At the start of last week Chris Gimmer the co-founder of Snappa, published an article on how his company acquired the .com for his company. Snappa is used to create a wide range of graphics for social media, display ads, blog posts, and more.
Here is an excerpt from his post:
Why we did it
Some people would argue that we were doing just fine with Snappa.io and purchasing the .com was a waste of money. Doesn’t everyone type stuff in Google now?
The reality is we were doing just fine. We had grown to $25k+ MRR without raising any money. So why did we care so much about a domain name?
There’s a few reasons.
1. Branding & Trust
At the end of the day, .com will forever be the ultimate top-level domain (TLD). To this day, there are still plenty of people who don’t even realize that other TLDs exist.
When you own the .com, you’re signalling to the market that you’re legit. And when people are paying you money to use your product, the more trust you can convey the better.
With Snappa, many of our customers pay us an annual subscription. We want them to know that we’ll be around for years to come.
As Joel from Buffer points out, most well-known companies all had “placeholder” domains for a long time before they got their actual name as their domain too:
Now snappa.com is a brandable that you could easily find on a brandable boutique like BrandBucket. Of course on BrandBucket the name would have a fixed price and the buyer would just click buy it now without any negotiations.
Snappa.com sold for $40,000 much higher than it would have ever been listed by BrandBucket.
There have been a couple posts on Namepros talking about pricing your name right to get more sales. I thought Kate wrote an excellent post, she pointed out doing research and think like an end user. This is not science it’s an art when it comes to domain sales. Would Snappa.com being sold for $8,000 been priced right ?
Snap is a fairly popular keyword used in either modified/invented brandables by adding a suffix, and is also popular in two word .coms. There are 144 names on BrandBucket for snap, names like snappety.com or snapora.com. These names are priced in the $1,999 to $2,999 range for the most part.
So you have to decide with certain brandable names you own, just how much do you like it ? The flipside is people like Michael Krell sell a lot of brandables at a fixed price.
Deciding on how you want to sell is an important factor, who do you want to be ? There is not just one right way.
Maybe a good option is to have a mixed strategy: sell a few of your brandables at a fixed price, and others with no fixed price. This way you can have a bit of both “worlds”.
Yeah, recently i went to transfer a name on brandbucket and they told me my account was in bad standing. Huh? “You must be mistaken” was my response.
Then i was asked why i didn’t list a 5L.com on there that they gave me a price on 2 years ago. That was my reason I was in bad standing…lol.
Well, they quoted me $1999. Which was a JOKE. Then, they priced 6L and 7L with my 5 letters at the start for MORE than $1999 – just adding nonsense endings.
My mind was blown.
Anyway, closed a $20k lease to own deal on the name a few weeks ago.
Good post and i can back it up with my own recent experiences.