Picking the company name — the biggest waste of time
"Simple Startup Tools." Is it a bad name?
It's one of the most important things you do, right? Picking the name of your company.
Yeah, the domain name was available... is that important? Is it better to pick a good name or a domain name?
My thoughts:
- You can always change your name. I know that sounds like a huge no-no, but it's not as big a deal as you think. Remember that, if you're successful, you'll have say 5,000 customers. So who cares if after 100 you change your "brand?" 99% don't care, and would never know. And the early adopters understand.
- I'm picking a domain name based on SEO, because Google still treats words in domain names very highly. For example, my main blog's about me page has far more pagerank than jasoncohen.net, and has "jason-cohen" in the URL, yet the .net wins.
- Most people will not come to your website by typing in your URL. It will be through email, Twitter, Facebook, advertisement, product review, ... in which case the domain and URL don't matter at all. In fact half the time your URL will start with "http://bit.ly."
I admit though, I still have doubts.
For example, does calling it "startup tools" mean that someone from a mid-sized company will immediately decide this won't work for her? Because that's not true.
For now I'm running with it, because it's what I know best, what I can completely own. I'll figure out how to expand it later.
First need users! No users == doesn't matter...
P.S. This came to a head when buying an SSL certificate for the domain. "Do I really want this domain?" I thought for about 4 hours. How dumb is that -- to waste 4 hours of time over a $40 certificate instead of spending that time talking to a user or building a feature that's blocking a user? Priorities, people.