Curious for fellow founders with the .com, how many of you defensively buy the .net, .org names as well? I find it hard to resist getting at least those three if I'm settled on a name/brand.
I was trying to decide this a few years ago when I found the best .com I'll ever own. It's only 8 characters and I was able to get matching social media handles everywhere but Twitter.
My main concern was that someone with more money than me could come along, start using it, trademark it, and make it unusable for me. I've been thinking about trying to trademark it, but it's expensive and complicated, especially if I can't get a trademark personally and transfer it to a business in the future
In the meantime I decided it was worth the money to buy every decent TLD as a way of discouraging someone else from trying to use the same name. It's not cheap, but it's cheap in the context of what people like the OP pay for a decent .com.
I pay about $200 / year in total to renew about a dozen matching domains. I can hold onto those for 20 years and it'll still cost less than the asking price of a half decent .com.
Think of the .net and .org as a $3 month expense for brand protection. I'm from Canada where .com and .ca are used pretty equally. I remember about 10 years ago when a local computer store only registered one of them and ended up with an unhappy customer redirecting the other to a porn site. Would you pay $3 / month to avoid dealing with that?
> I've been thinking about trying to trademark it, but it's expensive and complicated, especially if I can't get a trademark personally and transfer it to a business in the future
Trademarks are a bit of a pain, but you totally can get the trademark registered to you personally and transfer it to a different entity later.
The main things people miss about trademarks is that they're category-specific (If I have trademark "Foo" for a food product, that doesn't prevent someone else from getting trademark "Foo" for sporting goods), and that you have to actively be doing business (in that category) using the trademark first. You can't register the trademark until after you've been engaging in commerce with it.
> You can't register the trademark until after you've been engaging in commerce with it.
Is that US? I'm in Canada. I think we can register before commercial use [1]:
> Another of your responsibilities as the owner of a trademark is to use the trademark in Canada. If you do not use it, the registration could be expunged from the Register of Trademarks by the Registrar. The Registrar could start summary expungement proceedings, after three years beginning on the day on which a trademark is registered
To me, that sounds like you have to use it within 3 years of registering and I didn't see anything requiring commercial use prior to registration in the linked info.
We also have a ~3 year backlog for applications and I don't know if the trademark ends up registered with the filing date or the issuance date. It's the kind of thing that's complicated enough that I wouldn't want to risk screwing it up, so I'm waiting until I can pay someone that knows what they're doing.
TLDR; It's complicated and expensive, especially compared to the simplicity of pulling out a credit card and registering a dozen TLDs. Lol.
You can register before commercial use in the US (filing status 1B). But there is a deadline before which you do have to start using the mark in commerce, and then update your application with the USPTO, otherwise it will expire.
Those specific additional domains are useful in their own ways. .net is good for network infrastructure, .org is good for organizational purposes like mapping your office/LAN endpoints into it, so that employees could connect to VPNs and internal services like SCM and build servers.
Other than that, additional domains also give leverage for diversification if you decide to make them publicly visitable one day.
I'd suggest to not use this technique as it gets quite confusing for others. You have to connect to something and you don't know whether it is .com, .org or what else. It is common to use different dummy names like githubusercontent.com and so. You can easily grab a random name like this and is way less confusing.
There is a benefit: you do not want to stress your .com domain too much when you provide some network services like discovery services, tunnels etc to your customers.
The reason is pragmatic: if a company provides such kind of services then it may fall under a (false) scrutiny one day after somebody uses one of its services for, say, planting a stealth DDoS attack. The whole domain may be yanked or denylisted, and the last domain you want to see under the fire is your .com domain.
The same goes to .org: you do not want to see outsiders messing with your organizational endpoints and internal operations, so you better move them to a separate domain for the sake of a) clarity and b) risk hedging.
There are two drawbacks though: 1) higher domain costs 2) if you are not careful enough in managing expectations, people may be confused about which one to use and when.
If you deploy a Windows Server AD domain (do people still deploy new AD domains?) it makes things a lot easier and simpler to be able to make it the authoritative DNS servers for a real domain name, and by default it will stomp all over the A/AAAA records for the top of that DNS zone.
I can’t really think of anything else that would really benefit from having its own domain though, especially if your DNS infrastructure supports nested zones.
I always do that. I also proactively register possible domains before the product/company name is even firmly decided on. If I'm certain of the name, I'll also register the common misspellings and typos.
