Your name is fine

http://blog.standupti.me/post/126530670964/paul-graham-is-wrong-and-your-name-is-fine

by polysaturate • 11 years ago

43 43 11 years ago

blog.standupti.me

In recent news, many HN users avoid up-voting/commenting on things that disagree with pg/sama/etc. in the chance that their likelihood of getting into YC will be hindered.

gct• 11 years ago

After seeing how PG treats people when the filter's off, I don't think I want to be in YC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii1jcLg-eIQ#t=2179

btian• 11 years ago

What did he do?

Someone asked a dumb question and got called out for it.

richardbrevig2• 11 years ago

I've watched that lecture a couple times and never even thought what he was doing was bad until you called him out for it. And even still, I think he handled it very well.

I've seen people ask questions to try to get recognition in groups, and when they don't get it, they childishly leave the meeting.

This was a moment where I gained a lot of respect for Dave McClure: https://youtu.be/25TxrhsXFvs?t=46m14s

I've had 4 different choir directors through my life. The best was a man in high school that would get angry, throw his baton down, and walk out (of band). Never saw him do that in choir but I heard about it. He demanded that we were focused. In the select choir, all members were required to perform solos. I wasn't ready for mine, but he still forced me to do it (he refused to continue class until I sang). He was, beyond comparison, a better director than the others and the choir showed it.

Going back to Paul Graham, even if he didn't handle that as well as you think he should have, his overall personality certainly makes up for it. Anyway, it's good to see that he'll be honest and you can trust him to do that.

atom-morgan• 11 years ago

That may not have been the kindest way to make his point but if that was my benchmark to determine whether or not I interact with someone, I would never talk to anybody.

datashovel4• 11 years ago

Perfectly legitimate answer. Most importantly you're wasting pg's time w/ that question, but also important you're wasting other people's time who are interested in learning about startups, not about economics.

cbsmith3• 11 years ago

Maybe not his nicest moment, but really? that's the worst you've got? That leads me to think he's pretty awesome without the filter on.

InclinedPlane• 11 years ago

Wow. Seriously? He was blunt but hardly rude or mean. Are people such delicate flowers today they can't have someone disagree with them forcefully without shriveling up and disintegrating?

meowface• 11 years ago

He answered that question very well.

linkydinkandyou2• 11 years ago

I like PG; but I think YC may not be the best place for everyone. (We never considered it for our startup, for example.)

And he is quick with the banhammer for those who disagree, which I think is unfortunate.

briantmaurer2• 11 years ago

The irony here is that I agree with down votes on my parent comment, unfortunately that does not mean it is false.

tracker1• 11 years ago

The only point I will make is favor a short name for the people that do type it into the address bar... I'd much rather see foo.club or foo.io than have to type in some-kind-of-foo.com just to get a .com address.

Depending on your business, you may be doing offline marketting. Flyers, cards, etc... you really don't want people to have to type in things like http://www.foo-bar-baz-biz.com/pub/8588277760 to get what you want them to see... http://goto.biz.io/ (with a form taking the number) is much better UX.

It always made me laugh when I'd see a URL more than about 15 characters beyond the http:// because people just aren't likely to do that. I'd say, if your primary url for an offline marketing drive will be more than 12-15 characters (not including prot), find a shorter name.

asabjorn• 11 years ago

My impression has been that consumers frequently mistake the url for the brand name, which is unfortunate if your url is for instance http://{try,get,...}{brand-name}.{com,me,...}.

I also have the skill of naming companies and there are a lot of good names still left our there, even on .com. And I think a name should be 8 characters or less. If anyone needs help just send me a message. :)

michaelwww• 11 years ago

alphabet.xyz is way better than alphabet.com and I don't understand it when people say it's a problem. .xyz makes me think of the alphabet, .com makes me think of the 1990's

aidenn0• 11 years ago

I don't see this as having addressed the main point of the PG article which was "The problem with not having the .com of your name is that it signals weakness."

npt42793• 11 years ago

The author did not address pg's point that lacking a .com has the potential to signal weakness... such as among potential investors, potential employees, press, and other influencers (like pg himself).

(Yes, there are always exceptions - like angel.co - and hacks like getdropbox.com also work).

But perhaps the tradeoff of retaining your "perfect" .io domain is not worth the extra friction of convincing influencers that you are credible company, when an hour creative brainstorming session for a .com might solve the problem?

Sure, if you have a hockey stick growth chart growing revenue 100% month over month, it doesn't matter, but it's rare that most startups have that right out of the gate. So why add to your burden?

amorphid• 11 years ago

I don't care at all about whether or not a business as a .com domain name. I care about usefulness and utility. As long as the business shows up when I google them, I'm good.

npt42793• 11 years ago

That's fair. But the question here is: "Do even 10% feel a different way? Followed by: "Is the tradeoff worth it?"

For instance, the author's own web site is standupti.me. It's actually something I might consider trying out. But it comes across as someone's side project by a solo developer, not a company. As a potential customer, I might still get around to trying it out at some point in time, but I do have a slight negative connotation in that it might just disappear tomorrow. It would be 1000x worse for a larger enterprise customer.

cbsmith3• 11 years ago

So, the counter is: sounds like you don't care what the name of the business is either way.

However, from a usefulness & utility standpoint, do you care that when customers type the company's name in to their browser, they end up on their site? Do you care if first contact e-mails, etc. don't get delivered to the business? Even if you don't care about those things, don't you think other people might?

jfoster2• 11 years ago

You may not care about the name, but the business may cease to exist if, when you tell someone about it, they are not able to find it.

If I tell my friend "Uber is awesome", their first step in using it will likely be heading to "uber.com". If it's not there, they might just end up forgetting about the recommendation. Existing customers would still be happy, but the business itself will have unnecessary trouble in being discovered.

EGreg2• 11 years ago

If you don't have strong fundamentals, how much does foobio.com really beat foob.io or foo.community? Where the last one (foo) is a better word than foob?

The main questions should be: "How can people successfully close a viral loop?" And "Wh would people come back?"

npt42793• 11 years ago

I'd argue nearly any .com reduces friction, adds more credibility, and therefore increases the likelihood of answering those questions.

"Why would people come back?" is usually correlated with recruiting awesome co-founders, talented employees, great mentors, influencers to talk it up, and top tier investors. Then, the company has the time and resources to discover the best answer to that question.

Maybe once in a decade there's something like Facebook, which just explodes out of the gate instantly (and just buys the better .com later). But I wouldn't want to bet my company on that... especially when I can just spend an hour and brainstorm a .com to address the problem. Anything less is a failure of creativity.

rebootthesystem2• 11 years ago

You need the ".com" because mere mortals don't think about anything other than ".com". Put another way, for consumers, ".com" is assumed and ".<whatever_the_hell>" is an anti-pattern.

d0m• 11 years ago

Yep, if you say "mydomain.co" they will try "mydomain.co.com"

joshmn• 11 years ago

Whenever someone asks me for my email address ($myfirstname@$myfirstname.mn) and they're not tech savvy I always get "is that @gmail.com or @hotmail...????"

I've learned, like you alluded to, nearly everyone associates the internet with .com. Will we ever get past that point? I don't know. As some other comments mention, .co is not the new .com, but .co.com is.

Made me chuckle.

linkydinkandyou2• 11 years ago

I had the exact same experience. I got my first name, a common name, spelled the usual way, and I made my email "firstname@firstname.to" (that's Tonga). I used this for non-critical mail, like when a business (face to face) asks for an email.

I gave up. Nobody understood it. They would try to add .com at the end. Every time.

rebootthesystem2• 11 years ago

This brings me back to a nice little marketing book I read about ten years ago:

http://www.amazon.com/Positioning-The-Battle-Your-Mind/dp/00...

One of the interesting ideas the author postulates is, to put it in CS terms, that people's minds work like a dictionary. Each key associates with one and only one value. And, in this case, the key is a concept, need, category, etc.

If you ask someone in the US to name a plumber they'll probably answer "RotoRooter" without hesitation. Fast food? "McDonalds". Rental car? "Enterprise". Fast car? "Corvette".

The values side of the relationship isn't necessarily uniform across a population but some keys have more uniformity than others (Fast Food).

Once a person makes that key:value association it is really, really hard to break it, if not impossible. Politics tends to work that way too.

In the case of the web, the vast majority of people make the following key:value pair association:

"internet":".com"

And that's the end of the story.

datashovel4• 11 years ago

In a way I think the "being attached" part of the argument is perhaps being misinterpreted.

Who is "attached" to what here? Why should I be attached to having a .com domain name? On the other hand, why should I be attached to the name I gave my business? If neither is critical to the success of the business, which is better? Sticking with a name that doesn't matter even though I can't have the .com domain? Or what if I could have both, but decided not to. It seems frivolous to say you must have .com domain, but also seems frivolous to say I need to stick with the name of my company.

Also if a .com is available probably means you'll be able to get more marketing accomplished by name recognition alone. When you talk about a company you don't say "I heard about this new company Company.com". Generally when I hear people talk about a company they refer to it as the name of the company not by the domain name. So what's the first thing people think when they want to learn more? "Companyname.com". Ok they probably Google it too, but even that small amount of additional hassle you put a user through trying to find your company is probably statistically significant.

Mz• 11 years ago

Eh, I also don't entirely agree with pg and wrote a bit in reaction to his piece about Change Your Name. But this is super weak. If all you can say is "famous guy's opinion is wrong," you aren't really adding much of value. Your position shouldn't be defined by "I am against x." That leaves x -- in this case pg -- defining your position by default. It isn't very rich.

ScottBurson• 11 years ago

Yeah, when I first heard about Palantir I think their domain was palantirtech.com or some such. I dismissed them as losers.

cbsmith3• 11 years ago

Yeah, I'm not super buying the arguments presented here.

Changing your name certainly isn't the most important thing you could be doing, and I wouldn't buy that domains matter a ton.

However, the earlier you are in a startup's life, the lower your existing brand value. You can so easily change your name and move on. So much of the VC money you are going to get is going to drive up brand value, whether you like it or not. Is there anything else you could do at your startup at that time that would take such little effort to change then and be so much more costly to change later?

Maybe there are some things that are less effort to change now and would be so much more costly to change later. You should do those things first. If you've got a long list though, either change is way too expensive and you are doomed, or you've already got a lot more invested in your name than the pg's target audience.

galago• 11 years ago

It just occurred to me: Because Google/Alpha owns a popular search engine, they may be uniquely positioned to assess this dilemma. That is, they have massive data sets about companies employing either scheme. They also probably have live data regarding how people are finding their company. They may actually be big enough to make .xyz a thing, when smaller companies could not.

BRValentine• 11 years ago

Seems pretty clear to me that the right answer here varies case by case. My company sells enterprise software in a fairly niche market. Some people in Europe are squatting on our .com, so we have .io and .co and use both for various things. We're a startup but have achieved pretty good name recognition and visibility among our target customer base through various marketing activities and plain old hustle. Also if you google our name, the entire first page of results are refer directly to us (website, crunchbase, linkedin, etc.). So from where I sit it would seem to do a lot more harm than good to change our name at this point in pursuit of the .com. Respect for PG etc. etc. but this is not a one-size-fits-all question.

Your name is fine

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