If your company name is taken in .COM, you have three options

First things first, yes – pretty much every company wants to get their exact match .COM. That’s a given.

But more and more companies want to call themselves something that would be a big juicy six or seven figure purchase in the .COM space, or it might already be taken in .COM by a company doing something completely different. So they have three choices:

  1. Add a word like “Get” to the front of the .COM
  2. Change your company name entirely
  3. Buy the exact-match domain in a different domain extension

Two good friends of mine that went through Techstars with me hired a marketing agency to help them come up with a name for their company. They spent quite a bit of time going through what kinds of words, colors, etc. resonated with them and their customers. After spending a good amount of time and money they landed on the name – Convey.

The challenge was, Convey.com was taken, so they launched their new company on GetConvey.com. While the domain creates confusion, and some people think of them as “Get Convey” rather than Convey. It hasn’t really impacted their ability to raise money, grow, and build a great product. They’ve raised over $25M to-date without owning their exact-match .COM.

Even without the matching .COM all of their marketing material says “Convey” as does their tradeshow booths, website, etc. The same is true for a company like Mercury.co – they have ads all over San Francisco right now, and just like their website and all their marketing materials, it says “Mercury” not Mercury.co.

When it comes to option #3, going with a different domain extension, I think the vertical you’re in plays a big role in determining which extension you should pick. Recently Josh Reason shared his thoughts on this topic and I think he was spot on:

COM Alternatives

I would say that .CO out of all the new domain extensions has the most versatility as it could be used for really any category. Domain extensions like .AI or .GG are much more vertical-specific.

When it comes to picking a domain name, there really is no right answer, it really is up to you and your team to decide what’s best for you.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton