Excerpt from the ‘Getting a Billion People Working From Home‘ episode of the My First Million podcast with Shaan Puri. The entire episode (linked to above) is great but I wanted to focus on what Jason Chicola shares about naming his company and acquiring the domain. He demonstrates some hard-earned wisdom in his approach.
Chicola spent $400k to acquire Rev.com (a huge part of their assets at the time).
- Started off with a funky (animal + keyword) $12 Godaddy domain to make clear and specific their initial product offering. Knew it was temporary. “Spend no time at the beginning thinking about a name because the odds that your business is going to work are not super high”.
- Only later when the business was working and they’d found a good product/market fit did he prioritize naming the company.
- “It’s really a two part problem. One is picking a name that you love, and then figuring out can you get the domain name”.
- Hired two domain brokers to research his name list.
- Used Mechanical Turk to evaluate names…”What three words does this name evoke?”