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Change Your Name
- johnhess 11y ago100% of the top 20 by valuation have their .com What proportion had it at their founding or shortly after? Surely a well funded and successful company had the means and motivation to purchase their .com
- nanijoe 11y agoCheaper still, would be to get a new name that has an available .com
- iiiggglll 11y agoA great example: how long did it take Square to get their hands on square.com? Even now it's just a redirect to squareup.com.
- jnpatel 11y agoAnother example: Dropbox originally had getdropbox.com, and didn't obtain dropbox.com until more than 2 years after founding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropbox_(service)#2007-2011 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropbox_(service)#2007-2011
- erichurkman 11y agoAnd another: Box launched as box.net, and spent about $1 million to buy box.com. [0] For earlier companies, you can buy a lot of engineers, product, and marketing for $1 million. [0] http://www.cnet.com/news/how-box-net-became-box-com-for-just-shy-of-a-million-bucks/ http://www.cnet.com/news/how-box-net-became-box-com-for-just...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- tmsh 11y agoExactly, that's the real test. The information is available: http://brianjackson.io/view-dns-history-free/ http://brianjackson.io/view-dns-history-free/
- tedunangst 11y agoActually, paypal owns x.com, not Stripe. :)
- philippnagel 11y agoTrue, but x is a variable in this case.
- sarciszewski 11y agoShould've use ^([^\.]+)\.com$ for clarity.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- bgaluszka 11y agoOr just example.com :)
- tptacek 11y agoIf your numbers are going up and to the right, what does it mean to "signal weakness" with your name?
- Rauchg 11y agoI think the essay is missing crucial elaboration on the central point. That is, the idea that .com is associated with strength, and lack of .com with weakness.
- sarciszewski 11y ago.com is supreme .com is love .com is life Surrender your soul unto VeriSign
- noobie 11y agoExactly! This why I commended Casey Neistat for waiting to announce his startup name to the public until he secured the domain name.
- xamuel 11y ago>Don't believe a domain is for sale unless the owner has already told you an asking price. One of my favorite examples: http://nissan.com http://nissan.com
- electic 11y agoor tesla.com
- cpeterso 11y agoI've always wondered how long will domain squatters wait before they negotiate. Surely Tesla Motors has approached tesla.com and apparently been turned down. Telsa Motors has shown they don't need that domain name to succeed. So when will the squatter, if ever, cave to Tesla Motors' offer?
- rwallace 11y agoMaybe never. The Homo Economicus model of human behavior as optimizing for expected economic return is only a first approximation. In some cases, human behavior is more accurately modeled as "Mine! My precious!"
- TeMPOraL 11y agoEven if Tesla is not willing to pay the amount the squatter wants, he may be hoping that Tesla's competitor will. By the way, the coolest thing Tesla could do, that would buy them a lot of love and good press, would be to buy tesla.com and donate it to Nicola Tesla Science Center.
- vacri 11y agoShouldn't that be tesla.edu rather than .com? Their current .org would also be more appropriate than a .com...
- 11y ago
- jimminy 11y ago> "Whereas (as Stripe shows) having x.com signals strength even if it has no relation to what you do." I would contest that it has no relation, I could be wrong since I have no knowledge. That said I always saw it as a relation to the cards themselves and the magnetic-strip on the back of the card.
- matthiasb 11y agoI thought the exact same thing. I was really surprised by this comment coming from PG. This Forbes/Quora article explains how the name was chosen: http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/04/02/how-did-stripe-come-up-with-its-name/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/04/02/how-did-stripe-...
- mynameisvlad 11y agoYep, I agree, that's what I thought it referred to the entire time (and even commend them on a smart name because of it)
- adamzerner 11y ago> How do you find them? One answer is the default way to solve problems you're bad at: find someone else who can think of names. Imagine a website where startups could describe what they do and users could propose and vote on ideas for names. It's been on my list of potentially decent project ideas.
- preinheimer 11y agoand regularly scraped by bots to squat domains? You can hold a lot of domains for two years when you can sell a few for 5k
- adamzerner 11y agoTrue. I hate domain sharking.
- ikeboy 11y agoAlready done, see http://www.pickydomains.com/ http://www.pickydomains.com/
- adamzerner 11y agoVery cool! This makes sense to me. Specialization and trade.
- jotm 11y agoOh, wow, that's a throwback to the past! I remember when Dmitry Davydov first announced it, kinda surprised that it's still around :-)
- ThomPete 11y agoGreat names are made not found. I think Paul for once have it the wrong way around. If you become big enough and happen to have enough of a market you might need to .com name to optimize your numbers. If you happen to find a good name you can afford that you still think represents you and is .com you should most probably change your name. But for most people just like their logo it's it's not that important until you become big and you can become big without .com name. Whether you can stay big is another discussion. Far too often we fool ourselves thinking the wrong things are important. But just as you most probably can easily find another name because your current one isn't as great as you might think, you can probably also wait a little until it becomes an actual issue.
- paulpauper 11y agoFor entrepreneurs, the domains name should be the least concern.
- toephu2 11y agoand even when you stay big, your brand name is big enough that your domain doesn't matter (e.g., teslamotors.com)
- rokhayakebe 11y agoCorrect.I am trying to think of one instance where someone would refrain from working with Tesla, buying from them, or doing any sort of business with them because: Teslamotors instead of Tesla.
- blazespin 11y agoLittle details are always important as long as they don't require big effort.
- ThomPete 11y agoAgree. Problem is changing your name, to most people, is a big effort :)
- 11y ago
- sivers 11y agoBest advice I've ever seen on naming a business is from this old Seth Godin gem: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2003/06/naming_a_busine.html http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2003/06/naming_a_bus... I read that in 2003, and have never forgotten the "Lemon Pie" example since.
- rubiquity 11y agoI've done some scuba and I don't get the Lemon Pie name in that context. Care to explain?
- zyxley 11y agoIt's the whole point of the linked article. > The LESS it has to do with your category, the better.
- rubiquity 11y agoApparently I'm still really, really bad at this.
- function_seven 11y ago:). Just think to yourself what apples have to do with computers and phones.
- Stratoscope 11y agoThe Apple name did have a somewhat contrived connection with computers when the company was first started. Back in 1976, Steve Jobs explained the name to me: "Take a byte of the Apple, get it?" And that's where the famous shape of the logo came from. (I almost ended up working for him at the time - but that is a whole other story!)
- rebekah-aimee 11y ago
- nginx404 11y ago"Nearly all your attachment to it comes from it being attached to you".Interesting.Very interesting as this is truth in the real sense.
- pg_is_a_butt 11y agoi thought pg was finally changing his name to butt
- dave1619 11y agoI knew I needed to change our company's name but this article really sealed the deal. The problem is I don't have the skill of naming. If you do, I'd love your help (email me at lalalee at hotmail.com).
- ikeboy 11y agoIf you're ready to pay, try http://www.pickydomains.com/ http://www.pickydomains.com/
- starshadowx2 11y agoTry sites like these: * Namium - http://www.naminum.com http://www.naminum.com * The Name App - http://thenameapp.com http://thenameapp.com * Wordoid - http://wordoid.com/ http://wordoid.com/ There are some more sites like these but more focused on domain names, all from here - https://blog.growth.supply/300-awesome-free-things-e07b3cd5fd5b https://blog.growth.supply/300-awesome-free-things-e07b3cd5f...
- fractallyte 11y agoThere's a complementary post elsewhere in the comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10031735 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10031735
- arihant 11y ago> 100% of the top 20 YC companies by valuation have the .com of their name. 94% of the top 50 do. But only 66% of companies in the current batch have the .com of their name. Which suggests there are lessons ahead for most of the rest, one way or another. I wonder how much of that is due to the fact that landscape has changed in past 8 years and top 20 YC companies are all at least a few years (5-ish?) old. I appreciate the rest of the sentiment of the post, but I don't think the numbers he chose to share clearly support the assertions. Correlation isn't causation.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- hyperpallium 11y agoyes, didn't dropbox used to be trydropbox.com? And, tho non-YC, delicious.com was del.icio.us (or something). Successful companies can buy their domain. But I agree with pg; a startup by any other name would succeed as sweet, so why not choose one you can get.
- ploxiln 11y agodel.icio.us is an awesome domain. I'd be inclined to believe someone came up with the domain before the name.
- ikeboy 11y ago>100% of the top 20 YC companies by valuation have the .com of their name. 94% of the top 50 do. But only 66% of companies in the current batch have the .com of their name. Which suggests there are lessons ahead for most of the rest, one way or another. How much of that is due to the pressure that he admittedly puts on them to change names? (And that higher valued ones are likely to be older and have had this pressure for longer?)
- leroy_masochist 11y agoIn addition to having had the pressure for longer, they have the money from having raised multiple rounds of financing.
- ikeboy 11y agoWell, yeah, that's what "higher valued ones are likely to be older" implies.
- rhue 11y agocorrelation is not causation...
- humanfromearth 11y agoWe'll buy it when we raise series A. We'll use our hipster version until then. Thanks.
- loup-vaillant 11y ago> The problem with not having the .com of your name is that it signals weakness. Note to anyone who disagrees with Paul Graham on this one: he's not talking about the genuine importance of the domain name. He's talking about its perceived importance by important people —namely the investor community. That's the way it is with most status signals: they're not very important by themselves, but how they influence the people who have power over you is important. Simply put, if the investor community believes that lacking the relevant .com name is a sign of weakness, then lacking such a name signals that weakness. As such, they will be less likely to invest, making your company weaker. It doesn't matter if they're right in the first place. Their belief is sufficient. It's a self fulfilling prophecy: if investors believe you're weak, that belief can make you weak.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoIt also suggests that any investor willing not to believe in such signals can stand to make a lot of money. I sometimes wonder how much bullshit do people at the top of the foodchain believe and act on, given the material targeted towards executives (like magazine articles or presentations of software development methodologies) are so full of it.
- sandGorgon 11y agoIs this signaling as simple as having a .com ? Or are there other considerations such as SEO uniqueness, easy-to-pronounce (especially critical for enterprise software), length of url. Is kuickkoder.com a better domain than quickcoder.io ?
- adventured 11y agoIt's a sliding scale. If the .com is kuicksuperkodderdudes.com, then quickcoder.io is superior. Yes to length of url - if your only option is a .com that is 25 letters long, or a .io domain that is six letters, then the .io wins. For most of the cases in which a .com ends up being inferior to a .io, it's due to a naming exploration failure. You can still easily find good two word .com addresses today. Unless you've got coder.io or similar.
- rjvir 11y ago> 100% of the top 20 YC companies by valuation have the .com of their name. 94% of the top 50 do. But only 66% of companies in the current batch have the .com of their name. That's not a straight comparison. A better stat would be, what percentage of the top 20 YC companies had the .com while they were in the active YC batch?
- blazespin 11y agoNo, because his thesis is "change your name", not "start out with .com"
- timtamboy63 11y agoBut he's implying that having a .com correlates to success - so % starting with a .com would be a more apt comparison.
- bmelton 11y agoExcept for the spate of domain names that are .coms but are not the company's actual name, ala "Bootstrap" and "getbootstrap.com".
- rory096 11y agorjvir said the .com though. getdropbox.com doesn't count, but they managed to get dropbox.com after they raised enough money for lawsuits. http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/13/dropbox-acquires-the-domain-everyone-thought-it-had-dropbox-com/ http://techcrunch.com/2009/10/13/dropbox-acquires-the-domain...
- ThomPete 11y agoChange your name isn't enough you have to first find a name that you can afford. And so while it's true your current name isn't that important it doesn't mean that you can find any "good" .com names that are affordable.
- jlarocco 11y ago
- graycat 11y agoNot sure the domain name really matters much now. Reasons: (1) Do users really pay attention to the extension, COM or anything else? (2) IMHO, now users mostly just click on links while paying little or no attention to the actual URL or domain name. Of course, the HTML link element (tag) doesn't have to expose anything about the extension. So, why do 1+ billion users know or care about COM? For PG's point about the most successful YC companies use COM, that was then, when COM didn't cost so much, not now.
- Brushfire 11y agoI'm not sure. I'd rather have a memorable name with a sub-par TLD, than I would have a confusing / hard to remember name with a .com. Obviously, the ideal is memorable + .com, but most of those will cost 50-100k+, which is not feasible for seed-stage budget. Sounds like a series A problem.
- pjscott 11y agoAccording to the article, there's a third option: > It turns out almost any word or word pair that is not an obviously bad name is a sufficiently good one, and the number of such domains is so large that you can find plenty that are cheap or even untaken. So make a list and try to buy some. That's what Stripe did. (Their search also turned up parse.com, which their friends at Parse took.)
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoI couldn't disagree more with this article and am kinda surprised Paul wrote about this. Domain names are transitioning into becoming useless. When you open any web browser or mobile phone and go to look for a company it does a search. The most relevant results come back at the top. This type of trend, as we abstract away from using TLDs, is only going to continue. Owning a .com isn't nearly as meaningful today as it was 5 years ago. What I think will happen is ICANN will continue adding more, useless TLDs as quick cash grabs and the next 10 years you're going to see people stop referring to their domain name at all. I mean, why would you? You're Uber, you look for "Uber" in the app stores, you open your browser and type in "Uber". All of these take you exactly where you need to go. > 100% of the top 20 YC companies by valuation have the .com of their name. 94% of the top 50 do. But only 66% of companies in the current batch have the .com of their name. Which suggests there are lessons ahead for most of the rest, one way or another. Correlation is not necessarily causation; this statistic should be compared with general domain name availability with the time periods mentioned because an incredible amount are purchased every year making it impossible to even compare in this way.
- creeble 11y agoYeah. I heard this 13 years ago too. http://shirky.com/writings/domain_names.html http://shirky.com/writings/domain_names.html
- BinaryIdiot 11y ago> Yeah. I heard this 13 years ago too. http://shirky.com/writings/domain_names.html http://shirky.com/writings/domain_names.html So because someone suggested it 13 years ago makes it not true today? Look at how the new TLDs are working out; if you want to find a company using a funny TLD you just search for their name and unless the .com is higher ranked the company comes right up to the top. Look at it from a user's perspective; do you know anyone who actually types in a domain name anymore that isn't a technie? If a user wants to find a specific company they just simply use voice and ask their phone or open a browser and just type it in. Typing in a TLD adds friction especially since ICANN added all of these stupid TLDs that no one is even used to. The lower the friction the better, right?
- Olivier26 11y agoI have a related question. When you have one product, which name is different from the company's name, is it better to use comapany.com or product.com?
- BinaryIdiot 11y agoPerhaps both? Company.com can describe the company, show your products, etc. Product.com could be either a landing page advertising your product or, if it's a service, perhaps that's the login / primary access for your product. Just my thoughts.
- Animats 11y agoThe latest "new TLD" thing was a money-making scheme for domain registrars. Nobody goes to those domains. Even the previous round of TLDs (".museum", ".aero") are not used much; ".aero" has entries for all the major airport codes, but they're redirects. Amusingly, even if you have your very own TLD, it doesn't help you. Most browsers send single-word lookups to a search engine before they send them to DNS. Try "ca" in a browser. There is a web site at "ca". But to get there, you'll have to use "ca.", to force a DNS lookup from the root. Nobody knows to do that unless they're into how DNS works. There are some low-level bugs embedded in very common C libraries which cause problems with single-word domains, and they probably won't be fixed. As for the original poster's advice, the price of the domain you want in .com is probably more than YCombinator's initial funding. With all of today's domain hoarding, the ".com" domain usually comes later. Facebook started as "thefacebook.com".
- Tepix 11y agoThere is no website at "ca". Did you mean www.ca? That redirects to circa.ca
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Animats 11y agoFor a clearer example, try "http://ai." http://ai." No redirection; there's a web site there.
- silverwind 11y agoThere's no DNS record for "ai.". It's actually the browser prepending www in search for a site and "www.ai." happens to exist.
- Animats 11y agoNo, there is a DNS record for "ai": $ nslookup ai Server: 127.0.1.1 Address: 127.0.1.1#53 Non-authoritative answer: Name: ai Address: 209.59.119.34 Rechecking using Google's DNS server: $ nslookup > server 8.8.8.8 Default server: 8.8.8.8 Address: 8.8.8.8#53 > ai Server: 8.8.8.8 Address: 8.8.8.8#53 Non-authoritative answer: Name: ai Address: 209.59.119.34 It's pingable: $ ping ai PING ai (209.59.119.34) 56(84) bytes of data. 64 bytes from offshore.ai (209.59.119.34): icmp_seq=1 ttl=46 time=133 ms 64 bytes from offshore.ai (209.59.119.34): icmp_seq=2 ttl=46 time=132 ms 64 bytes from offshore.ai (209.59.119.34): icmp_seq=3 ttl=46 time=132 ms ... And it speaks HTTP: $ wget ai --2015-08-09 14:26:26-- http://ai/ Resolving ai (ai)... 209.59.119.34 Connecting to ai (ai)|209.59.119.34|:80... connected. HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK Length: 1257 (1.2K) [text/html] Saving to: ‘index.html’ 100%[======================================>] 1,257 --.-K/s in 0.001s 2015-08-09 14:26:26 (842 KB/s) - ‘index.html’ saved [1257/1257] It doesn't respond to HTTPS, though. So we don't get to see a cert issued for a TLD. A base level TLD site is rare; most TLDs don't have one. But it's supported in DNS.
- pknerd 11y agoEvan Williams of Blogger/Twitter fame disagree with it. http://evhead.com/2011/06/five-reasons-domains-are-less-important.html http://evhead.com/2011/06/five-reasons-domains-are-less-impo...
- declan 11y agoThe advice seems like a bit of an anachronism in the mobile world. Nice, short .com domain names were probably more important for desktop web browsing -- and I suspect are less relevant to startups that are focused on the iOS App Store, Google Play Store, third-party app stores, Twitter, Facebook, etc. for discovery.
- paulpauper 11y agoexactly ..people go to the app store. Few ever go to snapchat.com They hear about it on Facebook, on twitter, the press, through word of mouth
- curiousjorge 11y agomajority of people just enter the name in their address bar and click the search result. domain name is not as important as it was.
- iamwil 11y agoI remember hearing a couple stories about Octopop.
- seasoup 11y agoAre you all seriously arguing with Paul Graham about something in his realm of expertise that only someone with a vast experience in multiple startups can form an informed opinion of, or someone that has undertaken a serious research study thereof? If you are not one of those two, just smile, nod, and change your name. If pg suggests something, he thinks it's important, if he thinks it's important enough to write an article on, he's pretty sure he's right and it's important.
- tsomctl 11y agoYou might want to read up on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority
- brianmurphy 11y agotsomctl, the other side of the coin is that we have a bunch of people arguing the color of the bicycle shed instead of listening to an expert on the issue.
- seasoup 11y agoBut I one disagreeing with him is using logic or proof, they're throwing out a few counter examples to "prove" their intuition and disregarding someone with enough experience to have an actual informed intuition about the topic. Given the choice on an issue you are not that informed on will you trust your own intuition or one of the leading experts in the field? If there had been logic, data, or some other proof besides a couple of counter examples, I may need to do more than appeal "argue from authority." They aren't, so I'm sticking with the authority.
- flylib 11y agothis is telling Just take a look at all these successful startups which either had a temporary domain name, or which still have a different domain name to their name: Square was squareup.com, DropBox was getdropbox.com, Facebook was thefacebook.com, Instagram was instagr.am, Twitter was twttr.com, Foursquare was playfoursquare.com, Basecamp is basecamphq.com, Pocket is getpocket.com, Bitly was/is bit.ly, Delicious was del.icio.us, Freckle is letsfreckle.com https://blog.bufferapp.com/how-to-name-your-startup https://blog.bufferapp.com/how-to-name-your-startup
- unethical_ban 11y agoSimple was banksimple.com.
- jl 11y agoI only know the backstory of Dropbox, but I'm certain Drew Houston would tell you that it was a painfully distracting process to obtain dropbox.com. I suspect if he could have done it all over again, he would have spent the 30 minutes and few hundred dollars to buy something different. Of course, there were a lot more options back in 2007.
- melvinmt 11y agoUber was ubercab.com > With characteristic sense of profitable timing, it bought the domain name Uber.com from the Universal Music Group for 2% of the company then later managed to buy back the shares – today worth hundreds of millions – for $1m. http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2014/dec/21/travis-kalanick-uber-cab-app-observer-proifile http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2014/dec/21/travis-ka...
- daodedickinson 11y agosteam.com is NOT for sale.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- moubarak 11y agoWell bad names which own their .com are far more worse. bvckup2.com? seriously? too bad for a great product. There are other examples out there it baffles me.
- paulpauper 11y agoYea, this article would have been applicable in 1998, but not so much today. Even domain names are becoming antiquated, with everything moving to apps and cloud. The most popular blogs I read are still hosted on blogspot and wordpress...Having a good domain won't save your business if the execution and other aspects are flawed.
- lsc 11y agoI think that changing your name is almost always the wrong thing to do. It's a sort of 'reputation bankruptcy' that only makes sense when your "credit" has been damaged beyond repair. I imagine it would be different if you are primarily concerned about your reputation with your investors rather than your reputation with your users; but I think that big companies regularly undervalue the customer familiarity with their brand. Sure, when choosing a name, choose a name that has an available .com. Why not? Before you've invested anything in a name, it is all but valueless, so the cost to getting a .com is very low. The value in a name is in how many people recognize and remember it; if nobody knows your name, it's worthless. If people do remember it, it doesn't matter how awkward or weird the name is; the value is in that recognition. Once you have that, don't fuck with it.
- drchiu 11y agoI wonder, however, if one wanted to convey a sense of underdog or grass roots if it's better to choose a non dot-com domain? For example, sometimes the .com domain just seems too corporate sounding -- but your audience is not. Isn't it more strategic to get a newer extension?
- DenisM 11y agoAt the time of my comment, there are dozens of comments disagreeing with Paul and only 2 agreeing. And this goes to show you - most people will not accept an advice from someone who knows better. If a conclusion must be reached, it must be reached under your own power, and at your own speed. This just can't be helped, it seems. Or can it?
- rwallace 11y agoThat is one possible conclusion. Another possible conclusion, however, is that the world has changed in the years since last time Paul was actually doing this, and people with current experience are pointing out that his advice in this case is actually out of date.
- DenisM 11y agoPaul is drawing his conclusion from seeing through hundreds of startups and still being involved in YC to this day. His opponents draw their conclusion mostly from seeing through zero startups, that is being in the middle of their first. Then a much smaller number of people have between 1 and 3. This vast discrepancy in experience is strike one. Strike two is that pretty much everyone has an unhealthy attachments both to their own creations and to their own "identity". It gets even worse when the two are combined. Even Paul himself, one of few wise men of our times, gets very defensive when his creations are under fire. It's just how people are. Yet in this case Paul is a more objective observer, he doesn't have a stake in the game of naming your company. The insidious part of strike two is that it's nearly impossible to recognize while you're in the grip of it. It's like being drunk - most people who are severely drunk think they are "ok to drive". They aren't. Accepting advice takes one of the two: either blind deference to authority, or wisdom to recognize the limits of your own understanding and selective deference to those who could know better. Not perfect, mind you, just better. Alas, wisdom is hard to come by, and blind deference has significant downsides. And so it goes. Most useful advice goes unheeded.
- staunch 11y agoBuying a credible domain like stripe.com usually requires funding. Should bootstrappers be stripepay.com?
- rhue 11y agoDecided to finally comment after 8 years. Dear PG: http://cdn.meme.am/instances2/500x/1296318.jpg http://cdn.meme.am/instances2/500x/1296318.jpg
- booruguru 11y agoIf the .com name you want is already registered, you can always buy it later once you business is successful enough to justify the investment (much like betali.st and getdropbox.com). There's no point in buying an expensive domain name for a company that may not survive past the startup stage. Note: a large swath of web users don't even understand the concept of a domain name or address bar...instead they google terms like "Gmail" and "YouTube" thinking this is how they are supposed to visit web sites. What's more, tech-savvy users wouldn't think twice about visiting domain name ending in ".io", ".ly" and so on. (Hence their proliferation.) * I can't help but wonder if this article is some kind of prank--it's far too ill-considered compared to Graham's usual standards.
- brudgers 11y agoMy reading was that at an early stage it's just better to come up with another name and be done with it...if airmatressbreadandbreakfast.com is taken, just buy airBnB.com. Consumers won't care. In cases like Stripe, where the target is B2B and the businesses are mostly small businesses, then a good name matters because it's marketing and its cost is just a cost of doing business. To push it further a .io domain is signalling and that's what makes it attractive.
- GuiA 11y agoThat's a bad example though. If airbnb.com is taken, should you take airbnb.io or airmatressandbreakfast.com? Paul's argument is: neither, get a different short name for which you can get the .com.
- nostromo 11y agoAirbnb.com actually did come later. It was originally airbedandbreakfast.com.
- brudgers 11y agoI take it that the article is aimed at early stage startups and is premised on the idea that choosing a name is worth about 20 minutes of time by a founding team and an experienced investor. I find Airbnb useful because "air" has nothing to do with the current company. Any connotations to air mattresses are probably non-positive at this point and the company's success came after pivoting away from low quality low cost accommodations.
- machbio 11y agoI have a doubt about names - sorry to stray away from the topic but it would help me giving away the domain i have for the future. I have a domain name which is registered as trademark by one of the organizations, can the organization claim the domain name since they own the trademark ?
- clamprecht 11y agoI'd like to second this question - does anyone know? Many people grab the domain name, but don't file the trademark (which is more expensive). Can someone just file the trademark and then go after the domain name?
- astrong 11y agoDid you register the domain name before their trademark ? There are several ways under the Uniform Domain Resolution Policy whereby they can come after the domain name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Domain-Name_Dispute-Resolution_Policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Domain-Name_Dispute-Re... To answer the other question posted to your question. Registering a trademark in an attempt to take a domain name from someone else is know as Reverse Domain Name Hijacking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_domain_hijacking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_domain_hijacking
- machbio 11y agothank you that really helped learn more about the topic..
- jim_greco 11y agoI have some personal experience with this. Our company is Direct Match. We used to use the directmatchx.com website. Adding an X on the end isn't that odd in the trading world, but we would get comments on it all the time. directmatch.com ended up costing us $8k and well worth the purchase. For me it came down to, how can I tell customers, recruits, or investors that I'm going to be this huge impactful startup if I didn't even own the .com of my name? I couldn't. And now I never get a question about if my company's name is "Direct Match X" or why there's an X at the end of the domain name.
- nostrademons 11y ago"It turns out almost any word or word pair that is not an obviously bad name is a sufficiently good one, and the number of such domains is so large that you can find plenty that are cheap or even untaken." So, after reading this advice, I decided I'd actually try it out - it's easy enough to download a word list and write a script that pings a WHOIS API to check every single word or word pair. Turns out most such APIs are rate-limited, so I couldn't get as far as I wanted, but in a random spot check of 30 or so words off the word list, every single one of them was taken (as was the word-pair that I'm actually using for my startup). Even things as out-there as absurder.com or tektites.com. I think it's a good bet that somebody has already done this and registered every single English word and many word pair in the .com TLD. The good news is that by shitting all over .com, there will be no more startups founded with .com domain names. Either companies will buy them as they get bigger, creating a big transfer of wealth from startups to domain squatters, or more likely they'll just give up and we'll get more .ly, .io, or other gTLD domains in the future.
- pc 11y agoSo were Stripe and Parse, as it happens. We reached out to the owners of domains that looked unused / potentially for sale.
- nostrademons 11y agoHow did you start that process, and (if you don't mind saying) around how much did it cost? I've been looking at what it would take to buy some domains that are marked as taken and get pointed to domainagents.com by my registrar, but it's $199 minimum bid with a $30 deposit (with $10 going straight to the seller simply for responding), and I worry that they'll ask for like $100K, which I'm obviously not going to pay at this stage in the company lifetime.
- BreakoutList 11y ago> After sending a bunch of these emails by hand, I wrote a Bash script for the process in my old Harvard Computer Society shell account (sending from a .edu address would make us seem reputable while not flush with cash). I tested it out, but having forgotten both “set -u” and to provide any inputs, it sent an email with all variables blank. The to: address defaulted to mailer-daemon@, an administrative list that all of my former HCS colleagues were on. They were pretty confused to see my email asking if I could buy “.com” from them, and I was suitably embarrassed. I figured the cost of further similar embarrassment would be higher than the manual time I'd save, so I kept sending emails manually. > In total, I sent several hundred emails that day. Of the plausible responses I received, stripe.com was the clear winner. (Incidentally, I also got a reply from the parse.com owner; months later I sent my accumulated domain name list to Tikhon Bernstam, which is how Parse got its name.) http://www.quora.com/How-did-Stripe-come-up-with-its-name/answer/Greg-Brockman http://www.quora.com/How-did-Stripe-come-up-with-its-name/an... Cost: > We'd rather not disclose the amount, but it was less than you might think. http://www.quora.com/How-much-did-Stripe-com-spend-on-their-domain http://www.quora.com/How-much-did-Stripe-com-spend-on-their-... Summary: They sent emails from a student email address to the domain contacts as listed in the Whois details. Cost was perhaps in the range of $2-20k (which I realize is a big range).
- matt1 11y agoIf you're struggling to find a solid available .com for your startup, I'd encourage you to check out my free service, Lean Domain Search [1]. The site asks you for a keyword then pairs your keyword with 5,000 other words and instantly shows you which are available. For example, if you search for "food" [2], it will pair it with "free" and check "FreeFood.com", "hub" and check "FoodHub.com", and so on, and it also allows you to sort the results by length or popularity of that additional word. With a few searches you should be able to find a great domain, saving you a lot of time and potentially a lot of money. [1] http://www.leandomainsearch.com http://www.leandomainsearch.com [2] http://www.leandomainsearch.com/search?q=food http://www.leandomainsearch.com/search?q=food
- linky123 11y agoIf you don't have .com, it looks lame, with few exceptions. Also domains that are impossible to spell correctly if you just hear the name.
- Shed 11y agoMan, this advice may be tough to hear, (especially for someone like myself who currently only owns sellervision.net for the app I've been working on for ten months) but if the 'Godfather Of Startups' PG believes it's vital to have a dot com, then I'd change the name of my app in a heartbeat. Now I'm just waiting for YC to take me on to their Fellowship or main intake so I can have some budget to buy a cracking new name...ha ha!
- gojomo 11y agoI like how esoterically, the footnotes imply you may want to consider changing your nationality or religion, as well.
- rsp1984 11y agoThere is another problem with Paul's suggestion, which is that it only really works for very young startups that don't have many customers or other business relationships yet. Once you sell product and have established partnerships changing your name just doesn't make sense any longer and becomes a measure of last resort, e.g. if your brand is so damaged that continuing business under the old name becomes very complicated. But then again, if you're in that kind of a situation you probably have a lot more things to care about which are at least as important.
- snake117 11y agoNowadays, it seems that if your startup is primarily a web application, then choosing the right domain is a little more important than if you make an app like Snapchat. Is there really a big difference if you type in "snapchat.com" vs "snapchatapp.com"? However, if you can avoid more obscure and complicated URLs, then by all means do it. I think its best practice to have something straight forward so the user doesn't have to search first to come on your site. You never know what kind of distraction can present itself in those few seconds leading a user away from your site.
- nodesocket 11y agoI think there should a distinction made between consumer startups and b2b. If you are a database or developer tools company, .io actually makes more sense. .io is the standard, and it has become de facto. However, if your startup is a food rating service, or Uber for X, you gotta have the .com.
- tzury 11y agoPG a) Thanks for writing new posts. I have been missing your writings for quite long. b) IIRC, Dropbox started as getdropbox.com, just later on, when money "was not an issue", they purchased the more expensive one - dropbox.com. same applies to uber.com, square (which started as squareapp.com) and many others.
- clamprecht 11y agoBest case I can think of is facebook, who started with "thefacebook.com", and later bought facebook.com. Also, didn't AirBNB start with airbedandbreakfast.com? (which now redirects to airbnb.com)
- dshankar 11y agoPG is recommending you get the X.com, but that doesn't mean you need to pay $50,000 for X.com on Day 1 of your startup. I see people making this mistake all the time, buying expensive domains before validating their startup in the first place. Think about what Dropbox, Stripe, and AirBnB did! getdropbox.com -> dropbox.com devpayments.com -> stripe.com airbedandbreakfast.com -> airbnb.com
- alialkhatib 11y agoGraham mentions this in a footnote, essentially not to assume such a thing unless the domain squatter has actually given an ask price. I'll extend on his argument by pointing out that Nissan and Tesla still don't own their .com names, and evidently Houston (of Dropbox) went through a lot of pain to get dropbox.com well after it'd been validated. If your idea seems worthless, a squatter might figure this is the time to shed a worthless domain for a few hundred or thousand bucks. If you're at the helm of a runaway multi-million-dollar success, I imagine the squatter is going to try and squeeze you for significantly more.
- bra-ket 11y agothis is all kind of secondary
- pbreit 11y agoAnd if you're Elon Musk you get x.com.
- jxm262 11y agoAfter reading this, I'm a bit perplexed and sad at the same time. My current strategy was to not use a .com since it was up for sale more than I'm willing to pay. Instead, I decided to go with something similar but different and hopefully change it once the idea/company got traction. Whether or not I agree with this, PG is a source of authority, which makes me think about my current strategy. Sort of sucks, do I listen to my gut and what many others here are saying, or fork over the money into a domain that could be used for other areas in the business? I'm going with option#1 btw, just sucks to hear this from someone I respect, because it makes me believe it's true.
- matco11 11y agoAnybody remembers getdropbox.com before dropbox.com?! :-) Or... thefacebook.com before facebook.com?! Name, logo, domain name, are all important things, and - like for all things - their importance changes over time. You go in a circle of executing to "good enough" for the stage you are at (keeping in mind that you do not want to create problems for yourself in the future with the choices you make today) and then move on to the next item on the execution priority list. If you wait to have the perfect logo before launching, you will never launch... Then 6 or 12 months later you might find yourself analyzing the perfect palette of Pantone colors to go with your brand...
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- dis123233 11y agoI'm skeptical to see that PG wrote this article. There is no doubt that owning a snazzy .com domain is good but saying this If you have a US startup called X and you don't have x.com, you should probably change your name. doesn't make sense. Sorry.
- brianmurphy 11y agoIt makes plenty of sense. Try finding the ford modeling agency by typing Ford into google. (without longtail modifiers) Guess what... ford.com is your first hit.
- elwell 11y agoMy startup's name is Purple. This is what we have to deal with : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple.com
- ESBoston 11y agoDidn't you know that before you named your company?
- alialkhatib 11y agoMy sense of Graham's thesis - and I'm reading this really loosely here - is that he's saying a name's not worth sticking with if obvious metrics suggest it's a bad choice. The most obvious metric of whether you have a good name or not is whether it's already been taken, especially by someone else with their own idea and access to 6 or 10 or 20 dollars per year or whatever the annual registration fee is. The space for available names (the "name space", if you will ;) is still large enough that being very stubborn about your startup's names is probably hazardous, and certainly not a sign of health. Ignoring the minutiae of the rest of the post (and you can argue I'm really doing this quite intently), I think I agree with the principle. The name's not that important. If you're processing financial transactions you could be named PayPal, sure, but you could also be named Stripe or Square or BrainTree[0] or any of dozens of weird names that make no sense at face value (if these names are in fact deeply meaningful, I'd be curious to hear the stories... privately, or on Twitter, not necessarily here/now). There are reasonable things to get stuck on - if you're committed to being a B2C product or service, and others are telling you your startup is more of a B2B idea, then you should wrestle with that. But you shouldn't be wrestling over the name for such a great deal of time. If Paul Graham tells you to change your name when you're pitching to him so you can get a .com, you probably shouldn't (he argues) protest all that much. I don't think I hold his view as strongly as he does, but I'm neither a successful VC nor widely respected in Silicon Valley, so his argument about perception is admittedly a little self-fulfilling and it seems impossible to reject. [0] the irony is not lost on me, now that I check, that BrainTree doesn't own braintree.com - although first glance suggests Square only has squareup.com, square.com redirects to it; I'd be interested to hear Graham's thoughts on that, and I think it would signal strongly whether I understood his argument correctly.
- endymi0n 11y agoIt's a hard choice to make, but especially when building a B2C brand & product and a large enough SEO channel (where a domain change might hurt your rankings), I'd definitely stick with PG here. Lots of good examples and counterexamples in the comments, but if you want something memorable AND searchable, sometimes it's best to just churn out the money early on if you know very well what you're doing. For justwatch.com we paid a small fortune - almost a tenth of the seed investment - to a shady squatter that just wouldn't give in, but in retrospect I'd still say it was definitely worth it. Even in 2015, it still makes you come across a tad more serious, determined and professional to outsiders and the brand searches and direct openings of the domain are significant. When you've built a brand already, squatters will be happy to charge you for the work you did (which might or might not be a better deal overall than burning the valuable money in the beginning). YMMV. If you're shooting for a B2B SAAS business that's more sales or SEM driven, I guess you're off just fine with an .io or temp domain, but your main focus should be a clean search neigbourhood then where you have the chance to make the Google front page eventually.
- martin-adams 11y agoSo it feels like this is a prejudice against startups who aren't using the .com TLD and I suspect would come more from investors and partners than users. Maybe the point is that for startups that do get traction and funding, finding a .com is an inevitable task, one that could save a lot of money/energy by addressing it in the early stages. That inevitable task may be borne out of the CEO being tired of answering why they didn't go for a .com. There has actually been no justification as to why a .com is required. Simply saying non .com is "marginal" and "it signals weakness" is not a root reason. All it shows is that some people have a differing opinion on the value of a .com and not agreeing with 'them' means you're weak. I personally do feel more comfortable having a good sounding .com, but if I'm going to do it, it has to be for the right reasons. That I don't think has been clearly expressed in this essay. My reasons are that it's a global identity, globally indexable by search engines, the most common global LTD and therefore the most memorable by end users, and more stable from a root server point of view. Would I think a startup with another name is weak? No. I would assume that they understand the implications of a non-.com TLD.
- vorg 11y agoWhy should Coke own "coke.com" when they could own ".coke" one day?
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Disruptive_Dave 11y agoWould have loved to see any form of actual experience to back up the odd claim he makes (which, coincidentally, stinks of low confidence, to me at least). Any surveys out there or even anecdotal evidence re: a consumer's perception of your company as "weak" sans-.com??
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Zigurd 11y agoThis is why "Zigurd" is a very advantageous name.
- devanti 11y agoIs there a way to start a name consultancy? I'm fairly good at coming up with names, and wouldn't mind offering my services, but I'm not sure how to secure my idea before selling it. I would also be open to testing my skills for anyone looking for a company name.
- cjbarber 11y agoYou could do an Offer HN I'll help you come up with a name? The other thing to do would be just to have a gentleman's agreement where they sign something (TBH I wouldn't worry with a legal contract initially, if you work with honest customers the gentleman's agreement is OK, and worst case if it was a big deal you could take to court and likely win) So the agreement would be something like: I'll come up with a name for you, I won't make you pay upfront, but if I come up with one you like and you haven't already thought of it [make them list all the ones they are currently considering upfront], then you'll pay me $500. Reply to this email with your full name if you agree. And then just make sure you follow them on twitter and connect on linkedin or such so that they feel that you would notice if they screwed you over, but like I say I think most people are nice and worrying about getting screwed over is likely premature optimization :-)
- haihaibye 11y ago> I'm fairly good at coming up with names ... I'm not sure how to secure my idea before selling it. Whether you like it or not, domain squatting seems to be the most popular way to do that.
- astrong 11y agoTry the contests over at http://www.namestation.com/contests http://www.namestation.com/contests
- ssharp 11y agoTo anyone naming their company and moving on when the Whois comes back as registered -- if you're really like the name, you should follow up with whoever owns it! I was recently trying to come up with names for a website / app I've been working on and wanted to finalize a name. The couple of ideas I had were already registered, including the name I really wanted. I ended up sending out emails to the contact on record for the domains I was interested in and ended up buying the exact name I wanted for around $100, which was far less than I was expecting them to settle for. The name had been registered for 13 years and nobody who owned it ever did anything with it.
- telecuda 11y agoIf Whois returns a private registration and the site doesn't provide contact information, try the Wayback Machine http://archive.org/web/ http://archive.org/web/
- Mz 11y agoThis makes me so tempted to write up the name history of BigCo where I used to work. I have searched before and cannot find a good write up on line. But it would basically require me to out myself because much of what I know is from having worked there for over five years. I can't find online sources with some of this information. But, previously, I have just stated I worked at BigCo and not named the company. I was actually considering doing such a write up a day or two ago. So it really hits a nerve to see this here today. Short version of the story: Even really big, wildly successful companies do name changes and most folks founding a company are waaaay over-attached to whatever they first decided to name their baby.
- baristaGeek 11y agoIf you search for a .com domain and it's already taken, you're not being creative enough. You're looking where someone has already looked in the world of ideas, you're not expanding the world of ideas. Whereas if you force yourself to buy an untaken .com domain, you are pushing yourself to think creatively. You might even get so lucky to come up with a fantastic name such as Airbnb or Zenefits.
- danielrhodes 11y agoThese days an alternative is to just not have a (public) domain at all.
- taytus 11y agoWe started working in our startup one week ago. I'm signaling weakness because I don't want to spend 5 grands in a .com domain? This post is so confusing.
- joeyaiello 11y agoNo, you're signaling weakness because you don't change the name to something that doesn't cost 5 grand to get the .com for. That's what the article says at least.
- gwu78 11y agoHypothetical: Let's say you are a founder and VC tell you that you need to pay off someone to get a certain domain name that matches your startup name. Let's say that someone knows how badly you need this name, and they charge you an absurd price.[1] Finally, let's say your startup fails. Question: Who gets the domain name? Considering the money that has been spent to get it, the domain name could be your startup's most valuable and liquid asset? [1] "Absurd" because the cost of creating and maintaining a domain name (editing a zone file and running a DNS server) is quite low. In the early days of the www, domain names were registered for free. These days some people pay thousands of dollars for "domain names". Funnily enough, in some cases the names being "sold" for thousands of dollars are the same ones that were once given away for free. After one has paid a one-time, exorbitant "price" for a domain name, then they must pay the annual fee each year to keep the domain name registered. Usually this fee is under $100. Even the annual fee charged is far above the cost of creating and maintaining a domain name. Maybe I should start a new TLD, e.g., ".startup". I could distribute a copy of root.zone with .startup added. I could give away a free, preconfigured localhost DNS cache, freeing users from ISP provided DNS, open resolvers like Google and Cisco (OpenDNS), and most importantly freeing them from the ICANN racket. Then I could give away domain names for free, upon a proper showing of need. No hoarding. Nah, it would never work. No one wants "alternative" TLD's. (I wonder how much pure profit .io has made in recent years.)
- Freebo 11y agoThis can help if you're looking: http://www.dopename.com http://www.dopename.com New names coming soon
- erikpukinskis 11y agoGross. What if I don't want to signal strength? What if I don't want every aspect of my business to be a dick wagging contest?
- caf 11y agoSo having the .com of your name is the equivalent to, in earlier times, banks, churches and police basing themselves in large, impressive stone buildings. Of course, signalling architecture has become less important over time, and probably the same will become true of the domain name equivalent.
- throwthrowty 11y agoI agree with some other commentators here - I am surprised at this article and it doesn't appear to be up to PG's usual standards. There are trends I believe PG is missing. Today, we consider the .COM to be the true, authentic, creme dela creme. However, available .COM domains are becoming harder and harder to find, while there has been an explosion in new TLDs such as .ly, .io, .pro, .guru, .camp, .rentals, .pub, .management etc. More and more, we will be seeing startups and large companies with alternative domain names which they will promote online, in magazines, on TV, etc. It will be common to see alternative TLDs. I wouldn't be surprised if the next Super Bowl had a couple ads which included an alternative TLD. Marketing is about rising above the noise and right now a .PRO is much more noticeable than a .COM. Many commenters and PG acknowledge that while .COM names are less valuable today than they were just a few years ago, they are still perceived to be very valuable. However, that is less and less true for the younger generation (which is the trend I believe PG is missing). As they grow up seeing ly, .io, .pro, .guru, etc., a .COM will have no more inherent authenticity than any other TLD. Would they really be more attracted to a magazine/tv/online ad with sportsshoe.com than to sportsshoe.pro? More willing to eat lunch at goodfood.com over goodfood.pub? More likely to attend bestsummercamp.com over bestsummer.camp? More likely to download a fun app from puzzle.com over puzzle.app? As a potential investor, does spending time and money securing a .COM really signal someone's dedication and company strength? Should a startup founder really spend a lot of money to secure a .COM so the company appears stronger? Seems like a false metric.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- phantom_oracle 11y agoI read through all the comments, hoping for someone to match the irony of this Paul Graham article. ycombinator is not exactly memorable like a "stripe" or "parse", yet they are presumably one of the most successful accelerators in the world. Naming is secondary, marketing that name is primary. Of course, you can't have a shitty name like ookabugiedandwig, but ask yourself why English-speaking people know words like: Samsung, Nissan, Ubuntu, Volkswagen and you can even apply that in reverse and find out why people who may not even use English to write, know words like: Apple, Mercedes Benz, Windows. Also, I don't mean this in a bad light, but I am glad to see people disagreeing with Paul Graham. This shows that HN is healthy and even a YC members opinion can be wrangled down to reality.
- beau 11y ago.com is dominant. Even domai.nr changed their name to domainr.com. Over 90% of users at https://instantdomainsearch.com/ https://instantdomainsearch.com/ buy .com names.
- rebekah-aimee 11y agoIf you're better at coming up with different names, as PG apparently is (he mentions in the article), then yeah, this would be a net win to just change your name. For most of us who are pretty awful at naming, it may not be a great idea to focus on the name when there are other TLDs out there like .io, .co, or most recently, .tech. And there's also the highly acceptable alternative of using a derivative of your name, such as (name)app.com, get(name).com, and that sort of thing. It's also notable that a startup registering its domain name is probably early stages and their name may change anyway, because their idea may change. You don't want to spend hundreds or more on lavalamps.com and then later decide you're actually going to sell those puzzle/IQ lights. Doing that might even make you hesitate to change your idea.* But if you spend $12 on lavalamps.net, the cost of heading for greener pastures is epsilon. If you've got another name stashed on a scrap of paper in a drawer, dig it up and check whether its .com is available. But if figuring out a new name is going to take you a week, just take what you can get for now. Probably you don't want to use (name).ru, though. ;) --- *Although if you were that foolish and then that inflexible, you probably weren't going to get anywhere anyway.
- abalashov 11y agoThe best way to think of names, in an environment where nearly every intelligible verbal particle is trademarked, copyrighted, or domain-squatted, is unquestionably Erlich-style: https://youtu.be/hsr-QfgFRh8 https://youtu.be/hsr-QfgFRh8
- webmuzer 11y agoBefore startup founders disregarding PG's advice about prefering .com domains if feasiable, consider 2015 RSA Conference cyber security speaker Paul Vixie recommendation for corporate sysadmins to filter out new TLD's to cut down on cyberthreats. Startups considering sexy new cheap TLD's may want to reconsider cost / benefit metrics of such path. On Thursday, April 23 at 9:10am, there is a session called “Domain Name Abuse: How Cheap New Domain Names Fuel the eCrime Economy.” The panel will be led by Paul Vixie, CEO of a company called Farsight Security, Inc. http://www.rsaconference.com/ http://www.rsaconference.com/
- jscheel 11y agoWe found that out the hard way. We were getting tons of reports of our product not working. After a lot of investigation, we found out they were all coming from people at Starbucks locations, because Starbuck was blocking .me.
- gpvos 11y agoPretty ironic that hours after posting this, Google announced it split up under a new umbrella company called Alphabet, and it doesn't own alphabet.com . Although I guess Google is above the rules that startups have to play by. Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi.
- persona 11y agoSomeone from Google, er, Alphabet didn't read PG's essay: https://abc.xyz https://abc.xyz
- hoodoof 11y agoThe timing is exquisite.
- therealmarv 11y agoyes, so true! :D
- matobago 11y agoMuch of the comments mention that you should buy the .com until your startup is well funded (stronger). And that exactly the whole point of this post is make it stronger since the beginning.
- rsardeha 11y agoI couldn't agree more. We see more and more startups end up with the wrong name for their business. That's why we created and launched the "Unused Domains" index a couple of weeks ago. We index all(+50M so far) domains that are unused and give you access to them here: undeveloped.com/search At least now you know which options you have and which alternatives are out there. The search and acquisition of the right name for your startup doesn't have to be that painful anymore. PS: we help/advice/consult startups for free with finding and picking the right name in the right extension. So feel free to reach out to us if you're struggling with your name.