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So were Stripe and Parse, as it happens. We reached out to the owners of domains that looked unused / potentially for sale.

How did you start that process, and (if you don't mind saying) around how much did it cost? I've been looking at what it would take to buy some domains that are marked as taken and get pointed to domainagents.com by my registrar, but it's $199 minimum bid with a $30 deposit (with $10 going straight to the seller simply for responding), and I worry that they'll ask for like $100K, which I'm obviously not going to pay at this stage in the company lifetime.

> After sending a bunch of these emails by hand, I wrote a Bash script for the process in my old Harvard Computer Society shell account (sending from a .edu address would make us seem reputable while not flush with cash). I tested it out, but having forgotten both “set -u” and to provide any inputs, it sent an email with all variables blank. The to: address defaulted to mailer-daemon@, an administrative list that all of my former HCS colleagues were on. They were pretty confused to see my email asking if I could buy “.com” from them, and I was suitably embarrassed. I figured the cost of further similar embarrassment would be higher than the manual time I'd save, so I kept sending emails manually.

> In total, I sent several hundred emails that day. Of the plausible responses I received, stripe.com was the clear winner. (Incidentally, I also got a reply from the parse.com owner; months later I sent my accumulated domain name list to Tikhon Bernstam, which is how Parse got its name.)

http://www.quora.com/How-did-Stripe-come-up-with-its-name/an...

Cost:

> We'd rather not disclose the amount, but it was less than you might think.

http://www.quora.com/How-much-did-Stripe-com-spend-on-their-...

Summary: They sent emails from a student email address to the domain contacts as listed in the Whois details. Cost was perhaps in the range of $2-20k (which I realize is a big range).

DomainAgents is a startup that helps people buy and sell domain names. We (I'm one of the founders) help startups get their ideal domain names all the time.

A few thoughts.

When possible try to buy your domain before any sort of serious traction, first thing people who own domains are going to do is Google their domain and see what comes up. So if you're running on GetHappy.com and are blowing up, you're making the generic domain "happy.com" more valuable every day. Even with a TM, a rocking responsive site, and editors pick in the app store, the value of Happy.com improves right along side your KPIs, your entitlement to the domain however does not.

If you're running on a generic term like "Happy" and things are going well, chances are the term is being picked up by other developers. If you're thinking "no one is going to go after that domain, it's mine!" you're wrong. The guys running theHappyapp.com and haappy.io have likely already pinged the owner trying to buy the domain. So has your arch rival getunhappy.com ... just because they want to screw you. The longer you wait the more people will try to buy the domain. The more interest in an asset, the more potential for the domain to become increasingly expensive.

A good domain name really is an asset. It's likely that for at least the next 10 years or more, a solid .com is going to be an asset that will, at worst, hold it's value. So even if Google enters your market, eats your lunch, then Facebook follows to finish you off, if you own happy.com, you will still have something that you can potentially borrow against, or sell to fund a pivot.

And finally, if you've got a round locked down, see if you can buy the domain you're after before it's announced.

Care to share how much you paid for it? I typically see north of $5k. For a very early stage company its hard to justify even just $5k.

Was answering the question above and came across this so figured I'd share -- though maybe Patrick/Stripe has changed his/their mind since then :-)

> We'd rather not disclose the amount, but it was less than you might think.

http://www.quora.com/How-much-did-Stripe-com-spend-on-their-...

Yeah, now the challenge is just that I don't remember the exact amount :-). I believe $20k or $30k. We'd raised ~$1.8M by this point and so it seemed like a reasonable amount to spend.

That was 2010 right ? I'm going to throw this out there...The 2015 price point for a dictionary .com name of that caliber is double that at least.

The domain owner initially asked for $30k. We negotiated him down to $12.5k up front and another $12.5k a year later. As an early-stage startup, this structure was a huge win, since we expected we'd either raise money or no longer exist within the next year.

I have recent experience in this, as I spent 4-5 hours trying to name my new company.

I was first looking for some reference on prometheus.io and a transliteration for the Irish for "fire" looked free - but turned out to be to a derogatory term for Indians so that wasn't an option (always check Urban Dictionary). Next I looked for something with the initials AE (which means "liver" in Irish), and even after trawling through a thesaurus and /usr/share/dict/words nothing worked that was available in DNS.

Finally I had a list of ~100 words that were candidates. Single words were out as they weren't easily Googleable, and all were taken. I played with word pairs a bit, and the 3rd or 4th I really liked was free in DNS and not popular on the web. I now have robustperception.io, with the .com and plurals to be safe.

People I've talked to have liked the name "Robust Perception", and it ties into what we do, so it seems to have been worth all the hassle. Name pollution is a real problem.

There are still a few one-word domains left in the .com TLD (e.g. naziisms.com, regularizing.com, castigators.com). I myself registered one earlier this summer.

http://www.randomdotcom.com/

I can just see it now.

"Certainly there are some unfortunate connotations with our name, but we feel that the advantage of having a memorable, one-word dot-com domain name is worth it." - Bob Q. Startup, Founder and CEO of Naziisms, Inc.

Probably not for long - with 1.4 thousand domains and $10/domain, it would only take $14K to complete the corner of the .com TLD. Was tempted to do it myself, but my wife would probably have an issue with dropping $14K on the likes of blotchier.com, naziisms.com, ossiffies.com, chastens.com, etc.

(BTW, after clicking through random domains 50 or so times, I had some of them come up 3 times, which makes me think that there are more like 50-100 untaken .com domains than the 1.4K they say.)

I purchased a domain a few months back that I found on that site. Still debating on using it as my company's name, just not the best to spell.

Yeah.

I have quite a lot of experience trying to find names and is fairly good at coming up with them. Actually finding available names that have the proper quality is very very hard and time consuming.