So to add to your advise, I’d just say that you should get try to get a good domain in the sense that you should avoid obvious mispellings or proper spellings that you would have to get later if you turn out to be successful.

Thank you for your 2 cents. I don’t disagree with you as such, but I think we should be careful not to confuse things here.

Flickr had no value before the service became a success, neither did Zyb, neither did Skype. And the question is whether flicker had 3.6 million visitors per year before flickr became a success. I don’t know but I highly doubt it.

I don’t say don’t go over $50K, what I am saying is if you are a startup don’t do it unless it comes with traffic. Money are better spent improving your product or service.

Buying traffic is not the same as buying success.

So it becomes a pseudo argument.

I absolutely agree with the sentiment “if your product is great, people will find it”. We all know this is true. Google is not exactly a common name.

I don’t agree with “your name is not your brand”. As long as people need to remember you, your name IS your brand – at least a significant part of it. We have also seen this, even in the examples you cite – how much traffic does Flickr loose to Flicker? According to flicker.com, 3.6 million visitors per year.

What kind of startup are we talking about? If you are about to sell candy online, candy.com may be worth millions to you. If you are about to sell flights, fly.com may be worth something to you. If you are a news site in Germany, news.de may be your perfect name.

If you are about to do something very innovative (few start ups really do), you may be fine with using a creative artificial name. But even then, if you don’t go for a decent domain, you have to be prepared to buy it later at significantly higher cost than $50,000 – see Dropbox. Or lose and confuse millions of potential users.

Regarding heavy metal band names, I do hope you have a copy of All Known Metal Bands.

I reference this incredible compendium of heavy metal band names in my naming post, “Where are the most creative names?”

http://operativewords.blogspot.com/2009/06/where-are-most-creative-names.html

Thanks for sharing your words of wisdom.

- Anth

cs

[...] to come up with a company name. Don’t stress. That’s the advice of Thomas Petersen who says that a great product will more than compensate for a bad name. So focus on that. [...]

There’s a huge variety of country code top-level domains that can be used for your product.

For example, the most popular and brandable country extensions at iWantMyName are:

- .IO (British Indian Ocean Territory)
- .FM (Federal States of Micronesia)
- .AM (Armenia)
- .ME (Montenegro)
- .IM (Isle of Man)
- .AT (Austria)
- .IN (India)
- .MU (Mauritius)

They’re all based on stable registries and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t go with one of them. Just be creative and have fun when chosing a name… :)