The Collision Startup Conference will be held on May 5-6 in Las Vegas. Almost 10 thousand people will attend it; they are the creators of the most promising technological startups in the world. Right before the event one of the leading “domain guru” Bill Sweetman analyzed startups presented at the conference from the point of view of the domain business.
Sweetman works in the domain industry for over 20 years. For 5 years he managed the domain portfolio of a large company Tucows, achieving 800% sales growth. At the moment Bill Sweetman heads NameNinja.com. The company specializes in the selection and acquisition of domain names and management of domain portfolios for large corporations; this is why his opinion is definitely worth listening to.
Bill Sweeton discovered that 79% of startups that attend the conference chose domain names that are counterintuitive and might create problems for their owners as the business develops. From Sweetman’s point of view the main problem is a significant discrepancy between how the domain name is spelled and pronounced. This is why the user wouldn’t be able to correctly type it in the browser’s address bar after hearing the domain’s name. This method is called “Radio Test”, 68% of attendees didn’t pass the test.
The second difficulty by frequency and significance is that startups do not register names that exactlt coincide with their names in .COM. “If your startup is named Fashion Ferret then the optimal domain name is the exact match .com domain FashionFerret.com,” explains Sweetman. “Using anything else is risky because it’s likely to confuse your customers and drive up your marketing costs.”
“I get it. Most startups don’t have much cash to spend on their domain name,” Sweetman carries on. “But let’s not forget that your domain name is a key marketing asset.”
