Caffeine

Naming a company is always a lot of work. It often involves countless hours of brainstorming, brand consultants, creative agencies, and finding a domain name owner willing to sell for a reasonable price. Fortunately, you don’t need a great name to start a company and can always change the name later.

We decided to pick a code name (Project Venti) for the company to give ourselves more time to decide on the official name and potentially acquire one or more domain names. This is the third startup I have founded and every time naming the company gets harder as more and more domain names are registered and the resale price for names continues to increase.

We originally decided on two great options for company names (workspace.com and team.com), but for both names the .com domain was already registered. Owning the .com domain is an absolute requirement for us.

Note: There are many ways to check ownership of a domain, but I prefer the whois tools at http://www.domaintools.com.

Neither of our original names had a developed website but this doesn’t matter much, someone else had already purchased rights to the name. We tried contacting the owner for workspace.com multiple times, but the whois information was out of date. After some digging, it looks like the domain was owned by a company that was acquired multiple times. I would bet that someone owns the rights to workspace.com and doesn’t even realize they own the name. So, on to plan B.

For team.com, it was listed for sale at Sedo so we thought our chances were better.

There are many site that create marketplaces to resell names, some of the major ones are:

• Afternic http://www.afternic.com
• Sedo http://www.sedo.com
• BuyDomains http://www.buydomains.com
• GreatDomains http://www.greatdomains.com

So how much is a domain name worth? We tried to purchase team.com through Sedo. We were apparently bidding against Citrix, although we did not know this at the time. In the end, they purchased the name for $330,000. Not bad for the owner who has been sitting on the name for 10 years and probably paid $50 for the original rights to the name.

So, back to the drawing board. We now have a list of about 30 candidates for names that we are working from. For most of these, the .com domain is already registered and we will need to try and acquire the domain name. More on the name game later as we make more progress.