We recommend that you start by choosing the best name for your brand, then worry about choosing the domain. Here’s why.
It’s probably obvious that there are a finite number of “dotcom” domains, and as time goes on, it’s increasingly difficult to secure one of them. We get it – given the option, most people would love to have the clean dotcom for their name.
But while having the dotcom for your brand has historically felt like a stamp of approval – a sign that you’re a real, legitimate business – times and attitudes are changing. Over the past 10 years, we’ve seen more people start businesses and be forced into using either a prepended or appended dotcom domain address like hello___.com or ___store.com. Even big brands are doing this – Peloton uses onepeloton.com, for example, and they’ve certainly managed to build a brand and a business. Additionally, as new TLDs (Top Level Domains) become available, there’s an increasing opportunity to do something interesting with your domain name. We opted for the URL prequel.agency, for instance – perhaps not the most creative approach, but it adds a useful descriptor to our online address.
So there are a lot of ways to approach the domain name. If, like most people, you’ve chosen a name for which the dotcom domain is not available, we encourage you not to grow discouraged or think that you must choose a different name. That would be letting the tail wag the dog. The domain is one small element of your brand, and Google will make sure that people can find you – so optimize first for name and brand, developing the name that best suits your business. If you instead choose a name from available dotcom domains, it is highly unlikely that you’ll land somewhere strategically sound. You can always attempt to purchase that dotcom someday when you’re big and famous (you know, because your brand name was just that awesome.)
All of this assumes, of course, that you’ve confirmed that you CAN, in fact, use the name you’ve chosen — and that’s a question of trademark, not domain name. The two are not the same. In fact, it IS possible to acquire a domain name without owning the trademark. Here’s what the experts (aka Angela Wilcox) have to say about that:
“The availability of a “pure” .com domain name does not mean that a name is available to serve as a trademark. Similarly, the lack of availability of a domain name does not mean that a term is unavailable to serve as a trademark, particularly when a domain name is used to identify products or services unrelated to the client’s industry. As such, the availability of a “pure” .com domain name does not have any bearing on the potential for securing trademark protection of a name. A domain name is akin to a street address where a brand can be found on the internet. Moreover, while .com domains are commonly used and referred to, I always remind clients that many well-known brands have internet addresses that are not the brand’s “pure” .com, such as Alphabet’s abc.xyz, Zelle’s zellepay.com and SoulCycle’s soul-cycle.com.”
^^This is why we leave the legal stuff to the lawyers and focus on the naming process! It’s just not that simple – another good reason to START with the name and THEN figure out the domain. The bottom line: we can’t all have dotcoms, and that’s ok.