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Comment by joshstrange | Hacker News Reader

Honestly I think domain names should be the least of your worries when building something. You can always add a "get" prefix or "app" suffix (or a bunch of other options). If you are sold on a company name then by all means, grab the domain but don't confuse "buying a domain" with "making actual progress".

When I was younger I used to snap up domain names for every little idea I had. I executed on less than 1% of those ideas and ended up letting the domain expire 1-2 years later when I could finally admit to myself I was never going to pursue it. Literally hundreds of dollars flushed down the toilet all to get a temporary rush.

I know that I have issues with thinking "spending money" === "making progress" (be it on home improvement projects or web apps) and I know I'm not alone. If all you need is a domain to launch your product then go ahead and start looking, otherwise it's just a dopamine distraction.

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re: “When I was younger I used to snap up domain names for every little idea I had.”:

I am 71 years old and I am still do this. Good for you stopping!

Concerning the article: a clever idea but I think it is better manually thinking of words that match your idea and searching for similar free domain names - that doesn’t take much time.

Same, pretty much. Also, proofread the first sentence of your profile at https://leanpub.com/u/markwatson, which needs an “is” after “Mark Watson”.

Thanks!

I pretty much stopped obsessing over domain names after seeing the success of "google". Ultimately it is the product/service/business that matters. Sure, we all try to get a domain name that we want/like but no need obsessing over it. It sucks that most of us didn't know what to do in 1994 when lot of dictionary words were available. But it is what it is.

What's wrong with Google? I'm sure the origin (googolplex) is lost on most people, but it seems like a decent brand name to me. On top of which, consider if Yahoo! had won the search market, i don't think their brand would've become a universal verb.

Granted, I don't believe it was an explicit choice to have a "verbale" brand-name.

But you (and many others in this thread) are right that names often don't matter that much. A better product will normally win regardless of the name, and once it does it's name will become "normalized". Duckduckgo might be such an example.. terrible name (IMO), yet respected by many as a Google-alternative.

Your product likely won't fail because of a bad name, but it doesn't hurt to have a good one.

The OP didn’t say anything was wrong with Google and you repeated exactly what they were getting at.

I argued Google is a good name (IMO, subjectively) in the first part, while I understood OP as saying it's a bad one and that the company succeeded in spite of it (which I indeed agreed with in the second part). I've also already acknowledged said agreement/reiteration in my comment.

FYI, googolplex is derived from googol.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googolplex#History

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googol#Etymology

You're saying all this with the benefit of hindsight. Google is a gibberish name, and upon first hearing it, sounds a bit childish, like baby-speak (goo goo ga ga) or silly (similar to "giggle"). If a company with a name like that can become one of the most valuable companies in the world, it proves the name doesn't matter that much.

Google is a great name -- easily the best name among the top 5 tech companies. It's unique, short, can be "verbed" and is easy to memorize and pronounce for English speakers and many non English speakers alike.

I am making an Open Source CMS optimized for the cloud, in .NET. I got the domain cloudy.net. Needless to say I'm pretty stoked!

See also: "Change Your Name" - http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html

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

That was wrong in 2015 and it is wrong now.

What is seen as validation to users in Europe is different to North America is different to Asia. You can run a whole business in a group chat back then, and North America is just catching on to that, barely moving off of the concept of a .com presence and being okay that other TLD's are good enough too. When you don't even need a website.

Do the thing that makes revenue.

At this point its simple to me: if you are relying on an audience that instinctively types .com or if you think you need a .com for a search result or ad campaign, that's what you're doing wrong. Like, are you intentionally selling to pensioners? Is that the audience you want? People that had the same 30 years as you did to figure out to use a computer but made 30 years of excuses instead?

it doesn't change the fact that .com is and will forever be the de facto TLD

even if you succeed with appthatslaps.millennial, you're still going to redirect appthatslaps.com to it

its more like an optional tld that wont do anything for your engagement, actual revenue, or air of legitimacy

it will help all of those, by the people who couldn't remember your novelty tld autonomically trying .com

The default for people who couldn't remember seems to have become typing it into google. It helps that most browsers support omnibox type search

people reach your site by clicking through on social media and chatting apps - and referencing those places again if they cant remember

unless you specifically have targeted and proven that an audience is going to bring value to you, and they use .com and search engines to find you, then there is no reason to cater to these luddite and elderly people. Its a deprecated assumption only relevant to deprecated people.

Maybe, but I'm already seen enough 15-25-35 y.o. people who doesn't understand the concept of a domain name nor of a website. There is a significant overlap between them and people who primarily or only uses mobile devices to access Internet or to use any applications.

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

Spending money on trivialities is not how you project strength. If your business is so fragile it rests on the reputation of its TLD, you are already weak.

Agree 100% about domain names. The only exceptions could be for a personal blog perhaps or a brand.

Something brandable is worth holding on to IMO, especially if it's distinctive enough to trademark which likely means there isn't a lot of search competition either.

One fun paranoid thought I ponder over when getting a domain: What if someone with a lot of money and a distaste for what I write decides to buy the .com version of my site and post ugly photos of me to it? For me, I’d rather obviate that and just find an adequate .com.

Having the actual .com domain for your business signalise quality and authenticity, difficult to imagine Amazon having getamazon.com.

That being said, I also spend many (good hours) dreaming away while buying all sorts of domain names for my fictitious startups. I found that when using the startup niche as suffix or prefix, the domain is sometimes available. Had plenty of luck buying "git-what-ever".com domains, like git18n.com (though I am not sure how clever that naming really is).

Facebook used to be thefacebook.com. It only changed after they were already successful.

But Facebook was actually called theFacebook back then, so not sure if this is a valid comparison.

Step 1: Obtain gethotdogs.com

Step 2: Make billions.

Step 3: Buy hotdogs.com with your massive amounts of VC funds^W^Wcash.

This is what Facebook (thefacebook.com), Dropbox (getdropbox.com), etc did.

Counterpoint 1: Steam could not buy steam.com.

Counterpoint 2: Domain scalpers will demand ridiculous prices if they believe that you are affiliated with a similar-sounding domain or company.

Steam hasn't been really slowed down by not having steam.com however - even Valve itself doesn't have valve.com

Ever since URL bars defaulted to a web search instead of just adding www.com to the word the value of a one word dot com has dropped.

Crazy that the owners of steam.com and valve.com haven't sold. It's pretty obvious who they should sell to, they just need to agree on a price.

Valve isn't buying steam.com because they don't want to, not because they can't.

> Domain scalpers will demand ridiculous prices if they believe that you are affiliated with a similar-sounding domain or company

Anyone sitting on steam.com right now, thinking that Valve is more likely to buy it tomorrow than they are today is delusional. Domain names and TLDs are becoming less relevant day by day and especially with Valve/Steam's computer savvy, gamer userbase, I don't think they really need steam.com. It could be helpful but if they've already decided they don't want it today then they probably won't change their minds tomorrow.

The steam URL is kind of whimsical. I quite enjoyed when Stardock created their competing service in the same vein:

Valve : Steam : steampowered.com

Stardock : Impulse : impulsedriven.com

Steam has steampowered.com and steamcommunity.com

This only works if you are trying to go hyperscale. Most side projects do not qualify.

Do only us old farts remember the canonical example of having to buy your .com after you've made it very valuable? [0]

[0] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/compaq-buys-...

I remember altavista.digital.com from back when people thought subdomains were really going to matter - but eventually they went away and Google took over.

Ha! The current owners still have altavista.digital.com - it has some history thing.

steampowered.com

I have been doing the same thing for years, and just last week I finally executed a personal project I had been thinking about for months, and I just used the free subdomain that came with the hosting provider I used. Also, https://freedns.afraid.org/ is a great source for interesting names

The problem with freedns is that the vast majority of them being to users. I had dead.sexypenguins.com for several years, and was using it as a vhost for IRC, for email, and as a dyndns name. Then one day it stopped working. I considered buying it myself, but it had already been bought up by the time I noticed. It's still not available now; someone owns it and is not using it for web hosting. The same thing happened to me with various other hosts available on freedns. If the domain you pick at freedns isn't owned by freedns, don't expect it to stay around.

Everything you say is generally reasonable (though business and domain names can very much matter) but

> Literally hundreds of dollars flushed down the toilet all to get a temporary rush.

Is that really so bad? We pay hundreds of dollars for temporary rushes all the time.

Isn't "flushing money down the toilet for a dopamine rush" the definition of a hobby?

If it isn't, it should be.

>> You can always add a "get" prefix or "app" suffix (or a bunch of other options). If you are sold on a company name then by all means, grab the domain.

I totally agree, you can always "upgrade" later to a better, shorter, or more appropriate domain later. The TLD doesn't matter, either. The only potential exception to this would be if you're building something "local", whereas you'd want to get the ccTLD domain if you're targeting users in one particular country.

That assumes such a domain is available. There's an entire cottage industry around snapping up short or interesting domains and renting them to customers. https://venture.com/ it looks like their entire business model involves squatting on domains and renting to interested people.

Wordle is a pretty good example of how much success you can have with an unremarkable and unmemorable domain name.

Wordle is a great name - it's short, only two syllables and relates directly to the product.

A better example of a bad name might be Ycombinator. It's not immediately obvious what it means, and if you say it aloud it sounds like a question. Doesn't seem to matter much if you're successful enough though.

Wordle is a great name. But strictly speaking, at no point there was `wordle.com` or anything similar. Wordle always lived as a humble page on a larger domain. Which I believe was the point of the original comment: That if your product (name) is good, domain is secondary. The vast majority of users can just google at this point (which might not have been true 20 years ago).

For context, the original URL was http://www.powerlanguage.co.uk/wordle

Now it's https://www.nytimes.com/games/wordle/index.html

It's never been wordle.com (or even at any TLD), and despite that:

> Over 300,000 people played Wordle on January 2, 2022, up from 90 players on November 1, 2021, a figure that rose to over 2 million a week later. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordle#Rise_in_popularity

Agree.

I have a couple of fairly high value domains I've kept I'm interested in selling, but there isn't a great market I've found for this instead of letting them go?

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