SinglePill.com – Entertaining News

It might be more than you think. I recently commented on Techcrunch that a recent start up had a quite horrific name that was neither catchy nor practical. I don’t want to beat a dead horse but this particular start up is using a Native American word for friend as their company name. It really has no connection to their service but just to add insult to injury instead of having the .com domain extension, they’re using the .us domain. I suppose that’s what was only available for registration. In an ironic twist the company who owns the .com domain, the traffic to their website is up more than 50% from last year quite possibly due to this start up.

I’ve done some digging through the TechCrunch DeadPool and you can’t help but notice the huge amount of companies who raised significant amounts of money and worked so hard to build great products but almost seemed to ignore their company name completely. I didn’t go all the way through so if you’ve got some that you’d like to share, feel free to add on in the comments. Not all companies have a huge amount of cash to spend on a domain, but this trend of crazy “make up anything and launch this mother!” attitude is irresponsible.

In the image hosting (sharing) space there was; AllYouCanUpload.com and BubbleShare.com. Either one of those companies could have picked up ImageHost.com (a parked, essentially unused domain) as an easy to remember and logical company name. One of the more comical ones was TeeBeeDee.com a failed social portal for baby boomers. Boomers.com which gets more than 10,000 unique type-in visitors month over month is currently parked and quite honestly can’t be generating a huge amount of revenue and could have probably been picked up for low six figures. Even BabyBoomers.com the most logical choice is probably for sale for the right price. It’s currently a modest website that looks as if it was designed back in 1994 by the webmaster who was in charge of the Heaven’s Gate cult website before he boarded the space ship.

Trusera.com was a heavily funded health portal that couldn’t become profitable. If only it had acquired Healthy.com as their easily recognizable domain it might have helped make a little bit of a difference. The personal reminder service Kwiry.com could have picked up reminders.com for a reasonable amount. I especially liked the money transfer service iKobo.com, I’m sure they weren’t aware that MoneyWire.com was available. The video site aimed at bringing content suitable for kids under 10 could have done better with KidsVideos.com then their choice of TotLol.com. There were some that nailed it a little bit closer, like the personal cartoon creation sharing site MyToons.com. (Cartoons.com is available for sale)

The last one I’m going to mention is my absolute favorite, the personal news service Thoof.com. They had a great idea, they could offer a service that would let me choose what kind of news feeds I wanted to receive. Essentially I could customize my news. Amazing, oh by the way I think MyNews.com is avialble for less than $10,000.

Now I know what you’re thinking, “these companies might have failed regardless of the name”. This is most likely true, however there are some facts that can’t be ignored. When one is starting up a company you hope to build a product or service that’s going to gain the attention of the media. Print, television, radio and the internet. Having worked in advertising and PR I’ve been on the phone with show producers, radio DJ’s and journalists and one thing that was always clarified carefully was the company name and website. I actually had to once clarify a clients domain name that was a .info six times. The journalist was alarmed by the fact that the company was using a .info domain as their web address. My client sold information data services for a specific industry. So it was gimicky but sort of made sense. Sure enough the web version of the article was published with a .com instead of the .info address.

I also feel that you have a responsibility to spend your investors money wisely, splashy print ads and hundreds of thousands on banner ads that everyone ignores doesn’t seem like money well spent. Oh and by the way, in the event that things don’t work out a .com domain (in some cases a .net as well) will actually have a resale value. Try selling your print advertising from the last two years.

I’m not saying that you even have to get a .com extension (although you should) but when you start to use domain hacks (as they’re called) for your marketing, you’re asking for trouble. I know there are some good examples companies who have done well without them. Delicious or imageShack.us are doing just fine. I just think there are an even greater number of companies who have taken the time (and money) to seek out great generic domains that have a real connection to their business.

CreditCards.com – Coupons.com – Savings.com – RealEstate.com – Shopping.com – Ancestry.com – Business.com – Blogs.com

Even in the case where a great domain isn’t available some companies get creative and find an alternative that makes sense. OpenTable.com probably looked up who owned Reservations.com when they were preparing to launch. Of course once they saw that it was owned by Travelocity they probably figured they couldn’t afford the asking price.

The list goes on and on. Thankfully it seems there are some start ups who understand that your company name doesn’t guarantee you success but it sure can’t hurt. Bill.com and Face.com were two great acquisitions as was Clothes.com (by Zappos last year). None of those domains came cheap I’m sure, but in the end I think they’ll find it was worth it.

It just doesn’t make sense to make creating “brand awareness”  an even more difficult (and expensive) task than it already is. I even couldn’t help but notice that Austrialian start up (food and dieting social network) FatSecret.com has gotten the same marketing woes as well. Personally I like Calories.com better, but if you want something on the cheap why not CaloriesPerServing.com. Or something really really cheap, CaloriesPerServing.net it’s available for registration.