

Mortgaging your startup's domain name - mtrimpe

Does anyone here have experience with mortgaging a domain name? I have never even heard of it, but I think it must be possible, or otherwise be made possible.<p>For my startup I want to buy a domain name that will go for around $75k. We're bootstrapped with a generous supply of money from my day-job as a consultant and thus paying the mortgage wouldn't be the slightest bit of a problem, but I wouldn't have the faintest clue where one could actually get a mortgage for a domain name!?
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mbrubeck
It's called a loan. You can get a business loan from a bank, or a home equity
loan or second mortgage.

In the second case, you're not mortgaging the domain name; you're mortgaging
the house. If you default, then the bank will take your house and sell it. The
reason you don't mortgage the domain name is that the bank does not want to
own or try to sell a domain name. They have even less idea about domain name
values than they do about home values.

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gstar
I've noticed recent startups aren't that fixated on having the domain from the
get-go (dropbox is a notable recent one).

I have no idea what stage you're at, but is it worth considering just going
with websiteapp.com, getwebsite.com, websitehq.com or whatever until you've
proven the concept enough to make the purchase worthwhile?

Domain names don't seem to be very fungible, and it's a market where it seems
that professional dealers seem to have an unfair advantage (like real estate).
Nightmare.

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byoung2
$75k is pretty pricey for a domain name. Could you use that $75k in some other
way to get traffic to the site? I'm assuming that the name you want is
something like shoes.com where people are likely to type that directly, but
isn't this less of a draw now that we have search engines?

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krav
To paraphrase Clinton's winning phrase from his first election, "It's the
product, stupid."

Create a great product, provide value, and people will come. Case in point,
you come to news.ycombinator.com. Not the best domain name out there, is it?

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entelarust
You can also go the mint.com route and trade a little equity for access to the
domain

