Tech founders often try to get a short domain by dropping vowels or using creative spelling. This hurts you in the real world. If you have to spell your website out letter by letter every time you tell someone about it, you have failed the first test of marketing. You want to remove friction, not add it. If a potential client types your name based on how it sounds and ends up on a competitor's site, you have lost a sale before you even started. Another major error is tech businesses picking a domain that limits that growth. For example if you include a specific technology or a specific city in your URL, you trap yourself. You might pivot in a couple of years based on market feedback, but your domain will still be tied to the original idea. Changing it later isn't easy, and it can hurt your search rankings. It's safer to pick a name now that gives you room to grow.
One of the main errors I notice to be common with startups in the tech industry, while selecting a domain name, is choosing a name that only applies to their present situation, rather than their future role. Your domain is more than just a URL; it is a brand asset with a long-term perspective. Invest in it and do it right! Cleverly spelled names, obscure extensions, and hyper-niche names do not happen to be the main factors, but are rather the founders' attachment because they are available and inexpensive. However, if a customer cannot spell it, remember it, or make an instant association with your brand, you will be creating unnecessary friction. From the viewpoint of SEO, picking a domain that is not clear or relevant can also restrict visibility before even entering the market. The most intelligent and wise way is to think scalability first: select a domain that can expand along with your product, your audience, and your positioning. Do not give yourself a name that you will outgrow in two years - rebranding is much more costly than obtaining the right domain at the very beginning.
The biggest mistake new tech businesses make when choosing a domain name is selecting something that only fits their current product rather than their long-term vision. If people can't type or recall your domain name easily, they won't visit. Trendy names, hyphens, double letters, and quirky spellings only look modern, but this usually slows down discovery. Whenever the business evolves, the domain is likely to feel outdated and lose its credibility, and this eventually needs expensive rebranding, domain migrations, and lots of SEO work. Another issue is that most businesses take competitor analysis lightly while picking domain names, and choose domains similar to other players in the market, which confuses. A great domain should pass the "radio test" like if someone hears it once, they should be able to type it correctly. That's the true test of usability and branding. From my experience, I suggest choosing a domain that aligns with the brand you want to become 3-5 years from now, not just the product you are launching today. This helps to maintain the brand consistency and avoid other expenses in rebranding and scaling the domain.
"The mistake that I see most often with domain names is not simply poor choices when it comes to branding; it's also issues with signaling. Founders focus most of their time and energy on logos, pitch decks, and everything else; however, it is also important to focus on domains and not just quickly fill them out at the end of everything. Domains are often the first technical touchpoint that customers, investors, and security teams see. And security teams often see them first as well. In cybersecurity and SaaS especially, deals have been slowed down just because of domains that provided quiet warning signs, odd extensions, naming inconsistencies with the product or variants that seemed like they could have been used to phish. Nothing was technically wrong; however, emails were silently sent, and trust was lost. Learning that sort of phenomenon late in the process is a painful lesson. The greater mistake is choosing a domain name based only on the current product. The first product is probably going to change at some point. And the same goes for the market. However, the domain name is the front door and that is going to stay the same. My advice is to choose a name that the future business will not have to be embarrassed by. Founders often do not expect the ease that comes when this is done right from the start." - Yuying Deng, CEO of Esevel
Hi, I'm Andy Zenkevich, Founder & CEO at Epiic. One of the biggest mistakes businesses make when choosing a domain name is treating the domain as an afterthought. It's fine to "get whatever .com is available for $10 or $20," but when you're spending hundreds of thousands building a great product, marketing it, and hiring a team, the domain probably belongs to the subset of your work that deserves a little more attention than it actually gets. I've seen dozens of startups forced to rebrand, pay a fortune to acquire a domain, or lose mindshare to competitors with better names. If you think a crappy domain or $10 shortcut is no big deal, consider that insecurity about your name might cause logical partners to hesitate about promoting it or adding it to conferences and other organic appearances. I worked on a recent SaaS domain switch for a client, and simply switching from a cheap .co domain to their .com led to a jump from 2,000 to 4,500 weekly branded search impressions - because people trusted Google more, and were more likely to search for the thing with the good name. And that can lead to bigger problems - it's also the door you're leaving open to scammers. Domains are real estate. And negotiating them is no different from a real estate deal. If a founder is feeling powerless because an investor is the registered owner of the ideal domain, remember the network is only as powerful as the nodes it has to travel through, and you're motivated enough to figure it out. In many cases, these domain owners are open to phased deals that lead to lease payments, partial cash, equity commitments, and a bunch of other ways to create value. At a minimum, if you're planning to spend on infrastructure, marketing, and your team, I would budget realistic figures on the domain - a decent one often costs $20,000 and can go up to $100,000 or more. And when you can, not only buy the .com, but buy the ones you might want to defend too - name.ai, name.io, name.dev. Big brands like Apple and Google lock down 100 domain names. You don't need that many, but it's worth getting a few because it can save you brand erosion and drama for the rest of your life.
The biggest mistake new tech businesses make is underestimating how much a domain name impacts trust and credibility. When we rebranded from Terkel.io to Featured.com in 2023, we saw an immediate increase in trust from prospective customers and partners. It was one of the toughest decisions as a cash-constrained startup, but people simply trust a company more when they see a premium domain name in their inbox or when subscribing to a service. I've also owned and operated more than 300+ domain names. My last agency, which operated under the domain name markitors.com, ranked on page 1 of Google for the term "digital marketing company" for 5+ years. It was a deliberate misspelling that performed well, but certainly not as clear as Featured.com. I also own HelpaReporter.com, a legacy domain that is functional, memorable, and has lots of history associated with it. The moral of the domain name story is, a name is what you make of it. Some names have a more clear head start, and others have a higher potential ceiling. But, with grit and grind, any domain name can be made into a viable business. It's just determining how much headwind, or tailwind, you want working for or against you.
As the CEO of Tuta Mail, I've seen firsthand how important the choice of a domain name is for a tech business. At Tuta, we used to operate via tutanota.com, and recently rebranded by switching to the shorter and more memorable tuta.com domain. What we learned from this: It is often underestimated how important a short and easy domain and a great top level domain - like .com in our case - is. Many brands come up with creative domains under top level domains no one has ever heard of or where the top level domain is part of the brand name. While this might look fancy, it is actually very confusing because people can not remember such a domain as they will not be able to place the dot at the right spot. In addition, a renown top level domain is important for brand reputation as well as search engine optimization. It's easier to rank such a domain as it signal more brand credibility. Another big mistake new tech companies make - and we at Tuta also did this when settling on tutanota.com - is to come up with a domain that only fits the current product. Startups and their products change quickly, and a domain that's too long, too niche, or too difficult to spell can hinder adapting to these changes. That was a key insight we had when we rebranded from tutanota.com to tuta.com: We needed a name that was simpler, more global, and that was a better match with our mission to build the most secure, privacy-first communication platform (not just an encrypted email solution). The best tip I have for startups is: Choose a domain name that supports your vision, so where you want your company to be in five years, not just where you are right now. It should be short, easy to remember, and it should have a reputable top level domain ending.
Hello, My name is Phil Santoro and I'm a Co-Founder of the startup studio Wilbur Labs. We identify big customer pain points and build businesses to solve these problems. Since 2016, we have built and invested in 21+ technology companies, which means I pick LOTS of domain names across our portfolio. I joke that half my job is picking and negotiating domain names - which is a painful process now. The single biggest mistake tech founders are making right now is anchoring their brand to a .ai domain. It's very trendy today but it's a short-sighted play that will age poorly. We are rapidly approaching a reality where every company is an AI company, and having it in your domain name won't be a differentiator - it will be a redundancy. "AI fatigue" is already starting to take over and it will get worse. Customers are becoming skeptical of AI marketing buzzwords. They don't care how the sausage is made, they just want the best product and service. The most successful companies will integrate AI seamlessly in the background to better serve customers, not flaunt it in the domain name. I always advise our companies to go for a .com domain name, no matter how much AI they are packing. A .com domain remains the gold standard because it signals immediate trust, legitimacy, and longevity. A .ai domain screams 'we are a tech experiment,' but a .com says 'we are a business.'" Best, Phil https://www.wilburlabs.com
Hello there! I'm Nikola Baldikov, an SEO specialist with over 10 years of experience in the industry. I'm the founder of SERPsGrowth, a digital PR and link building agency helping brands grow their online visibility. I'm a contributing author at Entrepreneur.com, and my insights on content, SEO, and branding strategies have been featured in HubSpot, The Drum, the Content Marketing Institute, and more. I believe I can answer your question. Something I've noticed working with SaaS businesses is that many fail to conduct thorough background checks. There are always risks associated with purchasing a used domain, but if you buy a domain that's been used for spam or link schemes, you inherit suppressed rankings, unstable traffic, and months of cleanup work. Google is explicitly calling out expired domain abuse as a manipulation tactic, so even without a visible penalty, it can be hard to surpass the shadow ban. So, before you buy, I recommend looking for these red flags: - previously hosted low-quality content (casino/pharma) - near-zero indexed pages, spammy backlinks - sudden topic/geo shifts - any history of manual actions in Search Console You can also perform a quick 20-minute audit by running "site:" search and look for any topic flips in the Internet Archive. Previously built backlinks can be beneficial if you buy a used domain, but you need to look out for obvious manipulation. Search for brand reputation mentions and verify Search Console access pre-transfer. And if you've already bought a dirty domain, don't 301 it into your clean site. Stand it up separately, remove what you can, use disavow sparingly, and rebuild with original content. I hope that helps! Please let me know if you have any further questions. Cheers, Nikola Baldikov Website: https://serpsgrowth.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikola-baldikov-7215a417/ Headshot: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DiSZ3Eh4eXTZVHrEWAWHm4RReQRbqJCa/view Email: nikola@inboundblogging.net
We learned a painful lesson with Tutorbase. Using separate domains for our different tools made customers question if we were a legitimate company. Once we consolidated under one domain, that feeling disappeared. So here's some free advice for anyone building something: figure out your domain early and stick with it. It saves you a lot of customer confusion and awkward conversations later on.
The first mistake that newer tech companies make is using a domain name that's long and confusing or difficult to spell and pronounce. This misses the brand recall and renders word of mouth harder, as the customer will have a hard time remembering or typing the address right. Other big mistakes: attempting to sound out the spelling, include hyphens or numbers, and variations of spelling that are ambiguous and misleading (which all result in loss of traffic and confusion when you tell someone a more professional URL). com version is already taken and not available.
New tech companies have the tendency to choose a domain name, thinking of it very superficially. Tech companies have to choose a domain name as a strategic move with the long-term potential in mind. A domain name is not just an address on the Internet. A domain name is a fundamental part of your company's SEO. It is a part of your brand. The most unwise decision is having a domain name that has no descriptor of the company's purpose. Thus, every tech company has to make a domain name that is not ambiguous in the slightest. If a domain name obtains too much creativity within it, potential customers of the company will not be able to tell in which industry the company fits. This is a major inconvenience for companies in the saturated tech industry, specifically dev tools, AI, or SaaS. Another mistake is having a domain name that is not scalable. It is common sense for people to have a domain that is not a .com domain. This is a mistake due to the limit on a brand's credibility with that domain. It leaves future work on the domain branding to be very complex. SEO impacts are also being overlooked by newer founders. If a domain is too generic, too akin to industry competition, or has spam associations from its history, there will be significant traction impediments. Numerous founders do not check domain history, current backlinks, and prior ownership, which results in significant ranking challenges over time. One example of this is global usability. Domains should be memorable, easy, and quick to pronounce and spell. If you have to keep correcting someone, it's a losing situation. It should be brand-aligned, simple, scalable, and search-friendly. Check trademarking, and do a linguistic, SEO, and user testing audit. Growth should not be impeded by a domain. For the majority of tech companies, the domain name will be one of the first choices made and one of the most influential in terms of product adoption and trust, along with driving long-term brand equity.
We see many early stage teams choose domains that look modern but create long term credibility issues. I keep pointing to cases like productname.ai or secure-something.tech when the company actually sells risk critical software. These extensions feel current, but they age fast and they do not inspire trust during procurement or penetration test reviews. We once advised a startup that tried to run its entire security platform on a .cloud domain, and enterprise clients questioned it during every onboarding call. Another pattern appears when founders shorten names to the point of confusion. I have seen domains like qtguard.io or prxmsecure.app that require slow spelling every time someone says them out loud. That slows down sales, documentation, and support.
A name that restricts your business to one product, audience, or market trend can prove fatal. Our team supported a SaaS tool that launched under the name "Slack Optimization," but it struggled to sustain itself after launch. Once the company expanded its support to Teams and Zoom workflows, the domain became useless. The rapid pace of business development often causes founders to lose sight of their evolving plans. Many businesses come up with an innovative brand identity but settle for domains like get[brand].io or try[brand].co because the matching .com isn't available. However, users still instinctively type in brand.com due to habit, which can lead to losing traffic to other websites or having to buy the domain later at ten times its original value. We've seen this situation repeat itself several times.
The biggest startup error that I observe on the part of the tech startups is the selection of the domain name that cannot be spelled or remembered once heard. I have seen businesses waste their marketing funds by not being found on the Internet once a person has heard about them and finished the conversation or listened to the podcast. The following is how it occurred: A founder will select something smart such as Xyrtech or insert useless hyphens and digits believing that it sounds futuristic. After which they pass the following two years of typing the word on their telephones and seeing their prospective customers get to their competitors websites due to their misguided typing. This was one of the lessons that I acquired early on when assisting clients with their business insurance requirements. Provided that the time it takes me to access their site to check details of coverage is too low, it is a bad omen. The second aspect of this error is the non-factors of the domain beyond the original product. BestSaaSInvoicing2024 is a company that basic boxes themselves in. What will become of them once they start expanding services or in 2025? I have seen companies waste tens of thousands in rebranding due to their picking of too narrow. Your domain ought to be phone testable. Say it out loud to someone. They are not able to type it out the first time, and it is enough to lose a potential business. Stay simple, sound out and adapt enough to expand with your vision. Not only marketing advice, but also business protection at the very beginning of the business investment.
One of the most common mistakes tech companies can make, when thinking of a unique name, is to use a variant spelling of a common word (and of course the domain) because the actual word is already taken. An example would be naming a company "Syber Security Solutions", but every time you talk to potential customers you have to say "that's Cyber with an S". If you have to explain how to spell your company name every time, then you've made an on-going marketing blunder, unless you have a massive marketing budget for brand awareness. Another common mistake is not researching what else might also have the same name. I worked for an IT solutions company with a 4 letter name that was not an English word, so it should be easy to rank for right? Well the 4 letter word was also the name of a popular manga comic hero, so the manga comic content always outranked us when searching the company name. Conducting deep keyword research should be part of investigating any proposed company name, while also exploring what the word means in other languages before investing in a domain. A third mistake, from a pure SEO angle, would be choosing the wrong top level domain type (ie. .com vs .xyz). If the intention is to drive marketing via "search", then choosing a .com is a much better option for ranking long-term. If the company is promoted more via a community-based model like Discord, Telegram etc, than domains like .xyz or .ai can work. Additionally, if a company is only doing business in a particular country outside the USA, then choosing the country-related domain is the best option (ie. .com.au or .co.nz or .co.uk) for ranking specifically in that country.
A mistake many founders make is choosing a creative name that limits the scalability of paid ads. When it comes to paid ads, a domain name can tell people more than just who you are. It can be an indicator of what you offer and who your ICP is. For example, if you are offering a workforce management software for senior living services, a domain name like "seniorcaremanagement.com" will perform far better than a generic brand name because it tells users exactly who and what your offer is. This can be a powerful first step in your lead qualification process and can help eliminate the volume of unqualified leads that enter your sales funnel at the earliest stages of the buyer's journey. That improvement in traffic quality is what ultimately makes your campaigns easier to scale.
We often see new tech businesses choose a domain name that feels clever in the moment but creates friction later. We think the biggest mistake happens when founders prioritize novelty over clarity. The biggest mistake in my opinion is going for the .ai extension. Is it trending now? Yes. Will it be trending in 5 years? I'm not so sure about it. When your clothes are out of fashion and trends, you can easily replace them with new ones. When your domain is outdated and no longer cool, will you go through the whole hassle of migration? An additional problem we're facing when reviewing hundreds of domains each quarter for our publishing partners are domain names that require spelling explanations during demos or support calls. If someone needs to spell it out slowly, and twice, you know you made a mistake.
Having set up and built over 70 brands for our flagship lead generation company, I can say there are three best ways to think about your domain name. First, make sure it has intrinsic value for what you're doing. If your main marketing channel is online, so SEO or PPC, you can create intrinsic value through a brand that improves click-through rate. For our comparison brands, we would look at names similar to GoCompare. It doesn't just improve CTR, it improves action rates once the user lands on the site because they instantly know they're there to compare. "Go" is also a powerful action word. It boosts CTR and it boosts conversion rate when they get there. Just a few extra percent on each of those compounds into huge gains over the lifetime of the business and gives you a strong edge over competitors. One thing we could do is split test domain names, short list your top 5, buy them, set up identical sites with unique logos on each one, create a Google ads campaign with identical ad copy for each domain and see which produces the highest CTR and lowest conversion cost. No guessing, you can make pure data driven decisions this way for an extra 2 days work. The second type of intrinsic value is memorability. Think of brands like Apple, Google, Amazon. These have high recall and once a user has tried you a few times, they know exactly where to return. You become the number one place in their mind for that specific need. The third way, that works well if you have some offline mix or you want to target a very specific keyword, is saying exactly what you type of company you are. The bread company, Arizona Solar Panels etc.
The biggest mistake new tech businesses make is choosing a domain that's clever instead of clear. Founders fall in love with creative wordplay, but customers don't search for clever—they search for what they know. If people can't instantly understand what your company does from your name and domain, you've already created friction in acquisition, SEO, and brand recall. And, in a world awash in domain names, recall is probably the most critical. The quality of your content should prompt users to stick the first time, but getting them to come back again and again, requires something memorable and a great brand with a great domain will do that. That's exactly why we have regularly purchased premium domain names (including LLM.co) for our various brands.