Advice on domain name
Hello,
I discovered IH only recently and loving it! I have a project in mind but nothing concrete yet and I have a couple of questions concerning the domain name.
I thought of a catchy short brand name for which all TLDs are available apart from .com and .cn. The .com has been registered for many years and never used (parked; the registrar is xinnet.com); its status is apparently expired though (from a few weeks ago!). Would you have suggestions of what I could do to try and claim it? For example, I noticed this service from GoDaddy:
https://www.godaddy.com/domains/domain-broker
which could be useful to deal with a chinese registrar.
The services I would provide in my project are localised (country specific) so I would anyway use country-specifyc TLDs but I would prefer have the .com too.
Also which minimal set of domain names would you recommend I start buying? I'd love to have them all but it quickly gets expensive and maybe my project will never reach the stage where it will cover the costs... Would you also apply for trademark (I'm based in Europe) at the same time?
Many thanks!
Nino
While I think the domain name is important I do not think it's crucial to buy all the TLDs or even have more of them.
You can do subdomains for the sake of localizing your application (e.g. us.NAME.com, fr.NAME.com) Way cheaper :)
Also I had a bit of a fuck up with my domain that might be useful to read about:
https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/my-fuckup-1-google-auto-corrects-my-domain-when-searching-1362cf32b1
Thanks, you're right about subdomains but then the .com only would be best and it's the only one I cannot get!
IMHO .com is no indicator of a good/bad, professional/average etc. product. At the end of the day people come back for the solution you provide to their problem.
Also try to think of how many times in the last few years have you actually typed a TLD ? :) All modern browsers have great suggestion engines. Often I don't even remember the name of the website but just type a relevant word and Google Chrome parse the page title or other meta tags and gives me the right choice.
What I am trying to say is don't let this become a barrier. At the end of the day you can always rebrand and redirect the old domain to the new one :)
Good luck!
This comment was deleted 7 years ago
You can try snapnames.com
Thanks, it sends me in an interesting direction. I came across dropcatch as well. If someone has experience with backordering, I'd be happy to hear it!
I've done it before. You pay a little extra and you get first dibs on the name before it becomes available to the general population. People used to use it to snap up high PR domains that expired accidentally. Worth it if you have eyes on a particular domain
Interesting, thanks! I'm reading more and more about this; that's an entire new continent to explore... Which domain backorder company did you use? Snapnames, Dropcatch, Namejet?
Honestly don't remember. Was many years ago
Jason fried from basecamp said domain names really are no biggy at the end of the day its the product
I kind of agree but you can also hear the opposite argument, eg Paul Graham here:
http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html
yeh its come of different from everone i guess lol
The safe workplace or my work is safe my healthy shop
You can always take the one you like that is currently not available and add my or e to it. That is the simplest.