Paul Graham on Naming Your Startup

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In his latest blog post, VC Paul Graham talks about names for startups - especially domain names

The reason is not just that people can’t find you. For companies with mobile apps, especially, having the right domain name is not as critical as it used to be for getting users. The problem with not having the .com of your name is that it signals weakness. Unless you’re so big that your reputation precedes you, a marginal domain suggests you’re a marginal company. Whereas (as Stripe shows) having x.com signals strength even if it has no relation to what you do.

Even good founders can be in denial about this. Their denial derives from two very powerful forces: identity, and lack of imagination.

X is what we are, founders think. There’s no other name as good. Both of which are false.

Change Your Name

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I recall new TLDs were proposed to be a game changer for marketing strategies.

It’s important to separate fact from fiction regarding TLDs and to ask the question, “Will the new TLDs matter to marketers and consumers?”.

In the past, TLD registration were all handled by the ICANN, but in 2014, the door was opened for entrepreneurs to create their own TLDs that they can control on their own. So now, there are essentially an endless amount of TLDs. Business owners can have their site end with things like .xyz, .toys, .io, .info, and more. Nearly 4 million web sites around the world use one of the newly created TLD.

I think all TLDs work in a general sense. People know that the various country TLDs can be used to find information from a certain region of the world. Consumers generally know that .fr is for pages in France and that .ca is for Canada. However, I know it’s not perfect, as a study from Moz suggests that nearly 25 percent of Americans can be tricked into thinking that .ca is for California; so they knew that the TLD was for a region, but guessed the wrong region.

Similarly, people know that a .tv site will be about a television show, .edu is for schools, that .org pages tend to be for non-profits. The .edu and .org are the two TLDs that carry the most meaning for consumers. Searchers know that .edu resources will be more reliable since they are from schools and not from businesses. And people associate .org with organizations, groups or non profits with goals other than profit. Many people don’t realize that .com itself is short for “commercial” which was chosen in the early days of the internet to identify the sites that weren’t the traditional school or government based web pages that first populated the nascent world wide web.

The challenge for these new TLDs is that though people can use them to quickly understand the purpose of a site, consumers don’t inherently trust sites with unusual TLDs more than ones with more traditional endings, and that’s insane. Completely insane.

And despite what people say, I strongly believe all TLDs have the same intrinsic value if the right SEO is implemented.

The new TLDs will become popular soon enough, and will be treated no differently. See http://andela.co (Google ‘andela’ and see the URL provided), see Hotels.ng, GreenHouse.io, and a whole lots more.

I myself is presently trying out .info for a new web service (although it’s an old TLD).
My point is that good marketing and SEO will do the trick. Your choice.

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