
Your name is fine - polysaturate
http://blog.standupti.me/post/126530670964/paul-graham-is-wrong-and-your-name-is-fine
======
npt4279
The author did not address pg's point that lacking a .com has the potential to
signal weakness... such as among potential investors, potential employees,
press, and other influencers (like pg himself).

(Yes, there are always exceptions - like angel.co - and hacks like
getdropbox.com also work).

But perhaps the tradeoff of retaining your "perfect" .io domain is not worth
the extra friction of convincing influencers that you are credible company,
when an hour creative brainstorming session for a .com might solve the
problem?

Sure, if you have a hockey stick growth chart growing revenue 100% month over
month, it doesn't matter, but it's rare that most startups have that right out
of the gate. So why add to your burden?

~~~
amorphid
I don't care at all about whether or not a business as a .com domain name. I
care about usefulness and utility. As long as the business shows up when I
google them, I'm good.

~~~
npt4279
That's fair. But the question here is: "Do even 10% feel a different way?
Followed by: "Is the tradeoff worth it?"

For instance, the author's own web site is standupti.me. It's actually
something I might consider trying out. But it comes across as someone's side
project by a solo developer, not a company. As a potential customer, I might
still get around to trying it out at some point in time, but I do have a
slight negative connotation in that it might just disappear tomorrow. It would
be 1000x worse for a larger enterprise customer.

~~~
c22
Until I clicked the link and saw "StandupTime Blog" I thought the domain was
trying to say "standup to me" in a colloquial manner.

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tracker1
The only point I will make is favor a short name for the people that _do_ type
it into the address bar... I'd much rather see foo.club or foo.io than have to
type in some-kind-of-foo.com just to get a .com address.

Depending on your business, you may be doing offline marketting. Flyers,
cards, etc... you _really_ don't want people to have to type in things like
[http://www.foo-bar-baz-biz.com/pub/8588277760](http://www.foo-bar-baz-
biz.com/pub/8588277760) to get what you want them to see...
[http://goto.biz.io/](http://goto.biz.io/) (with a form taking the number) is
much better UX.

It always made me laugh when I'd see a URL more than about 15 characters
beyond the [http://](http://) because people just aren't likely to do that.
I'd say, if your primary url for an offline marketing drive will be more than
12-15 characters (not including prot), find a shorter name.

~~~
asabjorn
My impression has been that consumers frequently mistake the url for the brand
name, which is unfortunate if your url is for instance
[http://{try,get,...}{brand-name}.{com,me,...}](http://{try,get,...}{brand-
name}.{com,me,...}).

I also have the skill of naming companies and there are a lot of good names
still left our there, even on .com. And I think a name should be 8 characters
or less. If anyone needs help just send me a message. :)

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Mz
Eh, I also don't entirely agree with pg and wrote a bit in reaction to his
piece about Change Your Name. But this is super weak. If all you can say is
"famous guy's opinion is wrong," you aren't really adding much of value. Your
position shouldn't be defined by "I am against x." That leaves x -- in this
case pg -- defining your position by default. It isn't very rich.

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BRValentine
Seems pretty clear to me that the right answer here varies case by case. My
company sells enterprise software in a fairly niche market. Some people in
Europe are squatting on our .com, so we have .io and .co and use both for
various things. We're a startup but have achieved pretty good name recognition
and visibility among our target customer base through various marketing
activities and plain old hustle. Also if you google our name, the entire first
page of results are refer directly to us (website, crunchbase, linkedin,
etc.). So from where I sit it would seem to do a lot more harm than good to
change our name at this point in pursuit of the .com. Respect for PG etc. etc.
but this is not a one-size-fits-all question.

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aidenn0
I don't see this as having addressed the main point of the PG article which
was "The problem with not having the .com of your name is that it signals
weakness."

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rebootthesystem
You need the ".com" because mere mortals don't think about anything other than
".com". Put another way, for consumers, ".com" is assumed and
".<whatever_the_hell>" is an anti-pattern.

~~~
joshmn
Whenever someone asks me for my email address ($myfirstname@$myfirstname.mn)
and they're not tech savvy I always get "is that @gmail.com or
@hotmail...????"

I've learned, like you alluded to, nearly everyone associates the internet
with .com. Will we ever get past that point? I don't know. As some other
comments mention, .co is not the new .com, but .co.com is.

Made me chuckle.

~~~
rebootthesystem
This brings me back to a nice little marketing book I read about ten years
ago:

[http://www.amazon.com/Positioning-The-Battle-Your-
Mind/dp/00...](http://www.amazon.com/Positioning-The-Battle-Your-
Mind/dp/0071373586)

One of the interesting ideas the author postulates is, to put it in CS terms,
that people's minds work like a dictionary. Each key associates with one and
only one value. And, in this case, the key is a concept, need, category, etc.

If you ask someone in the US to name a plumber they'll probably answer
"RotoRooter" without hesitation. Fast food? "McDonalds". Rental car?
"Enterprise". Fast car? "Corvette".

The values side of the relationship isn't necessarily uniform across a
population but some keys have more uniformity than others (Fast Food).

Once a person makes that key:value association it is really, really hard to
break it, if not impossible. Politics tends to work that way too.

In the case of the web, the vast majority of people make the following
key:value pair association:

"internet":".com"

And that's the end of the story.

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datashovel
In a way I think the "being attached" part of the argument is perhaps being
misinterpreted.

Who is "attached" to what here? Why should I be attached to having a .com
domain name? On the other hand, why should I be attached to the name I gave my
business? If neither is critical to the success of the business, which is
better? Sticking with a name that doesn't matter even though I can't have the
.com domain? Or what if I could have both, but decided not to. It seems
frivolous to say you must have .com domain, but also seems frivolous to say I
need to stick with the name of my company.

Also if a .com is available probably means you'll be able to get more
marketing accomplished by name recognition alone. When you talk about a
company you don't say "I heard about this new company Company.com". Generally
when I hear people talk about a company they refer to it as the name of the
company not by the domain name. So what's the first thing people think when
they want to learn more? "Companyname.com". Ok they probably Google it too,
but even that small amount of additional hassle you put a user through trying
to find your company is probably statistically significant.

------
michaelwww
alphabet.xyz is way better than alphabet.com and I don't understand it when
people say it's a problem. .xyz makes me think of the alphabet, .com makes me
think of the 1990's

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cbsmith
Yeah, I'm not super buying the arguments presented here.

Changing your name certainly isn't the most important thing you could be
doing, and I wouldn't buy that domains matter a ton.

However, the earlier you are in a startup's life, the lower your existing
brand value. You can so easily change your name and move on. So much of the VC
money you are going to get is going to drive up brand value, whether you like
it or not. Is there anything else you could do at your startup at that time
that would take such little effort to change then and be so much more costly
to change later?

Maybe there are some things that are less effort to change now and would be so
much more costly to change later. You should do those things first. If you've
got a long list though, either change is way too expensive and you are doomed,
or you've already got a lot more invested in your name than the pg's target
audience.

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galago
It just occurred to me: Because Google/Alpha owns a popular search engine,
they may be uniquely positioned to assess this dilemma. That is, they have
massive data sets about companies employing either scheme. They also probably
have live data regarding how people are finding their company. They may
actually be big enough to make .xyz a thing, when smaller companies could not.

------
ScottBurson
Yeah, when I first heard about Palantir I think their domain was
palantirtech.com or some such. I dismissed them as losers.

------
briantmaurer
In recent news, many HN users avoid up-voting/commenting on things that
disagree with pg/sama/etc. in the chance that their likelihood of getting into
YC will be hindered.

~~~
gct
After seeing how PG treats people when the filter's off, I don't think I want
to be in YC: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii1jcLg-
eIQ#t=2179](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii1jcLg-eIQ#t=2179)

~~~
datashovel
Perfectly legitimate answer. Most importantly you're wasting pg's time w/ that
question, but also important you're wasting other people's time who are
interested in learning about startups, not about economics.

~~~
LouisSayers
IMO, It's totally a fine question to give - I do believe however that the
gripe was against the assumed intent of the questioner, but then, is it fair
to assume one's intent in a situation like this? The answer was a good one and
informative - startups are companies, and to ignore the economics involved
would be a huge mistake. History does repeat itself, and so it's important to
understand the difference between now and the 90's.

~~~
datashovel
Oh, and not to mention, imagine if he had actually tried to answer that
question? Next day headline in newspaper "Paul Graham doesn't think we're in a
tech bubble". Or if he did, "Paul Graham thinks we're in a tech bubble". It's
a lose-lose anyway you look at it.

