I thought the era of domain name squatting was over. Apparently it’s not. When we began working on putting together an online project management system we began brainstorming possible names. There were many that were strong and memorable, but of course when you do the search online someone already has it.
Now I could live with the fact that someone came up with the name first and has been using the site for sometime. That did not seem to be the case with any of the names that we came up with. Doing a quick search on the Wayback Machine made it clear that these names had never been used. What are they hoping to get out of it? Are people really paying big bucks for these names anymore? How long do you sit on them hoping to get that magical offer?
Now I don’t know how to stop it, but all I know it is definitely hurting legitimate companies from building strong brands. I guess it gives the creative people like us a more challenging task. Come up with a household name, make it memorable, easy to pronounce and spell and still get the domain name.
When we came up with FLO our first and most obvious check was FLO.com. Of course someone is just sitting on the domain. We decided not to pursue the name and get into some crazy bidding war. We followed 37Signals advice and added “hq” onto the end and away we went.
Let us know if you have ever faced this and what you did.