• Owning the dotcom version of your name is ideal. Launching with a ‘national’ domain (such ) is fine if you have small ambitions but won’t cut it if you’re serious about billion-dollar status. • Get as close as you can to the pure version of your domain. Starting with variants is perfectly fine: Twitter operated on twittr for many years before having the money to purchase twitter; similarly Facebook was thefacebook for many years; and Uber had ubercab before it acquired payday loans Tennessee the sleek uber domain. • Starting out with a domain name like ‘[companyname]app’ is great strategy if you’re focused just on the mobile side of things. • Other alternatives such as ‘get[companyname]’ and ‘get[companyname]app’ are also good ideas to get the ball rolling (ideally, you’ll be able to purchase a cleaner version down the line). • And, if you’re serious, start the process of communicating with the person who owns your ‘dream domain’ – it may take months, or even years, to eventually acquire it. It used to be true that you could find a great domain name for $10,000, but that’s frankly pretty hard. Fred Wilson, a very seasoned investor behind companies such as Twitter, Tumblr and Etsy (he also invested in Hailo), has revised his guidance to startups about how much they should commit to finding a good domain. In today’s market, he thinks it’s appropriate to fork out up to $50,000.1

Concrete Branding Strategies Once you’ve settled on a name, it’s time to start thinking about details such as your strapline, logo, colour scheme, tone of voice and style, which, when wrapped together, deliver what is called your brand. There’s no single tried and proven way to get this in place, and every company approaches it differently. The simplest approach is to get a basic logo and colour scheme in place, and then work through all the additional elements as needed, which are likely to change a lot in the early days.Continue reading→