.

Yeah.

I have quite a lot of experience trying to find names and is fairly good at coming up with them. Actually finding available names that have the proper quality is very very hard and time consuming.

So were Stripe and Parse, as it happens. We reached out to the owners of domains that looked unused / potentially for sale.

How did you start that process, and (if you don't mind saying) around how much did it cost? I've been looking at what it would take to buy some domains that are marked as taken and get pointed to domainagents.com by my registrar, but it's $199 minimum bid with a $30 deposit (with $10 going straight to the seller simply for responding), and I worry that they'll ask for like $100K, which I'm obviously not going to pay at this stage in the company lifetime.

> After sending a bunch of these emails by hand, I wrote a Bash script for the process in my old Harvard Computer Society shell account (sending from a .edu address would make us seem reputable while not flush with cash). I tested it out, but having forgotten both “set -u” and to provide any inputs, it sent an email with all variables blank. The to: address defaulted to mailer-daemon@, an administrative list that all of my former HCS colleagues were on. They were pretty confused to see my email asking if I could buy “.com” from them, and I was suitably embarrassed. I figured the cost of further similar embarrassment would be higher than the manual time I'd save, so I kept sending emails manually.

> In total, I sent several hundred emails that day. Of the plausible responses I received, stripe.com was the clear winner. (Incidentally, I also got a reply from the parse.com owner; months later I sent my accumulated domain name list to Tikhon Bernstam, which is how Parse got its name.)

http://www.quora.com/How-did-Stripe-come-up-with-its-name/an...

Cost:

> We'd rather not disclose the amount, but it was less than you might think.

http://www.quora.com/How-much-did-Stripe-com-spend-on-their-...

Summary: They sent emails from a student email address to the domain contacts as listed in the Whois details. Cost was perhaps in the range of $2-20k (which I realize is a big range).

DomainAgents is a startup that helps people buy and sell domain names. We (I'm one of the founders) help startups get their ideal domain names all the time.

A few thoughts.

When possible try to buy your domain before any sort of serious traction, first thing people who own domains are going to do is Google their domain and see what comes up. So if you're running on GetHappy.com and are blowing up, you're making the generic domain "happy.com" more valuable every day. Even with a TM, a rocking responsive site, and editors pick in the app store, the value of Happy.com improves right along side your KPIs, your entitlement to the domain however does not.

If you're running on a generic term like "Happy" and things are going well, chances are the term is being picked up by other developers. If you're thinking "no one is going to go after that domain, it's mine!" you're wrong. The guys running theHappyapp.com and haappy.io have likely already pinged the owner trying to buy the domain. So has your arch rival getunhappy.com ... just because they want to screw you. The longer you wait the more people will try to buy the domain. The more interest in an asset, the more potential for the domain to become increasingly expensive.

A good domain name really is an asset. It's likely that for at least the next 10 years or more, a solid .com is going to be an asset that will, at worst, hold it's value. So even if Google enters your market, eats your lunch, then Facebook follows to finish you off, if you own happy.com, you will still have something that you can potentially borrow against, or sell to fund a pivot.

And finally, if you've got a round locked down, see if you can buy the domain you're after before it's announced.

Care to share how much you paid for it? I typically see north of $5k. For a very early stage company its hard to justify even just $5k.

Was answering the question above and came across this so figured I'd share -- though maybe Patrick/Stripe has changed his/their mind since then :-)

> We'd rather not disclose the amount, but it was less than you might think.

http://www.quora.com/How-much-did-Stripe-com-spend-on-their-...

Yeah, now the challenge is just that I don't remember the exact amount :-). I believe $20k or $30k. We'd raised ~$1.8M by this point and so it seemed like a reasonable amount to spend.

That was 2010 right ? I'm going to throw this out there...The 2015 price point for a dictionary .com name of that caliber is double that at least.

The domain owner initially asked for $30k. We negotiated him down to $12.5k up front and another $12.5k a year later. As an early-stage startup, this structure was a huge win, since we expected we'd either raise money or no longer exist within the next year.

I have recent experience in this, as I spent 4-5 hours trying to name my new company.

I was first looking for some reference on prometheus.io and a transliteration for the Irish for "fire" looked free - but turned out to be to a derogatory term for Indians so that wasn't an option (always check Urban Dictionary). Next I looked for something with the initials AE (which means "liver" in Irish), and even after trawling through a thesaurus and /usr/share/dict/words nothing worked that was available in DNS.

Finally I had a list of ~100 words that were candidates. Single words were out as they weren't easily Googleable, and all were taken. I played with word pairs a bit, and the 3rd or 4th I really liked was free in DNS and not popular on the web. I now have robustperception.io, with the .com and plurals to be safe.

People I've talked to have liked the name "Robust Perception", and it ties into what we do, so it seems to have been worth all the hassle. Name pollution is a real problem.

> The problem with not having the .com of your name is that it signals weakness.

Note to anyone who disagrees with Paul Graham on this one: he's not talking about the genuine importance of the domain name. He's talking about its perceived importance by important people —namely the investor community. That's the way it is with most status signals: they're not very important by themselves, but how they influence the people who have power over you is important.

Simply put, if the investor community believes that lacking the relevant .com name is a sign of weakness, then lacking such a name signals that weakness. As such, they will be less likely to invest, making your company weaker. It doesn't matter if they're right in the first place. Their belief is sufficient.

It's a self fulfilling prophecy: if investors believe you're weak, that belief can make you weak.

It also suggests that any investor willing not to believe in such signals can stand to make a lot of money.

I sometimes wonder how much bullshit do people at the top of the foodchain believe and act on, given the material targeted towards executives (like magazine articles or presentations of software development methodologies) are so full of it.

this is telling

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

https://blog.bufferapp.com/how-to-name-your-startup

Simple was banksimple.com.

I only know the backstory of Dropbox, but I'm certain Drew Houston would tell you that it was a painfully distracting process to obtain dropbox.com. I suspect if he could have done it all over again, he would have spent the 30 minutes and few hundred dollars to buy something different. Of course, there were a lot more options back in 2007.

Uber was ubercab.com

> With characteristic sense of profitable timing, it bought the domain name Uber.com from the Universal Music Group for 2% of the company then later managed to buy back the shares – today worth hundreds of millions – for $1m.

http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2014/dec/21/travis-ka...

If you're struggling to find a solid available .com for your startup, I'd encourage you to check out my free service, Lean Domain Search [1]. The site asks you for a keyword then pairs your keyword with 5,000 other words and instantly shows you which are available. For example, if you search for "food" [2], it will pair it with "free" and check "FreeFood.com", "hub" and check "FoodHub.com", and so on, and it also allows you to sort the results by length or popularity of that additional word. With a few searches you should be able to find a great domain, saving you a lot of time and potentially a lot of money.

[1] http://www.leandomainsearch.com

[2] http://www.leandomainsearch.com/search?q=food

Another favorite tool: http://impossibility.org

You feed it a word and it will prefix/suffix it with random verbs/nouns/adjectives + '.com'.

I love it, thanks. One suggestion, though - make it mobile friendly.

100% of the top 20 by valuation have their .com

What proportion had it at their founding or shortly after? Surely a well funded and successful company had the means and motivation to purchase their .com

Cheaper still, would be to get a new name that has an available .com

A great example: how long did it take Square to get their hands on square.com? Even now it's just a redirect to squareup.com.

Another example: Dropbox originally had getdropbox.com, and didn't obtain dropbox.com until more than 2 years after founding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropbox_(service)#2007-2011

And another: Box launched as box.net, and spent about $1 million to buy box.com. [0]

For earlier companies, you can buy a lot of engineers, product, and marketing for $1 million.

[0] http://www.cnet.com/news/how-box-net-became-box-com-for-just...

Exactly, that's the real test. The information is available:

http://brianjackson.io/view-dns-history-free/

I have some personal experience with this. Our company is Direct Match. We used to use the directmatchx.com website. Adding an X on the end isn't that odd in the trading world, but we would get comments on it all the time. directmatch.com ended up costing us $8k and well worth the purchase.

For me it came down to, how can I tell customers, recruits, or investors that I'm going to be this huge impactful startup if I didn't even own the .com of my name? I couldn't. And now I never get a question about if my company's name is "Direct Match X" or why there's an X at the end of the domain name.

> "Whereas (as Stripe shows) having x.com signals strength even if it has no relation to what you do."

I would contest that it has no relation, I could be wrong since I have no knowledge. That said I always saw it as a relation to the cards themselves and the magnetic-strip on the back of the card.

I thought the exact same thing. I was really surprised by this comment coming from PG.

This Forbes/Quora article explains how the name was chosen: http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/04/02/how-did-stripe-...

Yep, I agree, that's what I thought it referred to the entire time (and even commend them on a smart name because of it)

The latest "new TLD" thing was a money-making scheme for domain registrars. Nobody goes to those domains. Even the previous round of TLDs (".museum", ".aero") are not used much; ".aero" has entries for all the major airport codes, but they're redirects.

Amusingly, even if you have your very own TLD, it doesn't help you. Most browsers send single-word lookups to a search engine before they send them to DNS. Try "ca" in a browser. There is a web site at "ca". But to get there, you'll have to use "ca.", to force a DNS lookup from the root. Nobody knows to do that unless they're into how DNS works. There are some low-level bugs embedded in very common C libraries which cause problems with single-word domains, and they probably won't be fixed.

As for the original poster's advice, the price of the domain you want in .com is probably more than YCombinator's initial funding. With all of today's domain hoarding, the ".com" domain usually comes later. Facebook started as "thefacebook.com".

There is no website at "ca". Did you mean www.ca? That redirects to circa.ca

For a clearer example, try "http://ai." No redirection; there's a web site there.

There's no DNS record for "ai.". It's actually the browser prepending www in search for a site and "www.ai." happens to exist.

No, there is a DNS record for "ai":

    $ nslookup ai
    Server:	127.0.1.1
    Address:	127.0.1.1#53

    Non-authoritative answer:
    Name: ai
    Address: 209.59.119.34

Rechecking using Google's DNS server:

    $ nslookup
    > server 8.8.8.8
    Default server: 8.8.8.8
    Address: 8.8.8.8#53
    > ai
    Server:	8.8.8.8
    Address:	8.8.8.8#53

    Non-authoritative answer:
    Name: ai
    Address: 209.59.119.34

It's pingable:

    $ ping ai
    PING ai (209.59.119.34) 56(84) bytes of data.
    64 bytes from offshore.ai (209.59.119.34): icmp_seq=1 ttl=46 time=133 ms
    64 bytes from offshore.ai (209.59.119.34): icmp_seq=2 ttl=46 time=132 ms
    64 bytes from offshore.ai (209.59.119.34): icmp_seq=3 ttl=46 time=132 ms
    ...

And it speaks HTTP:

   $ wget ai
   --2015-08-09 14:26:26--  http://ai/
   Resolving ai (ai)... 209.59.119.34
   Connecting to ai (ai)|209.59.119.34|:80... connected.
   HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
   Length: 1257 (1.2K) [text/html]
   Saving to: ‘index.html’
   100%[======================================>] 1,257       --.-K/s   in 0.001s  
   2015-08-09 14:26:26 (842 KB/s) - ‘index.html’ saved [1257/1257]

It doesn't respond to HTTPS, though. So we don't get to see a cert issued for a TLD.

A base level TLD site is rare; most TLDs don't have one. But it's supported in DNS.

Well, at least prg.aero is actual website and not redirect (which may have something to do with the fact that ownership structure of the airport had changed around the time .aero was introduced).

Is this signaling as simple as having a .com ?

Or are there other considerations such as SEO uniqueness, easy-to-pronounce (especially critical for enterprise software), length of url.

Is kuickkoder.com a better domain than quickcoder.io ?

It's a sliding scale.

If the .com is kuicksuperkodderdudes.com, then quickcoder.io is superior. Yes to length of url - if your only option is a .com that is 25 letters long, or a .io domain that is six letters, then the .io wins.

For most of the cases in which a .com ends up being inferior to a .io, it's due to a naming exploration failure. You can still easily find good two word .com addresses today. Unless you've got coder.io or similar.

I'm not sure.

I'd rather have a memorable name with a sub-par TLD, than I would have a confusing / hard to remember name with a .com.

Obviously, the ideal is memorable + .com, but most of those will cost 50-100k+, which is not feasible for seed-stage budget.

Sounds like a series A problem.

According to the article, there's a third option:

> It turns out almost any word or word pair that is not an obviously bad name is a sufficiently good one, and the number of such domains is so large that you can find plenty that are cheap or even untaken. So make a list and try to buy some. That's what Stripe did. (Their search also turned up parse.com, which their friends at Parse took.)

If your numbers are going up and to the right, what does it mean to "signal weakness" with your name?

I think the essay is missing crucial elaboration on the central point. That is, the idea that .com is associated with strength, and lack of .com with weakness.

.com is supreme

.com is love

.com is life

Surrender your soul unto VeriSign

Evan Williams of Blogger/Twitter fame disagree with it.

http://evhead.com/2011/06/five-reasons-domains-are-less-impo...

>100% of the top 20 YC companies by valuation have the .com of their name. 94% of the top 50 do. But only 66% of companies in the current batch have the .com of their name. Which suggests there are lessons ahead for most of the rest, one way or another.

How much of that is due to the pressure that he admittedly puts on them to change names? (And that higher valued ones are likely to be older and have had this pressure for longer?)

In addition to having had the pressure for longer, they have the money from having raised multiple rounds of financing.

Well, yeah, that's what "higher valued ones are likely to be older" implies.

correlation is not causation...

Hypothetical:

Let's say you are a founder and VC tell you that you need to pay off someone to get a certain domain name that matches your startup name.

Let's say that someone knows how badly you need this name, and they charge you an absurd price.[1]

Finally, let's say your startup fails.

Question:

Who gets the domain name?

Considering the money that has been spent to get it, the domain name could be your startup's most valuable and liquid asset?

[1] "Absurd" because the cost of creating and maintaining a domain name (editing a zone file and running a DNS server) is quite low. In the early days of the www, domain names were registered for free. These days some people pay thousands of dollars for "domain names". Funnily enough, in some cases the names being "sold" for thousands of dollars are the same ones that were once given away for free. After one has paid a one-time, exorbitant "price" for a domain name, then they must pay the annual fee each year to keep the domain name registered. Usually this fee is under $100. Even the annual fee charged is far above the cost of creating and maintaining a domain name.

Maybe I should start a new TLD, e.g., ".startup".

I could distribute a copy of root.zone with .startup added.

I could give away a free, preconfigured localhost DNS cache, freeing users from ISP provided DNS, open resolvers like Google and Cisco (OpenDNS), and most importantly freeing them from the ICANN racket.

Then I could give away domain names for free, upon a proper showing of need. No hoarding.

Nah, it would never work. No one wants "alternative" TLD's.

(I wonder how much pure profit .io has made in recent years.)

I have a related question. When you have one product, which name is different from the company's name, is it better to use comapany.com or product.com?

Perhaps both? Company.com can describe the company, show your products, etc. Product.com could be either a landing page advertising your product or, if it's a service, perhaps that's the login / primary access for your product.

Just my thoughts.

Someone from Google, er, Alphabet didn't read PG's essay: https://abc.xyz

The timing is exquisite.

yes, so true! :D

We'll buy it when we raise series A. We'll use our hipster version until then. Thanks.

My sense of Graham's thesis - and I'm reading this really loosely here - is that he's saying a name's not worth sticking with if obvious metrics suggest it's a bad choice. The most obvious metric of whether you have a good name or not is whether it's already been taken, especially by someone else with their own idea and access to 6 or 10 or 20 dollars per year or whatever the annual registration fee is. The space for available names (the "name space", if you will ;) is still large enough that being very stubborn about your startup's names is probably hazardous, and certainly not a sign of health.

Ignoring the minutiae of the rest of the post (and you can argue I'm really doing this quite intently), I think I agree with the principle. The name's not that important. If you're processing financial transactions you could be named PayPal, sure, but you could also be named Stripe or Square or BrainTree[0] or any of dozens of weird names that make no sense at face value (if these names are in fact deeply meaningful, I'd be curious to hear the stories... privately, or on Twitter, not necessarily here/now).

There are reasonable things to get stuck on - if you're committed to being a B2C product or service, and others are telling you your startup is more of a B2B idea, then you should wrestle with that. But you shouldn't be wrestling over the name for such a great deal of time. If Paul Graham tells you to change your name when you're pitching to him so you can get a .com, you probably shouldn't (he argues) protest all that much.

I don't think I hold his view as strongly as he does, but I'm neither a successful VC nor widely respected in Silicon Valley, so his argument about perception is admittedly a little self-fulfilling and it seems impossible to reject.

[0] the irony is not lost on me, now that I check, that BrainTree doesn't own braintree.com - although first glance suggests Square only has squareup.com, square.com redirects to it; I'd be interested to hear Graham's thoughts on that, and I think it would signal strongly whether I understood his argument correctly.

Before startup founders disregarding PG's advice about prefering .com domains if feasiable, consider 2015 RSA Conference cyber security speaker Paul Vixie recommendation for corporate sysadmins to filter out new TLD's to cut down on cyberthreats. Startups considering sexy new cheap TLD's may want to reconsider cost / benefit metrics of such path.

On Thursday, April 23 at 9:10am, there is a session called “Domain Name Abuse: How Cheap New Domain Names Fuel the eCrime Economy.” The panel will be led by Paul Vixie, CEO of a company called Farsight Security, Inc.

http://www.rsaconference.com/

We found that out the hard way. We were getting tons of reports of our product not working. After a lot of investigation, we found out they were all coming from people at Starbucks locations, because Starbuck was blocking .me.

Not sure the domain name really matters much now. Reasons:

(1) Do users really pay attention to the extension, COM or anything else?

(2) IMHO, now users mostly just click on links while paying little or no attention to the actual URL or domain name. Of course, the HTML link element (tag) doesn't have to expose anything about the extension.

So, why do 1+ billion users know or care about COM?

For PG's point about the most successful YC companies use COM, that was then, when COM didn't cost so much, not now.

So it feels like this is a prejudice against startups who aren't using the .com TLD and I suspect would come more from investors and partners than users.

Maybe the point is that for startups that do get traction and funding, finding a .com is an inevitable task, one that could save a lot of money/energy by addressing it in the early stages. That inevitable task may be borne out of the CEO being tired of answering why they didn't go for a .com.

There has actually been no justification as to why a .com is required. Simply saying non .com is "marginal" and "it signals weakness" is not a root reason. All it shows is that some people have a differing opinion on the value of a .com and not agreeing with 'them' means you're weak.

I personally do feel more comfortable having a good sounding .com, but if I'm going to do it, it has to be for the right reasons. That I don't think has been clearly expressed in this essay.

My reasons are that it's a global identity, globally indexable by search engines, the most common global LTD and therefore the most memorable by end users, and more stable from a root server point of view. Would I think a startup with another name is weak? No. I would assume that they understand the implications of a non-.com TLD.

If you're better at coming up with different names, as PG apparently is (he mentions in the article), then yeah, this would be a net win to just change your name.

For most of us who are pretty awful at naming, it may not be a great idea to focus on the name when there are other TLDs out there like .io, .co, or most recently, .tech. And there's also the highly acceptable alternative of using a derivative of your name, such as (name)app.com, get(name).com, and that sort of thing.

It's also notable that a startup registering its domain name is probably early stages and their name may change anyway, because their idea may change. You don't want to spend hundreds or more on lavalamps.com and then later decide you're actually going to sell those puzzle/IQ lights. Doing that might even make you hesitate to change your idea.* But if you spend $12 on lavalamps.net, the cost of heading for greener pastures is epsilon.

If you've got another name stashed on a scrap of paper in a drawer, dig it up and check whether its .com is available. But if figuring out a new name is going to take you a week, just take what you can get for now.

Probably you don't want to use (name).ru, though. ;)

---

*Although if you were that foolish and then that inflexible, you probably weren't going to get anywhere anyway.

Man, this advice may be tough to hear, (especially for someone like myself who currently only owns sellervision.net for the app I've been working on for ten months) but if the 'Godfather Of Startups' PG believes it's vital to have a dot com, then I'd change the name of my app in a heartbeat. Now I'm just waiting for YC to take me on to their Fellowship or main intake so I can have some budget to buy a cracking new name...ha ha!

It's a hard choice to make, but especially when building a B2C brand & product and a large enough SEO channel (where a domain change might hurt your rankings), I'd definitely stick with PG here.

Lots of good examples and counterexamples in the comments, but if you want something memorable AND searchable, sometimes it's best to just churn out the money early on if you know very well what you're doing.

For justwatch.com we paid a small fortune - almost a tenth of the seed investment - to a shady squatter that just wouldn't give in, but in retrospect I'd still say it was definitely worth it.

Even in 2015, it still makes you come across a tad more serious, determined and professional to outsiders and the brand searches and direct openings of the domain are significant.

When you've built a brand already, squatters will be happy to charge you for the work you did (which might or might not be a better deal overall than burning the valuable money in the beginning). YMMV.

If you're shooting for a B2B SAAS business that's more sales or SEM driven, I guess you're off just fine with an .io or temp domain, but your main focus should be a clean search neigbourhood then where you have the chance to make the Google front page eventually.

PG is recommending you get the X.com, but that doesn't mean you need to pay $50,000 for X.com on Day 1 of your startup. I see people making this mistake all the time, buying expensive domains before validating their startup in the first place.

Think about what Dropbox, Stripe, and AirBnB did!

  getdropbox.com          -> dropbox.com
  devpayments.com         -> stripe.com
  airbedandbreakfast.com  -> airbnb.com

Graham mentions this in a footnote, essentially not to assume such a thing unless the domain squatter has actually given an ask price. I'll extend on his argument by pointing out that Nissan and Tesla still don't own their .com names, and evidently Houston (of Dropbox) went through a lot of pain to get dropbox.com well after it'd been validated.

If your idea seems worthless, a squatter might figure this is the time to shed a worthless domain for a few hundred or thousand bucks. If you're at the helm of a runaway multi-million-dollar success, I imagine the squatter is going to try and squeeze you for significantly more.

I agree with some other commentators here - I am surprised at this article and it doesn't appear to be up to PG's usual standards. There are trends I believe PG is missing.

Today, we consider the .COM to be the true, authentic, creme dela creme. However, available .COM domains are becoming harder and harder to find, while there has been an explosion in new TLDs such as .ly, .io, .pro, .guru, .camp, .rentals, .pub, .management etc.

More and more, we will be seeing startups and large companies with alternative domain names which they will promote online, in magazines, on TV, etc. It will be common to see alternative TLDs. I wouldn't be surprised if the next Super Bowl had a couple ads which included an alternative TLD. Marketing is about rising above the noise and right now a .PRO is much more noticeable than a .COM.

Many commenters and PG acknowledge that while .COM names are less valuable today than they were just a few years ago, they are still perceived to be very valuable. However, that is less and less true for the younger generation (which is the trend I believe PG is missing). As they grow up seeing ly, .io, .pro, .guru, etc., a .COM will have no more inherent authenticity than any other TLD. Would they really be more attracted to a magazine/tv/online ad with sportsshoe.com than to sportsshoe.pro? More willing to eat lunch at goodfood.com over goodfood.pub? More likely to attend bestsummercamp.com over bestsummer.camp? More likely to download a fun app from puzzle.com over puzzle.app?

As a potential investor, does spending time and money securing a .COM really signal someone's dedication and company strength? Should a startup founder really spend a lot of money to secure a .COM so the company appears stronger? Seems like a false metric.

Exactly! This why I commended Casey Neistat for waiting to announce his startup name to the public until he secured the domain name.

I think that changing your name is almost always the wrong thing to do. It's a sort of 'reputation bankruptcy' that only makes sense when your "credit" has been damaged beyond repair.

I imagine it would be different if you are primarily concerned about your reputation with your investors rather than your reputation with your users; but I think that big companies regularly undervalue the customer familiarity with their brand.

Sure, when choosing a name, choose a name that has an available .com. Why not? Before you've invested anything in a name, it is all but valueless, so the cost to getting a .com is very low.

The value in a name is in how many people recognize and remember it; if nobody knows your name, it's worthless. If people do remember it, it doesn't matter how awkward or weird the name is; the value is in that recognition. Once you have that, don't fuck with it.

Actually, paypal owns x.com, not Stripe. :)

True, but x is a variable in this case.

Should've use ^([^\.]+)\.com$ for clarity.

Or just example.com :)

The advice seems like a bit of an anachronism in the mobile world.

Nice, short .com domain names were probably more important for desktop web browsing -- and I suspect are less relevant to startups that are focused on the iOS App Store, Google Play Store, third-party app stores, Twitter, Facebook, etc. for discovery.

exactly ..people go to the app store. Few ever go to snapchat.com They hear about it on Facebook, on twitter, the press, through word of mouth

I read through all the comments, hoping for someone to match the irony of this Paul Graham article.

ycombinator is not exactly memorable like a "stripe" or "parse", yet they are presumably one of the most successful accelerators in the world.

Naming is secondary, marketing that name is primary. Of course, you can't have a shitty name like ookabugiedandwig, but ask yourself why English-speaking people know words like: Samsung, Nissan, Ubuntu, Volkswagen and you can even apply that in reverse and find out why people who may not even use English to write, know words like: Apple, Mercedes Benz, Windows.

Also, I don't mean this in a bad light, but I am glad to see people disagreeing with Paul Graham. This shows that HN is healthy and even a YC members opinion can be wrangled down to reality.

So having the .com of your name is the equivalent to, in earlier times, banks, churches and police basing themselves in large, impressive stone buildings.

Of course, signalling architecture has become less important over time, and probably the same will become true of the domain name equivalent.

I'm skeptical to see that PG wrote this article. There is no doubt that owning a snazzy .com domain is good but saying this

    If you have a US startup called X and you don't have x.com, you should probably change your name.

doesn't make sense. Sorry.

It makes plenty of sense. Try finding the ford modeling agency by typing Ford into google. (without longtail modifiers) Guess what... ford.com is your first hit.

I have a doubt about names - sorry to stray away from the topic but it would help me giving away the domain i have for the future.

I have a domain name which is registered as trademark by one of the organizations, can the organization claim the domain name since they own the trademark ?

I'd like to second this question - does anyone know? Many people grab the domain name, but don't file the trademark (which is more expensive). Can someone just file the trademark and then go after the domain name?

Did you register the domain name before their trademark ? There are several ways under the Uniform Domain Resolution Policy whereby they can come after the domain name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Domain-Name_Dispute-Re...

To answer the other question posted to your question. Registering a trademark in an attempt to take a domain name from someone else is know as Reverse Domain Name Hijacking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_domain_hijacking

thank you that really helped learn more about the topic..

This makes me so tempted to write up the name history of BigCo where I used to work. I have searched before and cannot find a good write up on line. But it would basically require me to out myself because much of what I know is from having worked there for over five years. I can't find online sources with some of this information. But, previously, I have just stated I worked at BigCo and not named the company.

I was actually considering doing such a write up a day or two ago. So it really hits a nerve to see this here today.

Short version of the story: Even really big, wildly successful companies do name changes and most folks founding a company are waaaay over-attached to whatever they first decided to name their baby.

After reading this, I'm a bit perplexed and sad at the same time. My current strategy was to not use a .com since it was up for sale more than I'm willing to pay. Instead, I decided to go with something similar but different and hopefully change it once the idea/company got traction.

Whether or not I agree with this, PG is a source of authority, which makes me think about my current strategy. Sort of sucks, do I listen to my gut and what many others here are saying, or fork over the money into a domain that could be used for other areas in the business?

I'm going with option#1 btw, just sucks to hear this from someone I respect, because it makes me believe it's true.

Anybody remembers getdropbox.com before dropbox.com?! :-) Or... thefacebook.com before facebook.com?!

Name, logo, domain name, are all important things, and - like for all things - their importance changes over time. You go in a circle of executing to "good enough" for the stage you are at (keeping in mind that you do not want to create problems for yourself in the future with the choices you make today) and then move on to the next item on the execution priority list.

If you wait to have the perfect logo before launching, you will never launch... Then 6 or 12 months later you might find yourself analyzing the perfect palette of Pantone colors to go with your brand...

I couldn't agree more. We see more and more startups end up with the wrong name for their business. That's why we created and launched the "Unused Domains" index a couple of weeks ago.

We index all(+50M so far) domains that are unused and give you access to them here: undeveloped.com/search

At least now you know which options you have and which alternatives are out there. The search and acquisition of the right name for your startup doesn't have to be that painful anymore.

PS: we help/advice/consult startups for free with finding and picking the right name in the right extension. So feel free to reach out to us if you're struggling with your name.

My startup's name is Purple. This is what we have to deal with : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple.com

Didn't you know that before you named your company?

I knew I needed to change our company's name but this article really sealed the deal. The problem is I don't have the skill of naming. If you do, I'd love your help (email me at lalalee at hotmail.com).

If you're ready to pay, try http://www.pickydomains.com/

Try sites like these:

* Namium - http://www.naminum.com

* The Name App - http://thenameapp.com

* Wordoid - http://wordoid.com/

There are some more sites like these but more focused on domain names, all from here - https://blog.growth.supply/300-awesome-free-things-e07b3cd5f...

There's a complementary post elsewhere in the comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10031735

Nowadays, it seems that if your startup is primarily a web application, then choosing the right domain is a little more important than if you make an app like Snapchat. Is there really a big difference if you type in "snapchat.com" vs "snapchatapp.com"?

However, if you can avoid more obscure and complicated URLs, then by all means do it. I think its best practice to have something straight forward so the user doesn't have to search first to come on your site. You never know what kind of distraction can present itself in those few seconds leading a user away from your site.

There is another problem with Paul's suggestion, which is that it only really works for very young startups that don't have many customers or other business relationships yet.

Once you sell product and have established partnerships changing your name just doesn't make sense any longer and becomes a measure of last resort, e.g. if your brand is so damaged that continuing business under the old name becomes very complicated. But then again, if you're in that kind of a situation you probably have a lot more things to care about which are at least as important.

We started working in our startup one week ago. I'm signaling weakness because I don't want to spend 5 grands in a .com domain? This post is so confusing.

No, you're signaling weakness because you don't change the name to something that doesn't cost 5 grand to get the .com for.

That's what the article says at least.

If you search for a .com domain and it's already taken, you're not being creative enough. You're looking where someone has already looked in the world of ideas, you're not expanding the world of ideas.

Whereas if you force yourself to buy an untaken .com domain, you are pushing yourself to think creatively. You might even get so lucky to come up with a fantastic name such as Airbnb or Zenefits.

    a) Thanks for writing new posts. I have been missing your
       writings for quite long.

    b) IIRC, Dropbox started as getdropbox.com, just later on,
       when money "was not an issue", they purchased the more 
       expensive one - dropbox.com. 
       
       same applies to uber.com, square (which started as 
       squareapp.com) and many others.

Best case I can think of is facebook, who started with "thefacebook.com", and later bought facebook.com. Also, didn't AirBNB start with airbedandbreakfast.com? (which now redirects to airbnb.com)

Yea, this article would have been applicable in 1998, but not so much today. Even domain names are becoming antiquated, with everything moving to apps and cloud. The most popular blogs I read are still hosted on blogspot and wordpress...Having a good domain won't save your business if the execution and other aspects are flawed.

This can help if you're looking:

http://www.dopename.com

New names coming soon

> How do you find them? One answer is the default way to solve problems you're bad at: find someone else who can think of names.

Imagine a website where startups could describe what they do and users could propose and vote on ideas for names. It's been on my list of potentially decent project ideas.

and regularly scraped by bots to squat domains? You can hold a lot of domains for two years when you can sell a few for 5k

True. I hate domain sharking.

Already done, see http://www.pickydomains.com/

Very cool! This makes sense to me. Specialization and trade.

Oh, wow, that's a throwback to the past! I remember when Dmitry Davydov first announced it, kinda surprised that it's still around :-)

Buying a credible domain like stripe.com usually requires funding. Should bootstrappers be stripepay.com?

The best way to think of names, in an environment where nearly every intelligible verbal particle is trademarked, copyrighted, or domain-squatted, is unquestionably Erlich-style:

https://youtu.be/hsr-QfgFRh8

I wonder, however, if one wanted to convey a sense of underdog or grass roots if it's better to choose a non dot-com domain?

For example, sometimes the .com domain just seems too corporate sounding -- but your audience is not. Isn't it more strategic to get a newer extension?

Pretty ironic that hours after posting this, Google announced it split up under a new umbrella company called Alphabet, and it doesn't own alphabet.com .

Although I guess Google is above the rules that startups have to play by. Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi.

I think there should a distinction made between consumer startups and b2b.

If you are a database or developer tools company, .io actually makes more sense. .io is the standard, and it has become de facto.

However, if your startup is a food rating service, or Uber for X, you gotta have the .com.

Is there a way to start a name consultancy?

I'm fairly good at coming up with names, and wouldn't mind offering my services, but I'm not sure how to secure my idea before selling it.

I would also be open to testing my skills for anyone looking for a company name.

You could do an Offer HN I'll help you come up with a name?

The other thing to do would be just to have a gentleman's agreement where they sign something (TBH I wouldn't worry with a legal contract initially, if you work with honest customers the gentleman's agreement is OK, and worst case if it was a big deal you could take to court and likely win)

So the agreement would be something like: I'll come up with a name for you, I won't make you pay upfront, but if I come up with one you like and you haven't already thought of it [make them list all the ones they are currently considering upfront], then you'll pay me $500. Reply to this email with your full name if you agree. And then just make sure you follow them on twitter and connect on linkedin or such so that they feel that you would notice if they screwed you over, but like I say I think most people are nice and worrying about getting screwed over is likely premature optimization :-)

> I'm fairly good at coming up with names ... I'm not sure how to secure my idea before selling it.

Whether you like it or not, domain squatting seems to be the most popular way to do that.

Try the contests over at http://www.namestation.com/contests

If Whois returns a private registration and the site doesn't provide contact information, try the Wayback Machine http://archive.org/web/

Why should Coke own "coke.com" when they could own ".coke" one day?

.com is dominant. Even domai.nr changed their name to domainr.com. Over 90% of users at https://instantdomainsearch.com/ buy .com names.

Much of the comments mention that you should buy the .com until your startup is well funded (stronger). And that exactly the whole point of this post is make it stronger since the beginning.

I couldn't disagree more with this article and am kinda surprised Paul wrote about this.

Domain names are transitioning into becoming useless. When you open any web browser or mobile phone and go to look for a company it does a search. The most relevant results come back at the top. This type of trend, as we abstract away from using TLDs, is only going to continue. Owning a .com isn't nearly as meaningful today as it was 5 years ago.

What I think will happen is ICANN will continue adding more, useless TLDs as quick cash grabs and the next 10 years you're going to see people stop referring to their domain name at all. I mean, why would you? You're Uber, you look for "Uber" in the app stores, you open your browser and type in "Uber". All of these take you exactly where you need to go.

> 100% of the top 20 YC companies by valuation have the .com of their name. 94% of the top 50 do. But only 66% of companies in the current batch have the .com of their name. Which suggests there are lessons ahead for most of the rest, one way or another.

Correlation is not necessarily causation; this statistic should be compared with general domain name availability with the time periods mentioned because an incredible amount are purchased every year making it impossible to even compare in this way.

Yeah. I heard this 13 years ago too. http://shirky.com/writings/domain_names.html

> Yeah. I heard this 13 years ago too. http://shirky.com/writings/domain_names.html

So because someone suggested it 13 years ago makes it not true today? Look at how the new TLDs are working out; if you want to find a company using a funny TLD you just search for their name and unless the .com is higher ranked the company comes right up to the top.

Look at it from a user's perspective; do you know anyone who actually types in a domain name anymore that isn't a technie? If a user wants to find a specific company they just simply use voice and ask their phone or open a browser and just type it in.

Typing in a TLD adds friction especially since ICANN added all of these stupid TLDs that no one is even used to. The lower the friction the better, right?

The absolute lowest friction is to have a .com domain. And yes, it's still true.

I'm not convinced; if you look at Google Trends there are many, many company names in the top 100 searches. Why are people only searching the company name instead of going directly to their website? Typically their website is the first several results depending on the size of the company.

Also, only anecdotal because I can't find any studies one way or another, but I can't find anyone in the younger generation who actually types in any domain names. I even had a frustrating experience telling someone who's used the internet all his life what .com even was as he had never typed it before. Plenty of people in my generation still type it though.

Also many of the older generation folks I've worked with who had their internet start with AOL don't seem to type in domain TLDs either.

So until I see some solid, current research regarding the behaviors of the different generations I'm not convinced a .com is lower friction; you type less when you just type the company's name and most browsers nowadays will give you the option to autocomplete directly to their website.

> do you know anyone who actually types in a domain name anymore that isn't a technie?

That's a problem. It means we rely more and more on search engines, thus centralising the web (and with it, the internet) more than it needs to be. Centralizing the network means centralizing the power. Not a good idea. It never was.

DNS is already centralized.

Yes, and that is a problem. But that's not nearly as bad as having Google and Bing have the same role. DNS goes through a highly decentralised network of name servers, many of which aren't at all controlled by the ICANN. Each country based top level domain has its own set of servers, and there name requests are generally cached on other servers still.

But when you type "company name" in a search engine, you give away your search to an ad supported private company in real time. Juicy profiling, no privacy. Much worse than using DNS.

Besides, when you click on a link from your favourite search engine, you're still using DNS. Now you have two single points of failure.

I don't see the problem with G and B in this role; at least they answer to the end user. Who does ICANN answer to? What is your alternative if you get crappy service from the .com operator? If what PG says is correct, you don't really have an alternative.

> at least they answer to the end user.

Yes they do. Just don't forget that the end user is the advertiser. We poor schmucks who type text in the search box are the product.

That's a different kind of centralized.

Everything going thru search engines, means you depend on someone who has no responsibility towards the people they have power over. That's bad; you have to waste time understanding their incentives and staying on their good side.

DNS suffers the same flaw.

Err, I've just read this article, and it seems its main thesis is, domain names are probably not going away. Because people will likely always need memorable, globally unique identifiers. I didn't see any talk about .com going away either.

Exactly! Referring to your domain name is something you do so rarely it's not even worth mentioning. Most of the time people get redirected to your website, it's via bitly or a number of other url shorteners.

It seems like we are going back to the AOL keyword days... not a good sign.

> It seems like we are going back to the AOL keyword days... not a good sign.

Not really comparable in my opinion. In AOL, if I remember correctly, you had to register or pay for your keyword much like a domain name. So all keywords were owned by a central authority, could only be used within their ecosystem and had the same type of squatter issues as domain names.

What's happening today are "keywords" being associated with specific websites when, and only when, the users are actively looking for and using that website. This isn't centralized (sure most people using Google but people forget Bing is actually really good and used by many!). You can't simply pay for the top spot anymore.

You can "simply pay for the top spot". This is why the results at the very top of the Google search are paid ad placements.

I was referring to search results not advertisements. You can pay one fee, like a domain TLD or AOL Keyword, and get that spot. With those advertisements you have to constantly put money in to stay at that spot.

Domain names are also a constant, on-going cost.

While there is an on-going cost (i.e. domain renewals), it is very small compared to the initial payment one might make to acquire a premiere domain.

Sadly my parents don't know that the top yellow box is an ad, they think it's the top search result. I expect most people are the same.

Does it really matter, though? If they find what they're looking for, what difference is it if the result was paid or organic?

In most cases the ad is not what they are looking for.

> You can't simply pay for the top spot anymore.

There's ton of money being made (sometimes even by honest businesses) on the opposite assumption. Instead of paying the gatekeeper to put you higher on the list you pay some third parties to game the sorting algorithm.

You're assuming most people search first; many users don't even understand the difference between entering a search term versus a URL in a browser address bar. Yet, non-techy people know ".com".

I dont have the data but I would argue such minority is very less and even if they are unable to find what they are looking for in first attempt (by using .com), they do check search engines result afterwards.

I think it is the opposite. Among most of the "non tech" people I know, they enter a name at a google search box rather than a URL. Even if they know the URL, they enter it at a search field!

Correct. I have seen this with my own eyes. Me: Go to Facebook. Them: Google, Search Box, Enter Facebook.com in search box, Click.

Actually many non-techy do this:

1) Open browser, 2) Defaults to whatever search engine that add-on they have switch them to, 3) Type facebook, or facebook.com, or whatever they are looking for, 4) Click first result. If fails, go back, look around, click other result.

It sounds (unsurprisingly, of course) like the perspective of an investor or other tech industry insider. Notice the phrases like "it signals weakness" and "suggests you're a marginal company." Those don't seem like phrases most people are ever going to think about a company, and especially not based only on their domain name.

I disagree.

My parents are typical web users. Fairly tech savvy, but not tech insiders. I recall telling them about bit.ly. It took a while to explain that it wasn't bitly.com, bit.ly.com, etc. They ended up just searching for it instead of typing in the domain name.

Think of the added friction this causes... and as we all know, every added interaction detracts from the conversion funnel. Taken in aggregate, many startups cannot afford the attrition of a shitty domain name.

Isn't that a slightly different point? You're talking about ability of a user to discover or find the site, not the user's perception of the strength of the business.

...but the point is that to some non-technical users a "new" TLD won't even look like a full URL.

That is beambot's point, and it's valid, but it's different than the point in this essay.

Don't typical web users these days always search instead of typing in the domain name?

They ended up just searching for it instead of typing in the domain name.

And they found it. That's how a large, large number of people find web sites these days, and it works fine.

In B2B weakness in the form of undercapitalization is important because companies don't want to make middle term or long term bets on a technology with uncertain prospects for support, maintenance and further development. Signaling "this product might be legacy in 18 months" is worth avoiding.

A rose by any other name still smells sweet, but thornbush isn't the way to market it.

Insiders usually have ungainly phrases for things that outsiders sense but cannot/do not put into words themselves.

The public are hugely influenced by branding, advertising, look and feel, and experiences. They might not put the feelings they have into words like insiders do, but those things absolutely exist and insiders to the retail, advertising, and similar industries have all sorts of jargon to analyze the behavior of the public.

I agree with you.

Name of the company and domain name has very little to do with company's success. There so many things you need to worry when company is small and getting domain name or renaming company is really very dangerous distraction.

I'm not saying domain name does not play some role but spending time on it is a very dangerous distraction.

So, does it show as weakness? Yes. Is that biggest weakness of your company in relationship to how hard to fix it? No - but if answer is Yes then you are already made it and all this discussion is moot.

An easy thing for a well funded start up to spend money on is their domain name. A good question to ask is when did the top 20 YC companies by valuation buy theirs. Did they pass over really talented devs just so they could drop $500k on a dot com?

Things are changing. Talk to 18-20 year olds about how they are using the internet. Throw out an address using one of ICANN's new extensions. Do they even recognize its a website? EV Certs don't even show URLs in some browsers. Do mobile users look for you on Google, or in the app/play/other store? Personally I'm uncomfortable with the positions ICANN has taken.I don't trust them to protect domain's owner rights. We need better alternatives.

Google's search results page is pretty much a DNS Server.

You completely ignored PG's argument about it signaling weakness. This is one of those perception versus reality things, where people's perceptions (those who are judging a startup) ARE the reality, whether those perceptions are theoretically refutable or not.

In other words, let's say you're right, and owning the .com domain name is becoming less meaningful (an argument that PG already addressed, by the way). That doesn't mean that .com domains are becoming significantly less meaningful to people's perceptions. And perceptions matter, when going after customers, funders, employees, business partners, etc.

I wouldn't say that the perception that having the .com domain name is important is an incorrect one. Maybe you would disagree and say it is an incorrect perception. But even if you think the perception is incorrect, the perception is still part of the reality that the startup lives in.

This classic "perception IS reality" pattern is something that a lot of people miss.

signaling weakness is an important factor for a fraction of companies for most others that is the very least of their worries.

PG talks from a perspective that does not apply to most companies in this world.

Again if you get a .com name that is great. But whether it's worth the effort of finding one it if you don't have it already is another discussion all together.

> But whether it's worth the effort of finding one it if you don't have it already is another discussion all together.

Whether or not you agree with pg, finding a decent .com is pretty cheap in terms of time and money when you have free domain name checking services that give you available .com variants of desired keywords. Even though I know this, I'm still always surprised when I see the 2-3 syllable .com domain names that I wanted, being available without auction or private seller inquiries.

Thats just not true. It's not some universal law you can apply. You have to take into considering the amount of time and what kind of name you have access to.

> You have to take into considering the amount of time and what kind of name you have access to.

I'm not sure I understand. Free name checking services do take into account what names are available to you and they give you variants of your desired keywords. Results are returned in seconds. It takes a few hours at most to go through a bunch of keywords.

But changing perception is in our hands. If everybody starts not giving a F for the .com, then people will start not caring about that... If we keep fighting for the .com we are just supporting that ugly business of buying nice domain names in order to sell them for a ridiculous price to people that actually want create something.

When you're trying to get your company off the ground, fighting the good fight for the betterment of other companies is not something your can afford.

re:Signaling weakness.

True, but to whom. Most people don't know the difference between getDropbox.com and Dropbox.com.

Investors, is I think the implication.

I agree here with Natch, compare point about signaling weakness with sending your CV from "fancy_kid_45@gmail.com" to "firstname.lastname@gmail.com" or even "firstname@lastname.com" what looks most professional? Can you imagine reading CV of a person with fancy kid mail?

> Can you imagine reading CV of a person with fancy kid mail?

Yes. In fact I did quite a bit of hiring at some of my previous companies and I never cared about email (why would I care about email? This isn't a signal, this is noise). Do people, at least in tech, really care about such things? At least in my deals I never found one. I'd imagine in stuffy jobs it might be something to look down upon but in tech? That seems silly considering how progressive our industry typically is.

If you want to hire someone detail oriented will you look inside his CV if he has "detail oriented" listed or you just see he has typos?

Wouldn't appearing weak by not shelling out potentially tens of thousands of dollars for a domain name be, well, accurate? I mean...these are startups, not established companies. I think showing weakness could be to the advantage of a startup, which PG seems to ignore.

How is showing weakness an advantage?

It can signal value, though you might end up chasing worse customers.

How does it signal value?

I think it can signal breaking the mold. "We are new, we are not constrained to use a .com domain, come and find cool stuff here"

It can signal a prioritization of values. Startups tend move fast and be flexible, and tend to have less customers so each one is more valuable. Established companies tend to move slowly and often provide worse customer service. By being honest about being a startup (or being an established company) expectations can be set between company and customer. Pretending to be established when in reality you are not seems disingenuous, and I think it's pretty easy to argue that being genuine is good/can be an advantage.

I don't really see how .com or not translates into being genuine or not.

Having been a founder for four years now, I have learned that the word "startup" usually scares potential customers. It is actually a good thing to seem more established than you are. However that doesn't mean you are disingenuous either. It is not black or white. You can look more established: .com domain, decent website, proper terms and privacy policy, no beta or "coming soon" wording on website, etc. However if someone asks directly how established you are, you are truthful.

What the potential customer wants to know is if they can trust you, and you won't be gone tomorrow. Therefore if you are truthful about the company's state, but seem like you are established then more people will look past the word "startup" since it will be obvious to them that you are serious and have some idea what you are doing.

In other words, you dont need to go around yelling at the top of your lungs that X is a startup. That strategy will most likely fail. But you certainly shouldn't deceive people either. There is a line.

I suspect that your parent is conjecturing that the fact of not having X.com will eventually stop being perceived as a sign of weakness.

I do not know to which extent I agree. I find it sad but likely that people may eventually stop paying attention to URLs altogether; the main counter-argument I would have would be phishing, because, no matter what, you'll still have to check that you are on the right website at some point. That said I do believe that if it may happen for the general public, it may not happen before a long time for more knowledgeable people (prospective funders, employees, partners, etc., as you mentioned).

I didn't ignore PG's argument at all. My point is how can there be any perceived weakness when the thing in which we're calling a weakness doesn't exist to most users?

When I, admittedly anecdotally, poll people I've met who were practically born after the Internet started, almost none of them even type in .com and a few didn't even know what that was. I'm convinced this sentiment is going to become more common especially with so many squatters on .com domains it's almost impossible to have a good company domain name anymore without spending stupid money to get it. Yet you can get the same name with a different TLD for cheap and you show up at the top of search results.

I'd love to see more search engines or maybe even a decentralized search infrastructure to help facilitate this but that's pretty difficult.

The preponderance of the evidence suggests (proves?) you're wrong.

Remember this is in the context of startup businesses who may not have much on the web. Your position works out okay if you are confident in google's "I'm feeling lucky" kind of search. For everybody else, having a solid .com name still reigns supreme.

> Domain names are transitioning into becoming useless

That's an astute observation...however, they are not useless YET. Perhaps in 5 years .com's will be obsolete and every browser will have powerful company lookup utilities that everyone can use. The issue is that startups don't have the luxury of losing that sort of time.

Well bad names which own their .com are far more worse. bvckup2.com? seriously? too bad for a great product. There are other examples out there it baffles me.

"Nearly all your attachment to it comes from it being attached to you".Interesting.Very interesting as this is truth in the real sense.

Are you all seriously arguing with Paul Graham about something in his realm of expertise that only someone with a vast experience in multiple startups can form an informed opinion of, or someone that has undertaken a serious research study thereof? If you are not one of those two, just smile, nod, and change your name. If pg suggests something, he thinks it's important, if he thinks it's important enough to write an article on, he's pretty sure he's right and it's important.

You might want to read up on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority

tsomctl, the other side of the coin is that we have a bunch of people arguing the color of the bicycle shed instead of listening to an expert on the issue.

But I one disagreeing with him is using logic or proof, they're throwing out a few counter examples to "prove" their intuition and disregarding someone with enough experience to have an actual informed intuition about the topic. Given the choice on an issue you are not that informed on will you trust your own intuition or one of the leading experts in the field?

If there had been logic, data, or some other proof besides a couple of counter examples, I may need to do more than appeal "argue from authority." They aren't, so I'm sticking with the authority.

I like how esoterically, the footnotes imply you may want to consider changing your nationality or religion, as well.

Would have loved to see any form of actual experience to back up the odd claim he makes (which, coincidentally, stinks of low confidence, to me at least). Any surveys out there or even anecdotal evidence re: a consumer's perception of your company as "weak" sans-.com??

> 100% of the top 20 YC companies by valuation have the .com of their name. 94% of the top 50 do. But only 66% of companies in the current batch have the .com of their name. Which suggests there are lessons ahead for most of the rest, one way or another.

I wonder how much of that is due to the fact that landscape has changed in past 8 years and top 20 YC companies are all at least a few years (5-ish?) old. I appreciate the rest of the sentiment of the post, but I don't think the numbers he chose to share clearly support the assertions. Correlation isn't causation.

yes, didn't dropbox used to be trydropbox.com? And, tho non-YC, delicious.com was del.icio.us (or something). Successful companies can buy their domain.

But I agree with pg; a startup by any other name would succeed as sweet, so why not choose one you can get.

del.icio.us is an awesome domain. I'd be inclined to believe someone came up with the domain before the name.

I couldn't always remember where the dots went. Not a great property for a domain name.

Which is why I had it on the bookmarks bar. A single bookmark to all of my bookmarks :-). I haven't used them in a long time, what are they up to these days?

I'm thinking that joshu did, IIRC

Dropbox was getdropbox.com and airbnb was airbedandbreakfast.com

I made the same mental mistake as you just did and which I now bet PG thought about and carefully dismissed. Correlation isn't causation, but the fact is the top 20 companies either started with or changed their name. Which is his thesis.

What also bugs me is that there are probably things that:

(1) successful companies do often,

(2) marginal companies do less often, and

(3) aren't actually in any way instrumental to success.

It could just be that there's a mindset among successful founders that produces a particular vector of decisions, not all of which are all that important.

Graham would probably respond: whether every component of that vector is important or not, investors are scraping for every bit of evidence they can find, and your name might be a "tell" that other components of your decision vector are hinky.

And that might be true enough, but cargo culting every decision Airbnb makes in order to slip through an investor filter is no way to live either.

You forgot (4) require significant effort. Yes, those things bug me as well. As he points out though, naming is not particularly difficult, expensive, or time consuming when done right.

These days an alternative is to just not have a (public) domain at all.

This is why "Zigurd" is a very advantageous name.

I remember hearing a couple stories about Octopop.

And if you're Elon Musk you get x.com.

Gross. What if I don't want to signal strength? What if I don't want every aspect of my business to be a dick wagging contest?

steam.com is NOT for sale.

If you don't have .com, it looks lame, with few exceptions. Also domains that are impossible to spell correctly if you just hear the name.

majority of people just enter the name in their address bar and click the search result. domain name is not as important as it was.

this is all kind of secondary

At the time of my comment, there are dozens of comments disagreeing with Paul and only 2 agreeing.

And this goes to show you - most people will not accept an advice from someone who knows better. If a conclusion must be reached, it must be reached under your own power, and at your own speed. This just can't be helped, it seems. Or can it?

That is one possible conclusion.

Another possible conclusion, however, is that the world has changed in the years since last time Paul was actually doing this, and people with current experience are pointing out that his advice in this case is actually out of date.

Paul is drawing his conclusion from seeing through hundreds of startups and still being involved in YC to this day. His opponents draw their conclusion mostly from seeing through zero startups, that is being in the middle of their first. Then a much smaller number of people have between 1 and 3. This vast discrepancy in experience is strike one.

Strike two is that pretty much everyone has an unhealthy attachments both to their own creations and to their own "identity". It gets even worse when the two are combined. Even Paul himself, one of few wise men of our times, gets very defensive when his creations are under fire. It's just how people are. Yet in this case Paul is a more objective observer, he doesn't have a stake in the game of naming your company.

The insidious part of strike two is that it's nearly impossible to recognize while you're in the grip of it. It's like being drunk - most people who are severely drunk think they are "ok to drive". They aren't.

Accepting advice takes one of the two: either blind deference to authority, or wisdom to recognize the limits of your own understanding and selective deference to those who could know better. Not perfect, mind you, just better. Alas, wisdom is hard to come by, and blind deference has significant downsides. And so it goes. Most useful advice goes unheeded.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com