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Comment by beaconstudios | Hacker News Reader

on a somewhat tangential note, how on earth did they secure that domain? Surely buying it would cost a fairly large fraction of that $15M investment if they were to have done it at market rates.

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In March 2010 it was spam,

https://web.archive.org/web/20100317234443/http://www.pilot....

In May 2013 it was a placeholder for "curated collection for the style conscious gentleman",

https://web.archive.org/web/20130522175805/http://www.pilot....

Then July 2017 it was for bookkeeping,

https://web.archive.org/web/20170719213539/https://pilot.com...

I guess they managed to pick it up for a reasonable price.

Pilot CEO here. Short answer is "A domain broker, some good timing, and a fair bit of money".

Definitely not "a large fraction," but an amount that made us think hard about it first.

Do you guys also do payroll bookkeeping and processing? What about customers who want project/job cost accounting for payroll and other expenses?

A question I'll tack on...for payroll do you guys automatically pay and file taxes for unemployment, medicare etc?

These are good points. I've worked in this space and it's a huge time sink. And you can't afford to get it wrong because you're dealing with people's livelihood.

I'm currently working on a time attendance solution with an emphasis on usability for non technical users. You'd be amazed at how much paper / friction still exists in this domain.

Funny I was working on the same thing (time/attendance solution). Square has timekeeping using mobile app...punch in your ID, clock in. It had more features than I needed...I also have volunteers so they don't get paid but need to keep track of their time. I don't think it was the best solution for me.

I ended up just having a sign in sheet....It works.

We'll do the bookkeeping to track payroll — to actually process the payroll itself, we recommend something like Gusto.

(For project/job costing, we can do it, but it's definitely a premium feature which we don't support by default.)

thanks for the insight - I'm trying to acquire a domain for my startup at the moment and the pain is real.

My brief advice is: it's easier to work backwards.

Said another way, rather than falling in love with one domain and working hard to get it, try to come up with a shortlist of ~10 domains that are acceptable where they aren't obviously in use, and then work that list until you get something that's acceptable for you.

(Also, depending on your budget, also happy to connect you with the domain broker we used.)

Yeah that's the angle I'm trying to work - I'm bootstrapping so I have to try to be creative with a small domain budget. Given the product name I've gone through a fair number of domain variants. A domain broker might work if I had the budget to drop $10k+ on a domain as one I've been eyeing up is currently owned by the infamously-hard-to-contact twitter. I think I have a viable option on sedo though so I'm going to see if I can snag that :)

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