Ask YC: Feedback for our new startup

Founders really need to stop using misspellings for the name of their companies.

Number 1, people are going to have a harder times finding your site. This is somewhat mitigated by Google's technology around suggesting seatch terms, but not totally.

Number 2, you will have to spend five minutes explaining your name to every potential investor, customer, and even your friends, just so they know what your proper name is. That doesn't leave any time for what you should be delivering - your elevator pitch.

Number 3, it suggests you aren't very creative. Saying that all the good domain names are taken just isn't true. I've bought a number of good domain names in the past couple of years, none of which have been misspellings.

Use real words people.

We have bought some other domains that we've mapped to the site, but of all of the ones we bought, bidboxr.com seems to be the most popular by informal surveys. others that map to the site are: powrads.com, compelature.com, bidboxr.net, bidboxr.org

Can't you just come up with some two word combination? None of these names stick with me, and none strike me as easy to remember, and moreover, none give me an idea of what your company does.

I used to get paid to think up these names. Here's an exercise you can do. Think up words that apply to your company, and write them down. For example: money, profit, ads, auctions, etc. And also, you don't need to just stick with words that physically describe your company (though I think these are best). You can also look for words that describe your value proposition, and why you are better than your competitors.

Then, go over the list and see if you like any of the combinations. Also, just start free associating with words on the list and words off the list.

Another thing you can do is come up with imagery that you think might be good for an ad campaign or in the design of your site. With this sort of approach, you end up with names like monster.com.

Don't be afraid to use the dictionary, thesaurus, and to do hundreds of searches on Godaddy.com or similar.

Also, don't be afraid to seek out a friend who is good with words, or who tends to say funny or memorable things. I've long since ceased to work in creative at an ad agency, but my friends and colleagues ask me to come up with names for them these days.

And one final thought - it's not that important what your name is, as long as it's not confusing (which misspellings all are).

Domains are expensive... it is a shame. But I do agree that sometimes misspellings are hard. Kinda reminds me of when FaceBook was TheFaceBook.com... boy that was annoying.

Unfortunately there are very few real words or even real word combinations that are not registered.

Clever misspellings have been a solution to that problem.

What do you propose as an alternate solution?

Here are some domain names me or my associates have purchased recently. There are good ones left:

trailbehind.com (also thetrailbehind.com)

greathive.com (also thegreathive.com)

loudmountain.com

darnnews.com

agent1099.com

photosensate.com

surelogic.com

These are all fine domain names made of real words.

The name of a domain is as subjective as the proverbial eye of the beholder, eventually all that counts is whether or not you can make it succeed in the market.

That's not a qualitative assessment of your 'good' domains, just an observation.

Agreed, and the fact of the matter is, any reasonable name will succeed, if backed by a great company.

I think a good name won't help you much, but a bad name can hurt you in tangible ways.

Bigtimebids.com is available.

>> Unfortunately there are very few real words or even real word combinations that are not registered.

Problem solved... I'll plug my own site for finding good, available domain names: http://Hotnamelist.com

Or, go out and BUY a good one: http://sedo.com or http://Afternic.com

Cheers for this link mate, having a look now

Ive been struggling looking for a new projects domain for days now, snapnames, freshdrop, domainpigeon (from here), so hopefully you might have some suggestions!!

Sorry but problem not solved.

It's nice that your site lists CowardlyAct.com, MountyBounty.com and SecuritySituation.com as available - but that's completely useless to me who's looking for a name that somehow makes sense in conjunction with my business model.

Furthermore a good name is supposed to be short and distinctive. Most names listed on your and similar services meet neither criteria. They consist of more or less randomly combined dictionary words which leads to generic 10+ letter domains like, well, SecuritySituation.

Who told you that names are supposed to be short and distinctive? Security Situation is a pretty damn good name if you're starting a security company. Impressing the web 2.0 fanboys with misspellings makes your company look illiterate to everyone else. If you're simply going after those fanboys (or girls) as you target audience then that is fine but considering how many people are web 2.0ers and how many regular people there are, when starting a company I'm probably going to go after the far bigger market.

Who told you that names are supposed to be short and distinctive?

My common sense and probably every marketing book in existance. Think about the internet brand names that you can recall from the top of your head. How many of them are longer than 8 letters?

Security Situation is a pretty damn good name if you're starting a security company.

Most certainly not. It's generic and unsuggestive. That kind of name may work for an information page ("Security situation in your neighbourhood") but not for most businesses.

>> Unfortunately there are very few real words or even real word combinations that are not registered.

I thought this too, but did a quick back of the envelope calculation:

The OED had 616,500 English words in the 1989 edition.

In 2003 there were ~24,000,000 dot coms registered.

Let's assume 2% of English words are usable in a 2 word domain name combination. That means there are ~ 12,000 words that you can combine to form a new domain. Which means there are ~ 144,000,000 possible 2 word dot coms.

So the majority of real world combinations are not registered if you only consider 2 word combos.

The market shows combos can be pretty random: surveymonkey, plentyoffish, craigslist, etc.

Markov chains FTW! http://codeismightier.com/2008/10/generating-domain-names/ - how-to http://suggestly.com - ajaxy implementation of the above (which is down right now)

So you say people have "harder times finding your site" being "mitigated by Google" and "you will have to spend five minutes explaining your name". So let's get in the wayback machine and set it for '93. Show me a dictionary with google in it or find me a member of the public who can guess it will have something to do with search.

Google was an accident, if you know your internet history.

The founders intended the word Googol: http://209.85.173.132/search?q=cache:p7kcdIwV8J0J:daily.stan...

So, if I get it right you've crossed 'adwords/adsense' with 'ebay' ? Interesting!

I'm quite curious how high the effective CPM is of your usage of screen real estate vs other advertising networks. Since the items are 'relevant' it could be quite high, but initially you might be left with more inventory than you can sell.

Shipping seems to be USA only, you may want to limit your 'ads' to the region that the seller is willing to ship to.

We are just getting ready to launch so I'm not sure what the "effective CPM" will be vs other ad networks but I hope it will be high:) That's a good point about shipping. thanx

you're welcome. Another idea, not sure if it is feasible: Get your users to place an ad tag on their own pages with their own items that they have for sale. That would build you a ton of backlinks in no time at all. And possibly they'll leave the tag up even when they have no items for sale.

That's actually a great idea. We're working on a way to have users request a certain category of ads on their ads that they post on their site, but having them post their own products is a great idea.

Right that would go down like hot cakes with the Etsy crowd.

One thing I noticed that I think is really cool is that the first bid starts the auction clock. Not sure if the other "big boys" do that, because I don't use them, but great idea nonetheless.

Something else I noticed though is that in the satisfaction guarantee, you mention that you, Bidboxr, will refund the purchase price if it's not what they expected. I see that lasting about two weeks before you run out of money. If you really want to set yourselves apart with a satisfaction guarantee, you may want to look at some sort of escrow service instead.

Just my two cents.

Agreed. This looks like it has the potential to be seriously gamed.

If you read the satisfaction guarantee you'll see it says "If you see the Satisfaction Guarantee link on an item". We control which items have the satisfaction guarantee - so we will reserve the satisfaction guarantee for sellers that have earned a good reputation with us.

That's clever. eBay never tried this? (I've never bought anything there).

Yea, I'm a co-founder for the site. It's an "auction ads" site that is self-contained (doesn't use ebay auctions or other auction data). We've got multiple sizes for ads (like adsense) and we're using a highly-cached architecture to serve up the auction ads (typical for ad-serving sites). We use linux servers, memcache for avoiding DB calls, apache, php, mysql, ... The normal stuff. :) We also crawl websites on demand for finding context-sensitive auctions to serve-up similar to adwords. Most of the crawling and text analysis stuff is done in perl.

This is a great idea, and has the potential to take off very quickly. One thing you might want to do is seed your site with a bunch of merchandise. Find an interested party with some cheap stuff to unload (like woot.com) and offer to help them move inventory.

You need to get scale first, and you need lots of sources before you'll get lots of products. At then end of the day you are selling affiliate revenue to website owners, so I would focus your message on that, and attempt to stuff the product pipeline with some choice partnerships, until you get enough affiliate sites to drive product.

I wouldn't...it would make them think: why should I split affiliate revenue with these guys?

I'm glad you like it. Thank you for the idea! We already have a few site using our banners but its going to be a challenge getting products, affiliates and bidders :)

your math is wrong:

"We charge the seller a final sale fee of $3.12 which makes $1.56 available to the "active advertiser pool". If 5 people bid on the item from your site and 3 people bid from a different site. You earn 62.5% of the $3.12."

So there is only 1.56 available, but I earn $1.95?

actually it doesn't seem like anyone proofread the actual site, since there are a ton of other errors all over the place

"By signing up for a fee account"

I'm sure there are more errors. I've been working on finding them - but you are right I am the writer, coder and proof reader - and I'm not great at writing - won't mention my dyslexia :)

I'll up date that! I guess I need to practice math. Thanks for catching that...

Why wouldn't I just feature eBay auctions on my apps and get paid that way? I don't remember if it was directly from eBay, or from some other startup, but there was a way to copy & paste an iframe to your page that would target auctions based on keywords that you give, and you could get a percentage of sales.

great idea, but I didn't get it the second I got to the site. Why say "Auctions Just Got a Lot More Exciting!"? Why not say "An entire auction in an ad box"! or something like that?

2nd, if you want people to put the boxes on their page, i'd suggest investing in design. Of both your site and the boxes. You have to get peoples trust, and the poor design could sink you.

Thanks for the input. Great idea about "An entire auction in an ad box" - I like it. And the banners are being re-designed by professionals they should be done very soon :)

So many broken images from your badcheese.dyndns.org it's hard for me to move around.

it doesn't seem like you guys know that eBay has an affiliate program that pretty much does what you are doing

You're right I didn't know eBay had interactive ad banners that you can place bids from... Could you point me to the link - thanks.

not interactive, but bidding is only a click away.

The interactive part isn't really a plus. How does a person know that the interactive banner is yours, and not some scammer phishing for information?

That's a valid point but I don't agree that the interactive part isn't a plus. I agree and realize that some people will be afraid to use our banners because of phishing - but some won't... I hope :)