Weird – I just met a founder at Dreamforce 2018 who would rather have a .LY than a .COM

So Dreamforce is here in SF which means that 180,000 people have descended on a city with a population of 870,000 – in short, that’s a lot of people. While I’m not attending the conference I got invited to a pretty fun party on a boat hosted by Chorus.ai and Betts Recruiting (feels right to give a shot out to them right?). Here’s a few shots from the boat:

Okay, so now back to the topic of this post. One of the people I spoke to on the boat is the founder of a company who currently owns their name in .AI. Their company name happens to end in LY and I asked him if he had ever tried to get the .COM. What he told me was pretty surprising, “I don’t care much about the .COM, it’s the .LY that I really want.”

Now let me say two things:

  1. This definitely is not the norm. I can tell you that 99.9% of startups would prefer to have their .COM
  2. .LY isn’t a particularly popular extension from what I’ve seen but this startup happened to have their name end in LY

Still, I told the founder, well you should really get the .COM, sure get the .LY, but people are going to end up going to the .COM and emailing the .COM so you really need to have that. He didn’t budge – “nope” he said, “I just want the .LY, I could care less about the .COM”

It was one of the more interesting conversations I’ve had with a startup founder about domains so I thought I’d share it with the rest of you. What do you think? I want to hear from you, comment and let your voice be heard!

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton