The Domain Name Game
Monday, February 6th, 2006 by Mike Rundle
For a new company, a good domain name is like an office on Madison Ave. (or the similar San Francisco equivalent!) and if you’re starting your company now or soon, you basically have four choices:
- Find a domain that nobody has registered, buy it, brand it, rock it out.
This is what we did for Business Logs. Basically when we were thinking about the name of our new company a few years ago, we put together a list of 25 open URLs (made from a concatenation of normal English words) that were available, and then out of those we chose businesslogs.com as the URL and company name. We started with little money, so purchasing a high quality domain was out of reach — we had to build a high quality site/brand from scratch without a really rememberable name. Companies that fall under this category include Campaign Monitor, CrazyEgg, Blinklist, Bloglines, Tailrank, and many others.
- Number + word = crazy delicious!
Not many people are doing this anymore because it’s slightly played out, but there are a ton of XXword.com domain names available if you’re still interested. You’ve got 411metro, 60 Spots, 43places, 37signals, 23hq, 9rules, and a partridge in a pear tree!
- Buy a “web 2.0″ name, brand it, tell people how to spell it.
The problem with the zany domain names that people are purchasing nowadays is that when you tell somebody — either in person or over the phone — what your domain name is, you’ll probably have to spell it after you do so because the word is not a normal word or there are multiple periods in the domain. Companies that fall under this category include Ma.gnolia, Del.icio.us (after some dough influx they jumped into the next category), Flickr, Edgeio, Reddit, Chuquet, Megite, Simpy, and many others.
- Take angel or VC money, drop some major cash on a prime domain name, brand it.
One-word domain names, using words that everybody can say and spell, are basically all gone. If you want your company to have that nice office on Madison Ave., you’re going to have to pay through the nose, and most likely that won’t come until after you’ve taken some funding. Ning was originally called 24hourlaundry, Flock used to be Round Two, Facebook paid mid-six figures to switch to “facebook.com” from their old “thefacebook.com”, my friend Tony Conrad’s company ponied up dough for Sphere, and then Del.icio.us stumbled upon the sans-period version of their domain after they got cash as well.
I personally like the two-word contractions, just because they’re easy to say, people can spell them (unless you pick fake words), and a two-word company gives you one extra word for branding purposes. Of course my view is probably a bit slanted because business.com and logs.com wouldn’t sell ;)
Reader Comments
13 Responses to “The Domain Name Game”
I actually chose the name Chuquet for a genuine reason - it’s named after the 16th century French mathmatician Nicolas Chuquet who, amongst other things, came up with the earliest naming system for very large numbers - million, billion, trillion etc.
But yes, you’re right - it’s not easy to spell over the phone. And everyone pronounces it ‘chuck-it’, which probably has the poor man spinning in his grave
Laurence
February 6th, 2006 at 4:22 am
Thanks for the great comment Laurence! I think too many companies are picking random word/letters that hold no meaning, so when a company like yours has something to stand on top of it’s a great thing.
February 6th, 2006 at 4:25 am
Also.. the advantage of using two words is that people already have an idea what your company is before they use it :)
February 6th, 2006 at 4:51 am
I went for both the word+number combination, and some alliteration for Signal 7.
I deliberately went for something not tied to a particular product of industry, because I was uncertain where the business would go in the future. When I lived in the UK I was always struck by how dated the name “Carphone Warehouse” had become!
February 6th, 2006 at 5:43 am
I wanted to call this company “Matthew’s Happy Fun Fun Bloggy Business” but sadly, matthewshappyfunfunbloggybusiness.com was already taken.
It would be interesting to see what these companies might have been called, if there were other contending names. I gotta hunt around for that list we made, almost 2 years ago! A lifetime in the web world.
February 6th, 2006 at 9:08 am
Kevin - I admit that nobody is going to have a clue what chuquet is before they get there (and some would argue that they don’t even have much of a better idea after they’ve got there…) but I didn’t really know what tailrank was until I hit the site.
I guess you wanted to avoid the dreaded ‘blog’ word in your name, right? I mean, blogrank.com would just make it into another anonymous blog listing site.
February 6th, 2006 at 10:06 am
Now, all you need is someone to package this up into a board game or something. I’d play it!
February 6th, 2006 at 10:58 am
When we picked ASVM, we followed the pattern of CMP (Ziff-Davis Publishing arch rival). It always is and always was, just CMP, yet intuitively, back-of-yo-mind, you might think it stands for Computer Magazine Publishing. And by coincidence , that was their bread and butter for years. Coincidence?
ASVM, in extra heavy verdana, colors somewhere between shit(toned-down) brown and fun orange. 4 shades in all …
So, what does the ASVM stand for?
We want to help incubate companies that do “sustainable development”… yet we do documentary and music and multimedia stuff.. And so that might mean video and marketing… Adriano started it; and he is American.
But while we pick up other projects to pay the bills (we can’t hold our breath and expect President Bush to explain in a State of the Union address why a small country such as Germany can churn out more solar power per annum than the continental United States, can we?), our Managing Director never needs to explain, in a “strictly business” meeting crowded by neckties that we are serious about business even though we have big entrepreneurial plans around environmentally sound industries.
Frankly, the business community, especially in Central Europe, where we do some of our work, can not handle such paradox.
Similarly, CMP today owns DV, a video producer magazine. By not ever defining CMP, there is no perceptual conflict for the consumer.
So, my advice, be bold and take a stance, while also keeping a mystique and the option to serve who you like, in order to keep afloat.
Roberto
February 6th, 2006 at 6:43 pm
Wow. I actually had a post planned up about this same topic…and then you just blew it out of the water. Hit the nail on the head. Bulleyes. Sums it all up perfectly
February 6th, 2006 at 7:00 pm
When we picked ASVM, we followed the pattern of CMP (Ziff-Davis
Roberto, when I read that first line, I seriously thought it was spam…I had to force myself to read through all those acronyms!
February 6th, 2006 at 10:28 pm
Brian Morris…bmorris…bmo…
BEEMO!
I’m very happy with my domain name (which later became my nickname for some). Also important, as I have done work for non-english speaking companies, is the ability to have a name that is somewhat “international,” or at the least multi-national.
By the way, I was always slightly annoyed at typing in del.icio.us—I was happy to discover delicious.com would take me there ;)
February 7th, 2006 at 8:11 am
A new category for your analysis.
You list us as 23hq, but our name is actually just “23″. The hq just comes from the fact that we have opted for what we call a “poor mans domain name” - ie. 23.com wasn’t available, but how much does it really matter in the end.
I guess this category was pioneered with Basecamp having the url basecamphq.com.
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