Ask HN: Should I buy this domain? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should I buy this domain?

4 pointsthrowaway978 comments

Hi everyone, looking for a name for my B2B webapp project and think I have something. I'd eventually like to turn it from a project into a profitable company.

7 letters, 2 syllables, .com, looks like 1 word, and I can get it for high 3 figures USD. (Not a small amount of money, but my bank balance has gone up enough recently to cover it). Looks great written/typed, can be said over the phone, just doesn't roll 'perfectly' off the tongue.

It's a verb representing what people will do on my webapp (e.g. share) + short suffix (e.g. ly) + .com.

There's a (very) slightly related product using the .net; but it's from a small middle-eastern country, looks small, and it just a sub-project of a bigger company (judging by the different company name in its footer).

I'm not an expert, but it looks like it's being sold a little under value, because similar (worse) domains are going for 4 figures.

I'd almost buy it even for its investment value, but I thought I'd ask here first if there's anything else I should check or do.

Any advice would be much appreciated, thanks!

How far along is your project? Do you have a good feel for whether this is something you're likely to carry through to completion?

I personally tend to put too much time into looking for a domain name too early in the project (because it's fun to do, honestly). It's much better to at the very least do serious research first (competitors, understanding and talking to possible customers, etc.), and have done proof-of-concept work for technical challenges, and done some design on your minimum-viable-product first version before worrying about a domain name, because it's so frequent to find some serious problem during that process that will cause you to abandon the project (or perhaps realize that you don't find it as interesting as you thought initially -- if you don't have some serious passion for solving this particular problem, it's not likely you'll have the motivation to get through the hard parts of building a business around it!).

If you've already gotten past those steps -- sure, go for it. Upper 3-figures isn't a high number if this feels like a very good candidate.

I don't recommend buying it as an investment, though... There was an HN thread a few weeks back on the subject of assessing domain names, and in general they aren't very valuable. Yes, many names are taken, but there are so many businesses that are succeeding in spite of quite odd domain names (hell, thinking of domain names, what about "GoDaddy.com" for a completely random domain name?).

Great reply, thank you.

I'm just working on the MVP at the moment, but it's not that far yet. I'm also doing it as a project to learn some new technologies so it might take longer than expected.

Nice point on the investment too. I may just add it to my watchlist for now. Thanks again!

If you are going to buy it, make sure you will use it. I can't tell you how many domains I bought and never used.

Haha, I'm keeping that in mind too :)

If you pay me half the amount, I will come up with a better domain name.

Buy it when your webapp is live and showing signs of success.

Check for potential trademark issues.

Snag it. Don't wait.

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