
Ask HN: Should I use a one-word domain variant? - fgrimes
Or fear legal repercussions?<p>If I want to use &#x27;myexcellence.com&#x27; or &#x27;excellenceapp.com&#x27; for example, and there exists &#x27;excellence.com&#x27; from The Excellence Corporation, would that be a bad idea?<p>YANAL (or not), but what do you think? Especially those who may have encountered this situation before.<p>It&#x27;s a very generic word. There&#x27;s always the question of market sector, but this isn&#x27;t a clear case of auto repair vs. maid service, for example.<p>Instead it falls more into the realm of companies that offer business and marketing services to other companies, and deal with customers. Like most B2B services.
======
brudgers
Random advice from the internet.

Why even waste energy thinking about this?

Just pick something else. Nobody really cares much about the name and if the
company is making a pile of money, it can do a rebranding later. For a lot of
businesses having something that is easily googlable may help more than having
something perfect.

Alternatively, just use the name and move forward building a business. Blatant
cases aside, fretting over what might happen because of the name is pretend
work. Fretting over the business running out of money is real work.

Good luck.

------
Jaruzel
IANAL, so this is my education opinion only:

Are you offering on 'myexcellence.com' a similar service to what's already
offered on 'excellence.com' ? If so, then yeah, I'd avoid the name-clash as
they can legally apply to take ownership of the domain name.

If your service is in a completely different market sector, then you should be
OK, as there's 1,000s of examples of similar sounding domains but providing
very different services.

