There are many characteristics of premium domain names that make them more valuable than other domain names. Below, you will find some comments from entrepreneurs who have chosen to invest in a premium domain name for their business.
Finding a domain name for a startup is tricky. Particularly with the scarcity of quality domain names that are available these days. If you spend extra time brainstorming the perfect domain name, you may achieve better brand positioning and credibility to keep you way ahead of your competitors, right off the bat.
Dharmesh Shah, Founder and CTO of HubSpot
Why Employer.com? Because it’s easy to remember and perfectly captures our vision: which is empowering businesses to onboard effortlessly and pay employees anywhere in the world with ease.
Jesse Tinsley, CEO of Employer.com, Recruiter.com, BeforeYouApply.com and BountyJobs.com
Consumers are inundated with information, so anything you can do to make it easier for them to find you and remember you is worth the investment.
Consider a top domain as a permanent discount on your marketing budget.
Matt Barrie, Chief Executive of Escrow.com and Freelancer.com
Domain names may seem trivial, but the brand value is hard to refute. One-word .com’s are the Fifth Avenue real estate of the internet. They help position you as a market leader. That’s why I’m thrilled to announce that Endorsed.ai has now graduated to Endorsed.com!
David Head, CEO and Co-Founder of Endorsed.com
We’re one of the top two companies in our space, and I believe our easy-to-remember domain name plays a big role in that.
As one of the fastest growing companies in games and increasingly widely used platform across the internet, it was a fairly obvious decision to secure the .com domain for our (trademarked) brand name as it’ll lead to confusion down the line if people can’t find what they’re looking for.
Pim de Witte, CEO of Medal.com for Domain Investing
If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the last 26 years of doing business online, it’s this: A premium domain has the potential to make you and your company a lot of money.
Michael Santiago, Founder of OnlineBusiness.com (Energize.com, Newswire.com)
We wanted to build a category-defining, generational brand. If that’s your ambition, then take the swing early and invest in the right assets.
It’s wild that this is true, but since acquiring the dot com for Meow, partnerships and even inbounds have been night and day easier to come by. Acquiring the exact brand match has a profound impact on a company.
Brandon Arvanaghi, CEO of Meow.com
We wanted a strong name, a name that would send a message, a name that could communicate that we were serious about this company idea.
Zeno Rocha, Founder & CEO of Resend.com
In healthcare, especially when you’re offering something as serious as cancer screening, having a domain that is simple, memorable, and trustworthy is incredibly important.
The rebrand to Newswire.com was a game-changer. Revenue jumped from $891K in 2015 to over $3.6M in 2017, eventually reaching $8.2M in 2020. The power of a premium domain is undeniable!
Michael Santiago, Founder of OnlineBusiness.com (Energize.com, Newswire.com)
Having the domain name Teamwork.com gave us the credibility we needed and we started getting bigger customers and more referrals. At this point, everything took off at lightning speed and we had a brand identity we could build upon.
Peter Coppinger, CEO and Co-Founder of Teamwork.com TEAMWORK.COM was acquired for $675,000
When you buy an Exact Match Domain you get free traffic on day 1. Maybe that free traffic is 1 hit per day, maybe 1,000. It can take time to build up, but it’s worth the wait.
Chris Koerner, Owner of CoFounders.com
If you want to be a brand, your domain name is a big touchpoint.
I originally made a toxic error… a hyphenated domain gear-source.com. Eventually, I was able to secure the “real” domain. Never made the mistake again and have bought a few classics since then.
Marcel Fairbairn, CEO of GearSource.com
The acquisition of the gold.com domain represents a significant investment in our direct-to-consumer growth strategy. The gold.com domain carries broad global appeal and is an extremely versatile asset that will be incorporated into our long term strategy. Prominent, single word domains are in high demand due to their scarcity, and benefits of such domains include instant brand recognition and enhanced marketability.
Robert Pacelli, CEO of JM Bullion
We had a list of dozens of names, but how do you know which one is the best? This was our list of must-haves: Global – it needs to be a .com TLD, no exceptions; Short – it has to be less than 10 characters, no more than that; Memorable – it needs to be connected to the product in some way; Easy to type – you can type it on your phone without asking others to spell the name; Easy to pronounce – you can tell someone in a bar with loud music in the background, and people can still understand it.
Zeno Rocha, Founder & CEO of Resend.com
In the world of toll-free numbers- there is STILL only ONE prefix that everybody wants and everybody thinks of- 800! Everything else is just noise. In domain names- dot com remains the one everybody wants and everybody thinks of. Everything else is just noise.
Premium domain names are THE “unfair advantage”. Once you experience benefits yourself, you won’t build on anything else. That’s why I’m building on DataAnalyst.com and own domains like ContentCreators.com or Dayoff.com and many others.
Alex Kirillov, Founder of DataAnalyst.com and BusinessAnalyst.com
The one thing we changed that can’t be quantified? The upgrade to Newswire.com. And even though it was an improvement we couldn’t track, we just knew it conveyed massive and instant credibility and trust within our target audience. A small change with a huge impact.
Michael Santiago, Founder of OnlineBusiness.com (Energize.com, Newswire.com)
What’s in a name? A ton, turns out! Imagine Zillow didn’t exist. You go online to shop for a home. So you search “homes for sale Dallas, TX.” You see 2 results: homes.com, zillow.com. You’ve never heard of either. Which do you click? That’s it.
Chris Koerner, Owner of CoFounders.com
I bought CallTracking․com for $20k one time & tried to build a simplified call tracking app on it. The project failed. But I was able to sell the domain for $120k about a year later : )
Peter Askew, Founder of Deep South Ventures (Onions.com, RanchWork.com, DudeRanch.com, GuestRanches.com)
Brandable domains in my portfolio had the best ROI for me. Wish I focused more on those vs other types of domains.
Val Katayev, Founder of Jocalio.com and MobileFuse.com
Turning great domains into what you expect them to be, like Towing․com, has given me a fantastic life. Domain names matter.
Drew Wash, CEO of Moving Sites, (Towing.com, CarTransport.com, TransportReviews.com, DJs.com, PhotoBooths.com)
A great domain will never hurt you, but it just might help. Plus the little cookie bonus of using it as an insurance policy can be nice.
Derek, Founder of RemoteJobs.com
Back when domain availability was high, your choice of URL didn’t matter. But today, it’s a status symbol. If you own socks.com, it signals to consumers you have tons of money. That makes you appear trustworthy.
Nick Saraev, Founder of 1SecondCopy.com
It was the absolute best domain name we could have possibly secured. Our meteoric growth started the second we bought it and did the rebrand. If you have a big vision for your company and don’t have a premium domain, you’re potentially losing out on millions of dollars, trust, and credibility within your market. It’s as simple as that.
Michael Santiago, Founder of OnlineBusiness.com (Energize.com, Newswire.com)
Back in the 90’s, we realized we would need to reinvent our entire business model if we had any hope of surviving this thing they called “the internet”. Discovering these digital real estate assets was quite a realization for me. I vowed to buy a domain anytime an idea came to me, or I saw a need. Never in my wildest dreams at that time did I think I would ever sell any or still own most of them 25 years later!
I used to think buying a premium dotcom domains were a waste of cash. I’d hear stories of people spending $500k on a dotcom domain and would silently laugh to myself. If only you spent that money on paid ads, viral videos etc. That 500k might be 100k customers! You’re just lighting the cash on fire for ego. But I was wrong. I recently started actually acquiring some dope domains. So, I ran an experiment. What if I took the same product and slapped on a new premium dotcom domain. A dot co for a dot com. And I started seeing the conversion rates jump 2-3x Same EXACT product, just a new domain, more customers. Pretty wild. But the dotcom adds trust and organic search.
Greg Isenberg, CEO of Late Checkout (BoringMarketing.com and 5tools5days.com)
Investing in a premium domain has proven to be a transformative decision for my business, offering immense benefits from enhanced credibility to marketing advantages. While it presents challenges, including high cost and strategic planning, the potential for a strong ROI makes it a worthy consideration for small to medium-sized business owners looking to elevate their digital presence.
Jim Campbell, CEO of Honeymoons.com
Public.com – while obvs much more expensive – clean, simple, more serious, but still modern. And easy to remember. What’s easy to remember, becomes easier to trust. And finally, yes, works 2x-3x better for digital ads/cvr… but for non-digital (OOH etc), more like 50x-100x better.
Jannick Malling, Co-founder & Co-CEO of Public.com
The one word domain gives us instant credibility. This can’t be quantified, but people trust us wayyy more than some company with a dash in their domain name or a .co domain.
Adam Robinson, CEO of Retention.com RETENTION.com was acquired for $800K
Cars.com is a pretty easy domain name to type in. We get a majority of our traffic directly and organically, which allows us to really invest in other things, which to us is product innovation as opposed to what a lot of our peers have to do is, is they have to keep spending marketing every dollar every day just to stay relevant.
Alex Vetter, co-founder and CEO of Cars.com
Chat.com is absolutely brilliant in terms of simplicity, shortness and being totally *on point* and meeting the moment. It immediately creates user trust. Somebody (not me) will build a massively successful product/company on it.
Dharmesh Shah, Founder and CTO of HubSpot CHAT.com was acquired for an undisclosed eight-figure amount ($10M or more)
I never buy “fad” domain extensions. I stick strictly to “dot com” for the most part. There is nothing with the staying power and the mindshare of “dot com”. Everything else is a distant second. The only people who disagree are the one’s trying to sell something that is not a dot com.
The transition to Cats.com reflects our commitment to being the web’s most extensive and trustworthy source of cat knowledge. There could not be a domain name better representative of our intentions for this community, and it’s a privilege to call it home.
Doron Wolffberg, Founder of Cats.com
I always struggled to find a way to describe what our tool does in a sentence, but I can easily describe it in a word: monday. In becoming monday.com, our vision is finally encapsulated in our name.
Roy Mann, CEO and Co-Founder of monday.com
The power that a top level domain name, dictionary word has with the general public is phenomenal. It creates that authority automatically, instant trust.
Alex Tew, Co-founder of Calm.com CALM.com was acquired for $140K
We felt as a company that Jets.com was tremendously powerful for our industry and the product that we’re selling. We figured that anyone who’s going to search for private jets is likely to go to Jets.com. Now when we tell people in general on the phone or in a meeting that we’re Jets.com, the credibility alone by saying Jets.com is worth it.
Damian Klinger, President and Co-Founder of Jets.com
If the word that you own is not on the dotcom domain, it falls off in value. People have a harder time remembering it if it was dot io, dot org, or dot tv. Moreover, if the word is too long, it falls off in value too. If 65%~ 80% of the money on commerce around the world is in English, and if you own one of the 1000 most important words in the English language, you can treat the domain as a business.
Michael Saylor, Chairman and Co-founder of MicroStrategy
Having Trainual.com and not .co or another TLD has made us easier to search. We’ve also purchased a few misspellings of Trainual.com since it’s a made-up word. We want to make sure we capture all the traffic that’s searching for us.
Recruiter.com is a powerful brand, and we consider our name recognition and high web traffic to be a powerful differentiator and asset for our business. We have top search placement and generate thousands of leads and referrals every month.
I am pleased to have completed the acquisition of the Chill.com domain name. We are the proud owners of a highly brandable, premium domain asset reflective of a word that is pervasive in the everyday lives of consumers and is easy to say, spell, and remember.
Switching to Paw.com has had a tremendously positive impact on our company. First of all, as mentioned before, we no longer are limited to dog products. As “Paw.com” we have the opportunity to build a major pet industry brand, across a wide range of pets and products. There’s a sense of trust and authority that comes with a great name like Paw.com, and that seems to give a positive boost to just about everything.
David Gimes, Founder and CEO of Paw.com
For the 25+ years I’ve been emailing, I’d say close to 95% of those email began with some variation of “Hey [Name]”. So when it came time to think about a name for a new email system we’d be building, HEY was a natural.
Jason Fried, Founder of Hey.com
At that time, we were six people in an office above a fried chicken restaurant. $400K was a lot of cash. We only went for it because we had raised a $3M seed round, and I believed that the long-term branding benefit outweighed the short-term cost. I definitely don’t regret it.
Waseem Daher, CEO of Pilot.com PILOT.com was acquired for $400K
Operating through stoggles.com helps us to reach more people and follow our purpose of inspiring the importance of everyday eye protection through innovative and seamless design.
Max Greenberg, CEO of Stoggles.com
This is the company’s most significant evolution in a nearly 50-year history of serving the rental industry. This is much more than a name change. It is the outward signal of our evolution from an advertising company to a technology and software driven company.
Jon Ziglar, CEO of Rent.com
We didn’t have much cash at the time, we’ve just raised a little round of capital but what I knew was that this name would allow us to be taken a lot more seriously by future investors because it is a lot easier to raise venture capital when you’ve got a domain name like we have because the first thing you see on the deck is the title, and if it says Scan.com it is making them turn to the next page.
Charlie Bullock, founder of Scan.com
It was important for us to have the top level domain (TLD) for our brand strategy, so we secured Denim.com. Our experience has been incredible. It may seem trivial, but people take you a lot more seriously when you have a clean, one word .com domain with no prefixes or suffixes.
Bharath Krishnamoorthy, CEO and Co-Founder of Denim.com
We saw our conversion rate dramatically jump when we rebranded from usefedora.com to teachable.com.
Ankur Nagpal, Founder of Teachable.com
Our domain name was initially CHILI.tv but we changed to CHILI.com in order to become more international and to emphasise our presence on all devices.
Giorgio Tacchia, CEO and founder of CHILI.com
Our plan is to build a strong, memorable brand. Cal.com is the kind of domain/brand name that achieves exactly that.
Bailey Pumfleet, Co-Founder & Co-CEO of Cal.com
Standing out just gets harder when people confuse you with other companies. That’s why we went right to the source. There are many copycat Sumo names in the market but by owning Sumo.com, we’re positioned as the original. We are the Sumo.com.
Beyond just the benefits of properly aligning our brand with the .com name, we knew that owning this domain would illustrate to future customers that we’re here to stay for the long haul.
Steli Efti, CEO of Close.com
You will lose all word of mouth marketing if you don’t have a good name. Most people choose their name because the domain is available. That’s a really bad idea. I spent 3 months and $182,000 negotiating for Mint.com, and it was the best purchase I ever made.
If you’re talking to someone at a bar about your company, they just won’t remember TeamworkPM.net. One of our competitors is Basecamp, which has Basecamp.com. If someone is comparing Basecamp.com against TeamworkPM.net, many will choose the .com because it has credibility and the right image.
Peter Coppinger, CEO Teamwork.com TEAMWORK.COM was acquired for $675,000 in 2014
Over the decades, I’ve learned about the importance and value of domain names. WordPlay.com (my word-game) has hit 150 million games played and 16 million users. I know for a fact that a lot of this is because the domain is easy, memorable and fun.
Dharmesh Shah, Founder and CTO of HubSpot
Buying Tesla.com took over a decade, $11M & amazing amount of effort. Didn’t like teslamotors.com even when we were only making cars.
Compared to the earlier domain XAircraft.com, XA.com is simply more than a memorable, easily recognisable online identity. It undoubtedly better carries XAG’s brand value and prospect to shape the future of sustainable agriculture for 7.6 billion people, by unceasingly exploring smart farming technology.
Chinese Agri-Tech Company XAG XA.COM was acquired for US$ 1,600,000
We’ve grown over the years – and we’re now much more than a taxi app. This new brand is an important evolution that represents our goal to outserve our customers. We are not only providing passengers with a transport service, we are saving them time and ensuring they have a safe ride.
Anthony Tan, Group CEO and Co-Founder, Grab.com
We started with PerchHomes.co and then moved to Perch.com when we had an opportunity to get the domain. Ultimately, your website domain is a big part of your brand, particularly for a B2C company.
Phil DeGisi, Co-Founder at Perch.com
If we didn’t own RTS.com we probably would have changed the company’s name. It was very important for us to have a simple brand that has the ability to be recognized and understood globally.
Greg Lettieri, co-founder and CEO, RTS.com
People are trusting us with their finances and TryDave just didn’t seem to give me the same confidence as Dave.com.
Jason Wilk, Co-founder and CEO of Dave.com
We saw a big growth with our repeat customers. We had an average return of repeat customers of over 200% from where it originally was and that was definitely attributable to the brand. When you are Pacific Pillows, you can stumble across a bunch of pillow sites, but when you are Pillows.com, its pretty clear that there is only one Pillows.com.
Craig Clark, Pillows.com PILLOWS.COM was acquired for six figures
About 70% of traffic comes from the domain directly – we don’t have to purchase the keywords as much any longer. The domain name is pretty valuable in and of itself.
Tor Sweeney, Owner of Dresses.com
We saw a 40% increase in traffic immediately after securing our preferred domain.
John Furneaux, Hive.com
We saw our customers confusing us with some of the other companies in the industry, and wanted to remedy that issue. Our service is so different and unique in comparison with the competition that these confusions might cost us a lot of opportunities.
Oliver Dlouhy, CEO of Kiwi.com KIWI.COM was acquired for US$ 800,000
We have seen a 5x in our web3 calls to our Alchemy instances that coincided with the procurement of sushi.com. I think from a branding perspective it has been a boon.
Joseph Delong, CTO of SushiSwap
As Badger expands to become the most trusted place for anyone to put their Bitcoin to work, it’s important that the first experience for non native crypto users is comfortable and that we help them quickly overcome the common stigma that surrounds the cryptocurrency industry today.
Chris Spadafora, founder of BadgerDAO BADGER.COM was acquired for US$ 300,000
As the founder of the branded payment platform Recharge.com (500 million annual revenue), I know how to launch a worldwide fintech platform and how important it is to have a good domain name that is easy to remember.
Fleksy.com acts as a primary touch point between us and potential customers, our website is a representation of who we are and what Fleksy is all about.
Olivier Plante, CEO of Fleksy.com
It was important to us to have a brand name that consumers could get to easily without having to come up with some clever derivative or other domain that’s close, but not really. Autonomy.com we think obviously handles that.
Scott Painter , Founder and CEO at Autonomy.com
Having a strong keyword .com domain name brings a lot of inherent value, such as trust and a sense of being well-established, recognizable and not to mention web-based.
Rolf Larsen of CEO Desktop.com
Having the right domain is very important, and having a short, unique name that resolves in a .com has been super helpful versus, I don’t know, modern-dresses-best-shop.com or something.
Elena Silenok, Founder and CEO of Clothia.com
Since Yought was a unique name, buying the .com was straightforward and was one reason we wanted to go with something unique. As a marketer, I understood having a .com presence would be beneficial in the long run, especially as a SaaS product.
Richard Liu, Co-Founder at Yought.com
After a few years of effort, we landed our dream web address of Ahead.com, replacing ThinkAhead.com. Our name finally matches our domain!
The team behind AHEAD.com
Acquiring the aura.com domain is an investment in the Aura brand as we grow our business and build the best all-in-one digital protection platform for consumers.
We hope the above information will help you in making informed decisions about your brand. If you want to say hi or have any questions about naming, branding, and domain names get in touch, we’re always happy to hear from you.
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