Ask HN: Should I use a one-word domain variant?

2 points by fgrimes 9 years ago | 1 comment

Or fear legal repercussions?

If I want to use 'myexcellence.com' or 'excellenceapp.com' for example, and there exists 'excellence.com' from The Excellence Corporation, would that be a bad idea?

YANAL (or not), but what do you think? Especially those who may have encountered this situation before.

It's a very generic word. There's always the question of market sector, but this isn't a clear case of auto repair vs. maid service, for example.

Instead it falls more into the realm of companies that offer business and marketing services to other companies, and deal with customers. Like most B2B services.

brudgers 9 years ago |

Random advice from the internet.

Why even waste energy thinking about this?

Just pick something else. Nobody really cares much about the name and if the company is making a pile of money, it can do a rebranding later. For a lot of businesses having something that is easily googlable may help more than having something perfect.

Alternatively, just use the name and move forward building a business. Blatant cases aside, fretting over what might happen because of the name is pretend work. Fretting over the business running out of money is real work.

Good luck.

Jaruzel 9 years ago |

IANAL, so this is my education opinion only:

Are you offering on 'myexcellence.com' a similar service to what's already offered on 'excellence.com' ? If so, then yeah, I'd avoid the name-clash as they can legally apply to take ownership of the domain name.

If your service is in a completely different market sector, then you should be OK, as there's 1,000s of examples of similar sounding domains but providing very different services.