Sometimes you can spend 3-20 hours trying to figure out a name, domain, and branding. I'd pay a couple hundred bucks to skip that step. I wish this existed all those previous times I was stuck grinding on names!
There is no name here that suited what we were looking for, but it has the potential to save you loads of time, plus the logo costs.
If I was starting out something new I'd def check here, and use this as a starting point, use the logo to start a basic site, get a letter head made and some business cards done - bang, hours save, cost of a decent logo save, headaches saved.
Plus, you can change your name when ever you like - people get so overly stressed about names, as though the .com is the most important thing.
Plenty of great short domains on other extensions - I got whi.im and om.gd for a couple of projects I am working on. Issue is whether the people who need to know, know that .im or .gd are domain extension - or if it will just confuse them and send them to whiim.com (which we don't own).
This is a really great idea. One of the things which young startups often spend too much time on is picking a perfect name + brand. This is a great way to get started.
You can always iterate later if necessary, but this gives you something to use NOW, and put the discussion away and get back to real work.
Also, I love the layout. Very straightforward.
I currently subscribe to the http://justdropped.com/ mailing list which has daily domain names that he buys as they expire.. I could see something similar for your site, but with logos attached.
Also, a NewsLetter would be a great way for me to keep up with the (weekly?) new designs you add to the store.
If you need something to use right away and just get back to work, you can just head over to nameboy.com (or one of countless such sites), find a name thats not taken, then register it.
There..thats 30 minutes to save you over $200
Great idea for them, yes. For us? Awful.
Most of the time I bet the logos (which are ok but a bit generic) won't match what you have in mind for your site.
These people are no better than domain squatters - they're an unnecessary tax on startups.
A number of times now I've abandoned ideas after being unable to find a domain name as they're all taken by squatters, it's saddening :(
From all the possible names and extensions that are available, you've been unable to find anything that fits? And it was the lack of suitable URL that led you to abandon these ideas?
There are some lovely domains in here. Very cheap in comparison to their worth!
It sucks that when this post becomes more popular, most of them (if not all) will be taken.
Serves me right for having worked almost 4 years for a very large mobile games developer here in Argentina and having seen 40% of my paycheck being eaten away by inflation in the last few years.
I simply can't afford these domains, I would have loved to have them turned into full blown sites, just for fun!
Congratulations to the people that purchase them... please treat them nice :)
Looks like a great idea, very clever, but I'm not sure about the pricing. I would love to use something like this as a small developer, but $250 is a bit much for a domain and a logo given my small-time budget. On the other hand, companies with a larger budget would probably just have something like this done in-house. So I guess I'd ask: who do you see being the target market here?
I see HN as the ideal target market. I'm sure this submission didn't occur spontaneously and there are many people in HN who can afford $250 for a seemingly good value.
I'd be surprised if most of the domains are not sold quickly.
I don't think you understand. By your logic, everything should be equally priced based on its constituent parts, totally ignoring availability, desirability, demand and countless other factors.
Are you seriously saying that if you owned the domain name coke.com and the domain name jkkjs7e98wesj.com that you'd sell them to me for £10 each?
From searching and looking around a logo design can cost around $250 on its own, getting a domain to match a pre-designed and brandable logo is a nice idea and i like the concept, will i ever use this? Probably not.
The other day me and my business partners spent about 3 hours between us throwing around brand names and checking out .com's - we found a name we love and now we are getting a logo/branding piece done for it.
The costs in terms of our time, plus the design time are going to be way more that $250 - so if this has something you want and can use, great. If not there are literally millions of other names out there.
These guys, IMHO, are adding value. If you think not - fair enough, but they aren't selling just a domain. They are selling time saved. Some peoples time won't be worth as much, some people are already talented designers. For the rest of us, this is a great idea.
So you expect to get a logo for free with that logic. What they are selling here is a somewhat pre-built brand. If you want a $10 domain, spend the time to think of one that isn't registered. This will definitely take at least a few hours. Do you value your time? 6 hours spent thinking of a domain name is "free", but it took 6 hours during which you could be doing billable work, at a very low ~$40/hr
In hind-sight everything is obvious. Everything is easy if you already know it. You already know the perfect domain for your uses that's already available - more power to you.
The interesting aspect of this service is as a set of triggers. You'll find some people will immediately spot a matching domain in that list - they may not have thought of it themselves, but seeing it there triggers off the lightbulb.
Sure you can do the exact same thing with a command line whois, but then you don't get the benefit of serendipity. Someone else's list of brandable domains shows an item you weren't expecting to see, and that triggers off your own creative process into a different direction, and you find an end result you may not have arrived at without that serendipitous discovery.
You are seeing the results of someone else's creative process of discovering brandable domains. You don't have to pay for that effort, but you can be motivated by it. The $250 charge is if one of those domains is a perfect match, not for the process of finding an available perfect match and brandable domain.
The route that satisfies your expenditure expectations is watching expired domains lists - that's another source of someone else's creative inspiration. But you either have to scan tens of thousands of junk entries, or have a keyword list of some sort to focus on. Even then, because of the volume, you'll miss excellent domain names that are slightly outside of your current thread of ideas.
Then there's http://impossibility.org/ - generating available domains centred around a keyword. It's interesting, more serendipitous than expired lists, and purchasable immediately by registration. This is probably one of the better "suggested domain name" tools around, though it's just sticking words before or after your keyword. Sometimes an good domains does pop out, but it takes a bit of a graft, or a lazy Sunday afternoon.
Or sit there typing one domain idea at a time into a whois. It depends on your own level of innate creativity as to which approach will reap dividends. Personally, I use several different avenues. This is one more to keep an eye on.
Don't underestimate the creativity and inspiration. This is perhaps a better source of quality domains than Sedo/GoDaddy auctions, ebay/flippa/digitalpoint. Better, because of it's focus on brandable names rather than generic keywords / keyword-heavy / geo-targetted domains that are the current vogue in domainer/internet marketing circles.
These guys won't know what matches perfectly for you, only you do. If the price upsets you, you are not forced to buy even if it's a perfect match, you can just find another perfectly matching domain that is available.
From a small-time perspective, $100-$150. That's small enough where if the project doesn't take off I won't be out too much cash, and big enough to justify a logotype from a font library, a simple vector logo, and the transfer of a not-unreasonable domain name.
I'd like to see two or three different price points. Some of the names and logos are much higher quality than others. Seems that $250 is too high for some folks and too low ("a steal") for others. I'd suggest something like $100 for a minimally-branded name (like Sporous.com or oveza.com), $250 for a standard name and brand, and $500+ for the really good stuff. Also +1 on the idea of upselling business cards, letterhead design, etc.
It's clear from the feedback that you guys should be running auctions instead of charging fixed prices. Let the buyers choose the prices on a per-domain basis.
The price can seem a little high but it's a fixed price. No guessing, no haggling, no uncertainty. Just pick one you like and go.
I wonder if you'd consider locking in the matching Twitter, YouTube, etc. names as well. I'm afraid that if you don't now unscrupulous people will start scanning the site and picking those up.
I was thinking that, full suite social media branding, plus basic business cards, letter head, invoice template - the potential addons could go on and on.
Should have said brand-able, sorry. But my point still remains, names are extremely important and $250 is relatively nothing. Fix a script for someone and you'll get that much.
unfortunately a logo and 2-syllable odd-sounding name don't make a brand. however, as a cost-effective way to get a name and image, it's relatively pragmatic, especially for those who need it NOW.
lean startup ecosystem = not paying for things you don't need. plain language wins over every time. if a new business with little money needs a name and a logo for a fixed price, this can make economic sense. branding considers the audience and not the founders.
This is domain squatting pure and simple. Just because it's dressed up with a pretty design doesn't change the fact that these guys are the exact sort of bottom feeders that we should be blackballing from our industry.
I'm not sure it's as evil as you make it out to be. It's certainly not clear-cut domain-squatting.
They're adding value to a domain & selling it at (what I believe to be) a reasonable price. They're clearly investing time coming up with ideas for domains that they can create decent logos for. You would easily pay $500+ for a 'good' logo.
Domain squatting with fancy window dressing is still domain squatting. I'll admit, however, that this is a very clever form of domain squatting. I begrudgingly admire the player here, even if I hate the game.
This is sort of like the domain-squatter's equivalent of department store mannequins: visual aids that help shoppers picture what the items could look like in practice, sparking their imaginations, and thereby convincing them to buy. In this case, the logos are really just giveaways to sell visually and tangibly what would otherwise be abstract names. Again: it's kind of a stroke of genius, but it's a stroke of genius in a questionable profession.
So I end up with very mixed feelings here. Kudos to this guy for innovating, and for doing a good job at it. But I fear the rise of a second domain-squatting gold rush, when/if a bunch of squatters copy this model en masse and set up squat + design sweatshops to crank them out.
Domain squatting has a fairly specific legal definition. We aren't squatting. We actually came up with the idea after being frustrated by domain parking and squatters and frankly the whole domain industry.
And you are sticking it to that industry by ... doing the same?
It doesn't matter if you call it squatting or "domaining", in the end you are blocking thousands of domain names on the hope that someone needs that name so much that he will pay ransom for it.
(Kind of related: Anyone interested in a URI-dnsbl of squatted domain names?)
"(Kind of related: Anyone interested in a URI-dnsbl of squatted domain names?)"
I'm curious how you think that it's related. A blacklist directly impacts the startup purchasing the domain from purchasing it because of the murky ground involved in removing a domain name from blacklists.
And then, if you have a clear-cut mechanism for getting domain names off a blacklist when they cease to be squatted, what's the point of it? Domainers don't tend to build websites on theses domains, so blacklisting them out of being indexed on search engines is simply fixing a problem that doesn't exist. And as such, it doesn't lower the projected value of the domain in the eyes of either the purchaser or seller.
So it's not clear what purpose a URI-dnsbl would serve in regards to domaining.
It is only tangentially related because it is about domain squatting in general.
> removing a domain name from blacklists.
Of course the list would only carry squatted names, not names that have been brought from squatters. It would have to be regularly updated with a simple way to remove domains.
Some squatted domains do show up in search engines, so it could be used as a filter for that. Even better, when you accidentally land on a squatted domain (by following a link to a now-dead site, or by typoing a domain name) you get automatically redirected to Google or another search engine instead.
Gabriel Weinberg from Duck Duck Go has a similar list that he uses for his search engine, but he also had a Firefox toolbar that would prevent you from visiting squatted domains and instead get you to the correct domain when it was a typo. (The toolbar doesn't exist anymore).
Point is it's not their primary profit model. In fact, they'll make next to nothing on parking ads for these domains, being made-up names...unless their customers promote the domain before actually executing the transfer (which would not be a smart thing to do).
There are domainers that own hundreds of thousands and even millions of domains. Those are the guys making life suck.
These guys are actually helping, by doing the hard work of sifting through the relatively few good ones still available and charging a fair price for the effort.
Save all your outrage for the real scumbags and the ICANN organization that makes them possible.
It's annoying that they have purchased the domains, but there is no way to do this kind of boutique, pre-made branding without squatting the domains. So I'm not sure it is that clear cut. The logos and categorisation distinguish it from straight squatting.
I despise the blatant profiteering of domainers - they're sucking value out of a system that in some sense should "belong" to society, and providing nothing in return.
But these prices aren't completely unreasonable, they come with (generally quite decent) logos, and they would save a startup countless hours of faffing over domains.
Seems it does state on the sidebar that all domains are the same price.
I guess some people may see it as exploitative, but I would consider increasing the price of domains that a lot of people have clicked on and reducing the price of others.
I'm not sure I agree that this is such a 'superb idea' ...
As a founder, I want to personalise my domain, and design, and that means coming up with different concepts, and searching whois until I find a good match that's available ... The design then has to represent what the product is about in a non-generic way ... The designs on this site are far too generic for my taste
I can't imagine myself going to that page with a concept and saying 'AHA, that's exactly what I wanted' ... Possibly it could in reverse if someone is looking for inspiration for their next startup ...
I think that would make a great practice at idea generation and learning about brand awareness: get a list of these and try to decide what the named company does. Then compare with others. I'd be interested to see whether there are any names that totally dictate what the idea is.
When you're at the beginning stages, trying to get something built and possibly seeking seed money, spending your time naming, designing logos, and branding is sort of like spending all your money on a nice office before you have a product.
By all means, do the things you talk about when it's time--but that time is usually not at the beginning.
while I am sure that someone out there can use the service, taking the time to come up with your own name and design should not be given up lightly. I do take issue with the "branding" implication that these domains purportedly have. Before starting my own company I spent years in an ad agency, and I can tell you that unless there is an unusual amount of serendipity involved you probably won't find a name and image that fits perfectly with your company goals and vision. A brand is a promise to the public which conveys your intent your services and your commitment to your product. Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Disney all do this very well for example. If you're not a designer I can see gaining design inspiration from this site. But in my opinion, take a little time try to come up with your own ideas to implement.
I agree in some ways - but sometimes names can delay launches. I can see a small start up using this site to 'just get out there' - and worry about branding later.
Depending on what you are doing you can change your name/brand later.
Since /most/ start-ups fail, why not get to market quicker, with less cost, and less time/brain power wasted.
Everything in balance. You definitely should not delay the launch of a product because you can't think of a name. But getting to market and changing your name/brand later defeats the whole purpose of branding. In fact it's the opposite of branding. For the latest example just think about Netflix and what they did by naming their DVD mailing service qwixster. That name change is arguably a colossally bad move. I'm not saying your design has to be perfect, you can always update the image like Howard Johnson did for their motel chain. I tend to think that small businesses make a huge mistake when they gloss over the branding/marketing work. I am not advocating the necessity of bringing in a huge ad agency and market research just to get a logo. Just put in a little effort, use the same ingenuity you use when you started your company and come up with a brand identity that ties into what you do. At the very least you can go to logo tournament and get a custom built logo starting at 250. It's the same amount as this service plus you have are reasonably high degree of customization. Your name and your logo will be the most visible part of your company. You want it to instantly signify all the best traits and qualities you have, even if it is just subliminally. Some of the best brands out there who do this well, can just with their logo conjure up a long list of attributes/adjectives in a potential consumer's mind. A super simple one is Rolex… It's just their name with a crown over it. Even if you did not know that they were a watchmaker, by looking at their logo you would assume that whatever they do it's of high quality befitting of royalty or at least made the connection with royalty in your mind. I just think there are many more options that for the same amount of money and minimal effort you can put together something that is closely related and much more beneficial than an off the rack name and logo solution.
Ugh! These are just glorified domain sitters disguised as a trendy start-up. Please don't give these people your money - they ruin innovation by taking up massive amounts of domains then selling them for huge amounts.
These people RUIN the internet.
I know a lot of domainers (who own thousands of domain names) and all of them will sell a .COM for less than $1000, just because its a .COM doesn't mean its instantly worth at least $1000.
That's not to say they won't sell some domains for more than $1000 because, they own premium domains, as well as LLL.com's NNN.com's etc but your generalisation that a .COM is worth $1000 is wrong.
I think this is really good for people in certain situations, e.g., you're going to pitch an important event with a new idea and you don't have a name or a logo. The design is nice and clean. My only suggestion would be adding share buttons.
I love it. It's like themeforest for startups. Don't listen to the haters.
I have a lot of ideas I put on the backburner 'cause I'm busy with other things. The value in this isn't just the domain, it's the "packaging" of the entire first part of the process. I do this on themeforest too.. browse landing pages for one startup, but maybe buy a landing page that happens to be suited to another random startup idea, if I saw it.
Totally agree - I actually just lucked out and found a simple temp name for a startup I'm working on. Trying to find a name has been a pain, and now its sorted in 2 minutes. I won't use the branding, but FINALLY we have a domain.
I'm sure they'll be sold out by the end of the day.
No, please do listen to the haters. They may well explain to you how the system is so intratcably broken that it must cause cognitive dissonance if you believe in a free Internet.
The DNS is not your friend. The sooner you recognize the lack of utility of globally unique names and the pound of flesh being extracted for this inane privilege, the sooner you will be on the side of the future.
Yes, yes.. barriers to entry are always awesome for entrenched players. I'm not even slightly interested in how your name is your competitive advantage. If you believe this lie, I do not care about your success.
No, please do listen to the haters. They may well explain to you how the system is so intratcably broken that it must cause cognitive dissonance if you believe in a free Internet.
The DNS is not your friend. The sooner you recognize the lack of utility of globally unique names and the pound of flesh being extracted for this inane privilege, the sooner you will be on the side of the future.
Yes, yes.. barriers to entry are always awesome for entrenched players. I'm not even slightly interested in how your name is your competitive advantage. If you believe this lie, I do not care about your success.
I agree. I bought ZippyKid.com from Brandstack last year. I would never have thought of it myself, even though all my initial customers had said how fast I was in responding to emails, and how much faster their sites were after they switched to me.
Also a fan; I've sent our clients their way before, and every time we got positive feedback! Simple interface, easy process - I'll continue to recommend!
Count me in the group that finds $250 to be a steal for this sort of thing. Your mission page is spot on.
The amount of time/headache it takes to brand a startup should not be underestimated. I think that the logos are fine to get started quickly but probably would all need to be changed in the long run, but no big deal, you've provided a decent enough starting point where it doesn't look shitty atleast and can allow someone to build their product while still having a decent looking thing on their site.
We spent several WEEKS of all hands on deck and lots of $$$ (Well over $10k for the domain name, banners, stationery etc) as a company rebranding from Transparent Financial Services (http://transfs.com) to FeeFighters (http://feefighters.com).
Had we started with something better than transfs from the beginning we wouldn't have had the problem (btw, it's still a pain in the ass because google apps doesn't let you change your name, so we still only have a duct tape solution where our google apps are still @transfs and I occasionally still send an email from @transfs - embarassing!). Plus, we lost all the google juice we'd built up over that time (which was considerable - TransFS was a PageRank 5 site and FeeFighters had none).
At that point (post-funding), our time and pagerank were a lot more important than the money.
Agreed. The time and money you can waste doing domain search and logo design far exceeds the $250 price they're charging. Having done this a number of times myself, $250 is a major bargain for something that is vetted and pretty much ready-to-promote.
Looking through the brands, nothing really fits any of my current projects but I would definitely consider coming back to check again and again.
That's exactly the problem with this service: nothing really fits any of your current projects. If none of them fit now, what are the chances they'll have something that fits in a week? A month?
Looking at the list of domains on offer, half of them are 'empty vessel' nonsense words which could quite easily be generated with the same amount of personal effort using something like Wordoid[1]. The other half are nothing more than Monkey Tennis[2], i.e. word pairings thrown out there in the hope that someone else will build a product around it[3].
Plenty of excruciatingly successful companies have run start to finish with dumber, emptier names than you'll find here. I'm surprised "TransVerify", for instance, is even available.
If you think you're going to get less than $250 worth of value from this site, don't use it. But count me in with the people saying that that a lot of these are steals. Just in terms of opportunity costs saved in spending weeks bouncing names around, this seems like a major value.
I'm with tptacek on this one. This is provides tremendous value to those that need it.
It's the classic out of the box software vs custom development argument we see every day in companies around the world. Some people will yell "BUT IT'S NOT EXACTLY WHAT WE NEED" but the bottom line is that it provides value to those that don't need a "perfect" branding fit.
I'm all over your point but strictly only in theory.
These logos are for the most part gobsmackingly awful. I'm genuinely surprised that there's no Comic Sans among them. Robogenerating words with free fonts you dug up on some website is not the same thing as a 'Design Service'.
This is my feeling as well. You have to sell about 200 of these a year to make any sort of profit off this. That means you have to have a large enough selection to make that many sales. That means each one has less time allocated to it, and is going to be of less quality. I'd rather pay someone to spend the time to get it done my way. That said, this isn't an obvious scam in the way that http://www.brandings.com/ is.
Absolutely. You know what else would be nice? Color palettes, maybe even a "starter" CSS file to point you in the right direction to have the style of the site match the logo and name. Fiddling with that stuff can soak up an inordinate amount of time in the first days ...
Small point: I believe Google Webmaster Tools has a tool for when you change your sites' names, which might have come in handy to transfer your PR5 to the new domain. Did you try this feature?
Now all we need is a place where you can put brandless but fully implemented tech solutions. e.g. "sms to e-mail technology".
That brings us to the final piece of the puzzle: a site where you can invest in a "team" that has no idea and no technology.
Then the guys who walk around with bags of money evaluating teams and business propositions will finally be able to just mix and match to whatever they want, thinking (as they already do) that they're the ones adding all the value. Which, to be fair, under capitalism they probably do.
That's a symptom that startups possibly became a new fashion.
Now the following is a bit offtopic, but the thoughts are what I have in mind for quite a time.
Look how many startups are there around whose only purpose is to connect or extract information from other startups whose again are build on the top some previous startups. Where is a stop for this? Where's the creativity? Where's the thinking of making things that people really need?
This looks like a rant but please think of it analytically:
1. People start to use product A because it fills some temporary niche.
2. The conditions of the niche vanish, but the product is still used, the user base grows because of inertia, marketing, whatever.
3. As the initial conditions dissolved the product A isn't exactly what people need at the moment, so there emerge products B & C built on the top of A with even more fragile conditions: only to support momentary lack of desired features in A.
Any similarity with existing startup scene?
Well, what if all these products were build based on some more unconditional needs of the users in the first place?
"Where's the creativity? Where's the thinking of making things that people really need?"
Startup owners are people that need things too - often really good customers to work with as they understand the time involved in building a product and will pay for services that save them time/money.
If anything, startups selling to startups is fantastic news as:
1. It's creating an ecosystem of small, independently owned businesses - a vibrant self-contained economy.
2. Good marketing is selecting a niche that is small enough to compete in but large enough to build a profitable business. It validates that startups are a successful enough business model that there's enough people in that community to constitute a profitable niche market.
3. It doesn't matter if the need is not permanent - all customer needs are transient given a long enough timeframe. If I have a problem I'll pay to solve then I'm not thinking about whether I'll have the same problem in 10 years, just that I want it solved right now.
211 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadSometimes you can spend 3-20 hours trying to figure out a name, domain, and branding. I'd pay a couple hundred bucks to skip that step. I wish this existed all those previous times I was stuck grinding on names!
If I was starting out something new I'd def check here, and use this as a starting point, use the logo to start a basic site, get a letter head made and some business cards done - bang, hours save, cost of a decent logo save, headaches saved.
Plus, you can change your name when ever you like - people get so overly stressed about names, as though the .com is the most important thing.
You can always iterate later if necessary, but this gives you something to use NOW, and put the discussion away and get back to real work.
Also, I love the layout. Very straightforward. I currently subscribe to the http://justdropped.com/ mailing list which has daily domain names that he buys as they expire.. I could see something similar for your site, but with logos attached.
Also, a NewsLetter would be a great way for me to keep up with the (weekly?) new designs you add to the store.
Keep it up!
A URL alone does not makes a site or a success.
Seriously? You've given up on an idea because you couldn't find a domain name? Your idea is contingent on a domain?
* altavista.digital.com * del.icio.us * thefacebook.com
Nonetheless, this is a superb idea, which can become easily profitable.
Serves me right for having worked almost 4 years for a very large mobile games developer here in Argentina and having seen 40% of my paycheck being eaten away by inflation in the last few years.
I simply can't afford these domains, I would have loved to have them turned into full blown sites, just for fun!
Congratulations to the people that purchase them... please treat them nice :)
I'd be surprised if most of the domains are not sold quickly.
Are you seriously saying that if you owned the domain name coke.com and the domain name jkkjs7e98wesj.com that you'd sell them to me for £10 each?
The costs in terms of our time, plus the design time are going to be way more that $250 - so if this has something you want and can use, great. If not there are literally millions of other names out there.
These guys, IMHO, are adding value. If you think not - fair enough, but they aren't selling just a domain. They are selling time saved. Some peoples time won't be worth as much, some people are already talented designers. For the rest of us, this is a great idea.
The interesting aspect of this service is as a set of triggers. You'll find some people will immediately spot a matching domain in that list - they may not have thought of it themselves, but seeing it there triggers off the lightbulb.
Sure you can do the exact same thing with a command line whois, but then you don't get the benefit of serendipity. Someone else's list of brandable domains shows an item you weren't expecting to see, and that triggers off your own creative process into a different direction, and you find an end result you may not have arrived at without that serendipitous discovery.
You are seeing the results of someone else's creative process of discovering brandable domains. You don't have to pay for that effort, but you can be motivated by it. The $250 charge is if one of those domains is a perfect match, not for the process of finding an available perfect match and brandable domain.
The route that satisfies your expenditure expectations is watching expired domains lists - that's another source of someone else's creative inspiration. But you either have to scan tens of thousands of junk entries, or have a keyword list of some sort to focus on. Even then, because of the volume, you'll miss excellent domain names that are slightly outside of your current thread of ideas.
Then there's http://impossibility.org/ - generating available domains centred around a keyword. It's interesting, more serendipitous than expired lists, and purchasable immediately by registration. This is probably one of the better "suggested domain name" tools around, though it's just sticking words before or after your keyword. Sometimes an good domains does pop out, but it takes a bit of a graft, or a lazy Sunday afternoon.
Or sit there typing one domain idea at a time into a whois. It depends on your own level of innate creativity as to which approach will reap dividends. Personally, I use several different avenues. This is one more to keep an eye on.
Don't underestimate the creativity and inspiration. This is perhaps a better source of quality domains than Sedo/GoDaddy auctions, ebay/flippa/digitalpoint. Better, because of it's focus on brandable names rather than generic keywords / keyword-heavy / geo-targetted domains that are the current vogue in domainer/internet marketing circles.
These guys won't know what matches perfectly for you, only you do. If the price upsets you, you are not forced to buy even if it's a perfect match, you can just find another perfectly matching domain that is available.
I wonder if you'd consider locking in the matching Twitter, YouTube, etc. names as well. I'm afraid that if you don't now unscrupulous people will start scanning the site and picking those up.
Good idea.
And the thought of spending $250/month on beer and coffee is disturbing. I spend $15 ;)
Flagged.
They're adding value to a domain & selling it at (what I believe to be) a reasonable price. They're clearly investing time coming up with ideas for domains that they can create decent logos for. You would easily pay $500+ for a 'good' logo.
This is sort of like the domain-squatter's equivalent of department store mannequins: visual aids that help shoppers picture what the items could look like in practice, sparking their imaginations, and thereby convincing them to buy. In this case, the logos are really just giveaways to sell visually and tangibly what would otherwise be abstract names. Again: it's kind of a stroke of genius, but it's a stroke of genius in a questionable profession.
So I end up with very mixed feelings here. Kudos to this guy for innovating, and for doing a good job at it. But I fear the rise of a second domain-squatting gold rush, when/if a bunch of squatters copy this model en masse and set up squat + design sweatshops to crank them out.
It doesn't matter if you call it squatting or "domaining", in the end you are blocking thousands of domain names on the hope that someone needs that name so much that he will pay ransom for it.
(Kind of related: Anyone interested in a URI-dnsbl of squatted domain names?)
I'm curious how you think that it's related. A blacklist directly impacts the startup purchasing the domain from purchasing it because of the murky ground involved in removing a domain name from blacklists.
And then, if you have a clear-cut mechanism for getting domain names off a blacklist when they cease to be squatted, what's the point of it? Domainers don't tend to build websites on theses domains, so blacklisting them out of being indexed on search engines is simply fixing a problem that doesn't exist. And as such, it doesn't lower the projected value of the domain in the eyes of either the purchaser or seller.
So it's not clear what purpose a URI-dnsbl would serve in regards to domaining.
> I'm curious how you think that it's related.
It is only tangentially related because it is about domain squatting in general.
> removing a domain name from blacklists.
Of course the list would only carry squatted names, not names that have been brought from squatters. It would have to be regularly updated with a simple way to remove domains.
Some squatted domains do show up in search engines, so it could be used as a filter for that. Even better, when you accidentally land on a squatted domain (by following a link to a now-dead site, or by typoing a domain name) you get automatically redirected to Google or another search engine instead.
Gabriel Weinberg from Duck Duck Go has a similar list that he uses for his search engine, but he also had a Firefox toolbar that would prevent you from visiting squatted domains and instead get you to the correct domain when it was a typo. (The toolbar doesn't exist anymore).
2. Adding value
3. Not using means such as using expiring names
4. Not using "bottom feeder" tactics like parking page advertising.
From wikipedia: cybersquatting:
" or using a domain name with bad faith intent to profit from the goodwill of a trademark belonging to someone else"
What goodwill or trademark are they misusing?
[Edit: For formatting, but couldn't get it to look like I want.]
You mean trademarked.
These guys are actually helping, by doing the hard work of sifting through the relatively few good ones still available and charging a fair price for the effort.
Save all your outrage for the real scumbags and the ICANN organization that makes them possible.
As far as blackballing, I can think of one super well known tech figure who came from the domain industry - Michael Arrington.
But these prices aren't completely unreasonable, they come with (generally quite decent) logos, and they would save a startup countless hours of faffing over domains.
I guess some people may see it as exploitative, but I would consider increasing the price of domains that a lot of people have clicked on and reducing the price of others.
As a founder, I want to personalise my domain, and design, and that means coming up with different concepts, and searching whois until I find a good match that's available ... The design then has to represent what the product is about in a non-generic way ... The designs on this site are far too generic for my taste
I can't imagine myself going to that page with a concept and saying 'AHA, that's exactly what I wanted' ... Possibly it could in reverse if someone is looking for inspiration for their next startup ...
By all means, do the things you talk about when it's time--but that time is usually not at the beginning.
Depending on what you are doing you can change your name/brand later.
Since /most/ start-ups fail, why not get to market quicker, with less cost, and less time/brain power wasted.
That's not to say they won't sell some domains for more than $1000 because, they own premium domains, as well as LLL.com's NNN.com's etc but your generalisation that a .COM is worth $1000 is wrong.
I have a lot of ideas I put on the backburner 'cause I'm busy with other things. The value in this isn't just the domain, it's the "packaging" of the entire first part of the process. I do this on themeforest too.. browse landing pages for one startup, but maybe buy a landing page that happens to be suited to another random startup idea, if I saw it.
Good luck to you, sirs / madams.
I'm sure they'll be sold out by the end of the day.
The DNS is not your friend. The sooner you recognize the lack of utility of globally unique names and the pound of flesh being extracted for this inane privilege, the sooner you will be on the side of the future.
Yes, yes.. barriers to entry are always awesome for entrenched players. I'm not even slightly interested in how your name is your competitive advantage. If you believe this lie, I do not care about your success.
The DNS is not your friend. The sooner you recognize the lack of utility of globally unique names and the pound of flesh being extracted for this inane privilege, the sooner you will be on the side of the future.
Yes, yes.. barriers to entry are always awesome for entrenched players. I'm not even slightly interested in how your name is your competitive advantage. If you believe this lie, I do not care about your success.
Nicely designed site, though. Looks great.
As I see it you get a working logo matched with a domain you like, even if it's not your final visual identity it's at least a start.
The amount of time/headache it takes to brand a startup should not be underestimated. I think that the logos are fine to get started quickly but probably would all need to be changed in the long run, but no big deal, you've provided a decent enough starting point where it doesn't look shitty atleast and can allow someone to build their product while still having a decent looking thing on their site.
We spent several WEEKS of all hands on deck and lots of $$$ (Well over $10k for the domain name, banners, stationery etc) as a company rebranding from Transparent Financial Services (http://transfs.com) to FeeFighters (http://feefighters.com). Had we started with something better than transfs from the beginning we wouldn't have had the problem (btw, it's still a pain in the ass because google apps doesn't let you change your name, so we still only have a duct tape solution where our google apps are still @transfs and I occasionally still send an email from @transfs - embarassing!). Plus, we lost all the google juice we'd built up over that time (which was considerable - TransFS was a PageRank 5 site and FeeFighters had none).
At that point (post-funding), our time and pagerank were a lot more important than the money.
More on our rebrand that might be useful to people (you now have to pay to see the video but can download the audio and read transcript for free): http://mixergy.com/sean-harper-feefighters-intervie/
Looking through the brands, nothing really fits any of my current projects but I would definitely consider coming back to check again and again.
Looking at the list of domains on offer, half of them are 'empty vessel' nonsense words which could quite easily be generated with the same amount of personal effort using something like Wordoid[1]. The other half are nothing more than Monkey Tennis[2], i.e. word pairings thrown out there in the hope that someone else will build a product around it[3].
[1] http://www.wordoid.com/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_tennis [3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rS1le_8ZhOU&t=1m30s
If you think you're going to get less than $250 worth of value from this site, don't use it. But count me in with the people saying that that a lot of these are steals. Just in terms of opportunity costs saved in spending weeks bouncing names around, this seems like a major value.
It's the classic out of the box software vs custom development argument we see every day in companies around the world. Some people will yell "BUT IT'S NOT EXACTLY WHAT WE NEED" but the bottom line is that it provides value to those that don't need a "perfect" branding fit.
But it's not: Stylate owns it. ;)
These logos are for the most part gobsmackingly awful. I'm genuinely surprised that there's no Comic Sans among them. Robogenerating words with free fonts you dug up on some website is not the same thing as a 'Design Service'.
http://stylate.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/burntfood_smal...
http://stylate.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/usante_small.p...
REALLY? Those are worth more than a cold cup of coffee?
I thought it sounded like a great idea from the link title, and I'd have no issue with the price if there was any actual value in the value-add.
Love the fixed $250 price.
Great work guys.
That brings us to the final piece of the puzzle: a site where you can invest in a "team" that has no idea and no technology.
Then the guys who walk around with bags of money evaluating teams and business propositions will finally be able to just mix and match to whatever they want, thinking (as they already do) that they're the ones adding all the value. Which, to be fair, under capitalism they probably do.
Now the following is a bit offtopic, but the thoughts are what I have in mind for quite a time.
Look how many startups are there around whose only purpose is to connect or extract information from other startups whose again are build on the top some previous startups. Where is a stop for this? Where's the creativity? Where's the thinking of making things that people really need?
This looks like a rant but please think of it analytically:
1. People start to use product A because it fills some temporary niche.
2. The conditions of the niche vanish, but the product is still used, the user base grows because of inertia, marketing, whatever.
3. As the initial conditions dissolved the product A isn't exactly what people need at the moment, so there emerge products B & C built on the top of A with even more fragile conditions: only to support momentary lack of desired features in A.
Any similarity with existing startup scene?
Well, what if all these products were build based on some more unconditional needs of the users in the first place?
Startup owners are people that need things too - often really good customers to work with as they understand the time involved in building a product and will pay for services that save them time/money.
If anything, startups selling to startups is fantastic news as:
1. It's creating an ecosystem of small, independently owned businesses - a vibrant self-contained economy.
2. Good marketing is selecting a niche that is small enough to compete in but large enough to build a profitable business. It validates that startups are a successful enough business model that there's enough people in that community to constitute a profitable niche market.
3. It doesn't matter if the need is not permanent - all customer needs are transient given a long enough timeframe. If I have a problem I'll pay to solve then I'm not thinking about whether I'll have the same problem in 10 years, just that I want it solved right now.