Picking a good company name for a startup is only half the battle. A good domain name is critical and startups frequently have to go with their second or third choice domain unless they have a healthy budget. On that front .ME and .CO have done an excellent job of building their brands and more and more startups are proudly embracing these new TLDs.
Take Vine.co for example, the wildly popular new service launched by Twitter. There’s also Angel.co which has quickly become one of the top companies in the startup world. About.me closes this trifecta of very solid products/companies built on a TLD like .CO or .ME.
Now this doesn’t mean that one word .COMs aren’t selling, they are, but at much higher prices which means that most startups need to pick a two-word .COM or a one word domain in another TLD. Last year I helped 18 startups acquire their top choice domain and found that .COM was always the top choice, and close to 80% of the deals were one word domains.
It’s a hard decision to make and we, like many other startups we decided to go with a two word .COM (Fashion Metric) along with the corresponding Twitter and Facebook handles. This is another key element to owning a brand, if someone finds out about your company and mentions it in a tweet, you should hope they can guess it otherwise they’ll be giving credit to someone else!
Below are some of the startup domains making news today:
SquareSpace.com
Heroku.com
SkyfireLabs.com
RocketInternet.com
FlightCar.com
GetChute.com
FanDrop.com
GameClosure.com
MailboxApp.com
Viggle.com
KleverBeast.com
