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Comment by staunch | Hacker News Reader

I think things have changed a lot since then (it has been half a decade), but it's still mostly right.

Better to be Heroku.com than Cloudhosting.com then and now. But I wouldn't want to be launching Del.icio.us or Flickr.com in 2011.

These days I think you're far better off with simple/short/spellable domains like: Fab.com, Batch.com, Groupon.com, Mint.com, Dropbox.com, Airtime.com, Oink.com.

For consumer-facing web companies these strike the right balance of credibility and hipness. You won't find domains like these unregistered. You'll have to buy them off someone.

For business-to-business companies domains are somewhat less important, names like: Mixpanel.com, KISSmetrics.com, Mixrank.com, Olark.com, Heroku.com will do the job perfectly fine.

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Fab.com, Batch.com, Groupon.com, Mint.com, Dropbox.com, Airtime.com, Oink.com

With the possible exception of groupon and dropbox, all of those names would very expensive to acquire. The problem is that a startup typically has to pick a name before they have $50000+ to drop on a domain.

Actually Dropbox.com is quite a lucrative property of its own: http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/13/dropbox-acquires-the-domain... и http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=880522

I believe Dropbox and Groupon were both quite expensive (but acquired after significant traction/funding).

Mint.com on the other hand was purchased with ~$180k in Series A stock. The domain owner ended up making $1+ million when the company was acquired. The founder (Aaron Patzer) seems to think it was one of the very best decisions he made.

The paradox of choosing a domain is that you buy it when your company is small but you live with it when your company is big.

It's a lot like choosing real-estate for a restaurant. You can launch your restaurant in a bad location, build it up, and then move. Or you can find a great location and build it there. A great location doesn't mean you will be successful (it's just a big advantage), and a bad location doesn't mean you will fail (it's just a big disadvantage).

> The paradox of choosing a domain is that you buy it when your company is small but you live with it when your company is big.

thefacebook.com didn't, to pick one example.

Nor did getdropbox.com, or mymint.com

It's a fair point. You can move domains. Mint isn't an example of that though. Patzer bought mymint.com but didn't launch with it. He got mint.com before any press/traction.

Also playfoursquare.com

I am always surprised by the number of startups who do get a short domain name: Path, Yelp, Stripe, Color (infamously so), Fab, etc., often times right from the start. (NB: Dropbox got dropbox.com pretty late)

Sure if you have a couple of millions in the bank, that helps but I'm more thrifty and always feel that it would probably not change much to find a different name with an available (or cheaper) domain.

You'd be shocked with how much we paid for batch.com.

We'll likely write up a blog post in the near future disclosing this along with some additional information.

I love guessing. I'll guess $5k - $12k.

Dropbox lived at getdropbox.com for most of its early history. They didn't announce their Series A round until they could acquire dropbox.com from a domain squatter. [1] I bet it wasn't cheap.

[1] http://gigaom.com/2009/11/24/dropbox-raises-7-25m-crosses-3m...

Yep! The internet's user base has expanded so much, especially in the last decade, that formal names are no longer marketable for a lot of different purposes. They will appear boring and dull. Increasingly, the trend on the internet is to entice potential users with relatively fast paced, easily understood branding. Anything other than a short name will be lost from memory amidst a sea of shirter, more poignant and imaginative names (which often ride on the value of their recognition than pragmatism).

>> These days I think you're far better off with simple/short/spellable domains like: Fab.com, Batch.com, Groupon.com, Mint.com, Dropbox.com, Airtime.com, Oink.com.

Without a doubt. Don't leave out Orange.com and Hellow.com.

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