Our Point of View

PremiumBrands.com is the collection I put together for founders who want to start on a name they will never need to replace. Each name comes with enough context to picture the company on it, because a domain is easier to judge when you can see it on a proposal or above a byline. AIWriters.com belongs in the collection because writing with AI is a field where, as I see it, many of the companies that will matter have not been started yet.

Lessons from Newswire.com

In 2007 I acquired the press release distribution business that ran on i-Newswire.com. I secured iNewswire.com in 2013, and after more than a year of negotiating, and of putting the move in front of SEO professionals before committing to it, I moved the business to Newswire.com in February 2015. On the morning of the switch, a prospect told one of our sales agents, “Oh yeah, Newswire.com. I've heard of you guys.” That was impossible, since the switch had only just happened, and it is still the clearest lesson I have had in what a strong name does before anyone has tried the product.

The name before the plan

PremiumBrands.com came to me before any plan for it did. I value names like it, and I could see that waiting would most likely mean losing it: in a few years it could have belonged to a company building on it, and a name in that position rarely comes back to market. The plan followed the name, which is the order I trust for a name this good.

Every name I buy has to pass one test: would I build on this? I buy as an end user, and the names I have not built on yet are the ones I am open to selling. AIWriters.com passes because of who it names. The writer is still the person who decides what a reader needs, which source to trust and which paragraph to cut, and a company built around that judgment has room to grow for years.

AI is part of why I think the name matters now. A small team can put a writing product together quickly, so products in this field are quicker to build and quicker to imitate. What takes longer is earning the trust of the writers and editors who use them, and a name that says plainly whom the company serves gives that work a place to start. If I were building on AIWriters.com, I would begin by watching someone edit a generated draft, because the changes they make show where a product should help and where it should stay out of the way.

The common advice runs the other way: launch on whatever name is free and trade up once the business has made it. Founders have done well that way, and I don't dismiss them. I still think the plan costs more than it looks, because the switch arrives when there is the most to change, from the invoices and inboxes to the name people already pass along. A great name won't save a bad business; it is a head start, not the business. On a good business, it means starting where the company intends to stay.

Two ways to begin

OnlineBusiness.com is my strategy and development studio, and it supports the presentations behind PremiumBrands. If AIWriters.com is the name for the company you have in mind, the Let’s Talk page is where to tell me, and the Explore the Domain page sets out what the purchase covers. If the name you want is a different one, tell me which; I help founders acquire names that are not in the collection. A premium .com is a trust shortcut.