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Comment by venning | Hacker News Reader

Off-topic, but how expensive are five-letter, English word .com domains right now? I don't see new companies with domains that are small-ish words very often.

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For those interested in researching past domain sales, namebio.com is a great starting place. It has a searchable DB of public domain sales which can be filtered by extension, length, etc.

Eg. five-letter .com search: https://namebio.com/?s==ITO4gTM5ITM

Also the weekly domain sales report by Ron Jackson is another good place to get a sense of current sales: http://dnjournal.com/domainsales.htm (I believe these are included in namebio's DB, but regardless Ron adds some color commentary to the numbers)

For five-letter .com domain names sold within the last 12 months, here are some public sale prices: place.com $550,000; asset.com $406,000; sandy.com $46,100; hours.com $31,000; sleek.com $30,000; patty.com $21,000; drove.com $18,500; these.com $14,100; vents.com $5,500; swore.com $5,450

Wow, yeah that domain must have cost a ton of money. Wouldn't that be worth at least 5 figures, maybe even 6? Is that something that YC would encourage them to do, and maybe help fund the domain purchase?

Definitely something YC encourages (.com domains), but definitely NOT something they would encourage you spend YC money on. They would tell you to pick another domain, like getsolve.com or something.

You're right, the domain wasn't cheap, but we had it prior to YC. We bought Solve.com at my last company (n/k/a StudentBrands.com) for a math-related product we were going to build, but we decided to focus elsewhere and didn't use the domain. Anyway, we were able to work out a way to use it in a way that worked out for everyone.

I kind of expected something like that, based on the generic-ness of the domain. Hopefully you can leverage that generic-ness into solving other problems under the same name.

Nice service, lots of luck.

For a service like this. Domains mean nothing. If they spent more than the price of a .com domain it's a mistake.

For consumer facing product, they find you one of two ways.

1. Social (Paid ads) 2. Google search (Paid ads)

I am not talking about viral products or brands, I am talking about the average service (like this one).

I saw many companies do this mistake, some paid 10K some paid 2m<, all made a mistake IMHO.

Think also about customers who have seen already seen your ad or read about the company somewhere, but did not have immediate need for the service back then. Good and simple domain name might help the end up to the web page right away. If they need to Google, they are exposed to all your competitors.

This is certainly our hope. Thanks!

From what I've seen (and again, I might be very bitter about consumer facing products) the behavior is that even if they think they know your name they will still end up on Google. At which point whether you are solve.com or getsolve.com it matters very very little.

Like it or not, Google is the entry point and how consumers will find your service.

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