Seeing a domain name with an MVL (Minimum Viable Logo, haha) is really much better for imagining how strong it could be than just seeing it listed in text.

However, I found the selection too limited. So I think an interesting model for you would become a marketplace: 1- invite squatters with domains to sell to post their names on your site 2- invite designers to freely create logos to un-logoed domains 3- sell this wider selection to your audience, sharing the revenue with both squatters and designers.

Good luck - with more selection, I would easily find the service worthwhile at that price point.

At first, it's interesting. But think about it. Pre-purchasing domains throwing a brand on top is really as bad as implementing a software/web application without doing any market research. Chances are it's really not what people want. Unlike dead software/web apps, however, these domain names become worse than useless by block others from making something great.

The title here is misleading but the site does a good job explaining what they are offering. And I think that they are providing good value. When you are starting out the last thing you need to do is waste a lot of time and money on a name and logo. With this service, you just pick one and forget about it then move onto more important matters.

Choosing a name is supposed to be difficult. You're supposed to brainstorm for hours, bounce ideas off your friends and second guess yourself. Having to go through this pain to get to the right name adds character to the business through authenticity.

Choosing a name from a list of pre-created brands, clever or not, is a cop out.

Best of luck, though. I'm sure you'll do well.

I think they should create a tool that does this name and custom logo creation then doing it themselves. Dont see how they sell much

Other than that I am not that impressed, the logos look pretty generic/standard. Maybe that kind of thing could work for small businesses (like restaurants), though.

But what about small web apps? This should work very well for them.

I own LunchMeet.com and paid 5 figures for it when at the time I intended to develop a startup.

Now I want to sell it. Is it squatting if I am just trying to get my money back?

Feature request: I'd love to subscribe to categories and get updates when you add new domains. E.g. "Please email me when you have a new domain related to health or hardware."

If you have free time, do it yourself.

Currently not using HeyBTW with Heybtw.com, heyb.tw, @heybtw

@stylater

Though a reverse hijacking costs more than $250

Nicely designed site, though. Looks great.

The amount of time/headache it takes to brand a startup should not be underestimated. I think that the logos are fine to get started quickly but probably would all need to be changed in the long run, but no big deal, you've provided a decent enough starting point where it doesn't look shitty atleast and can allow someone to build their product while still having a decent looking thing on their site.

We spent several WEEKS of all hands on deck and lots of $$$ (Well over $10k for the domain name, banners, stationery etc) as a company rebranding from Transparent Financial Services (http://transfs.com) to FeeFighters (http://feefighters.com). Had we started with something better than transfs from the beginning we wouldn't have had the problem (btw, it's still a pain in the ass because google apps doesn't let you change your name, so we still only have a duct tape solution where our google apps are still @transfs and I occasionally still send an email from @transfs - embarassing!). Plus, we lost all the google juice we'd built up over that time (which was considerable - TransFS was a PageRank 5 site and FeeFighters had none).

At that point (post-funding), our time and pagerank were a lot more important than the money.

More on our rebrand that might be useful to people (you now have to pay to see the video but can download the audio and read transcript for free): http://mixergy.com/sean-harper-feefighters-intervie/

That said - most people put too much weight on a name, but it's really important to be sure the name is A) memorable (this doesn't mean weird or unique), B) easy to spell and C) easy to Google.

Names that are weird spellings or made-up words are NOT memorable, basically because they don't fit into a ready-made slot in the readers' head. (Plus if they are hard to spell, you're SOL.)

It's far better to have a memorable name like "Charm" and then append crap to the end of the domain (e.g. CharmHQ.com) to ensure you can grab the domain, than it is to have a short, unique name where you get the regular name.com.

This conclusion is based on my extensive reading of cogsci research about memory, word association, etc.

That brings us to the final piece of the puzzle: a site where you can invest in a "team" that has no idea and no technology.

Then the guys who walk around with bags of money evaluating teams and business propositions will finally be able to just mix and match to whatever they want, thinking (as they already do) that they're the ones adding all the value. Which, to be fair, under capitalism they probably do.

You could condense the entire Silicon Valley startup funding scene into a single transaction.

If you think you're going to get less than $250 worth of value from this site, don't use it. But count me in with the people saying that that a lot of these are steals. Just in terms of opportunity costs saved in spending weeks bouncing names around, this seems like a major value.

Even with those tools, I still hate looking for domain names :)

All you're doing here on HN is --- whether you realize it or not --- brainwashing nerds into believing the market works in ways that it does not.

In the real world, this is an extraordinarily generous offering that absolutely hits a sweet spot in reducing pain for new startups. Every one of the entrepreneurs on this site have gone through days, weeks, sometimes months of pain trying to brand a new product. I have products I haven't started working on yet solely because I can't figure out a name I don't hate.

Please stop conning nerds into thinking the world works the way you want it to.

Every one of them clears the bar of "presentable to early customers".

Most clear the bar of "presentable to mainstream customers".

None are distinctive, which is to say, none send the signal "we picked one of The Cool Designers and paid $10,000 for this logo". But virtually nobody needs that.

Think whatever you want about these designs, but if you bring a prototype to market that looks like the typical "Show HN" because you're too cool to buy a cheap design, you'll suffer for it.

If you were going to get another logo from the off I'm sure you could spend a few hours thinking of a great (available) name too.

The interesting aspect of this service is as a set of triggers. You'll find some people will immediately spot a matching domain in that list - they may not have thought of it themselves, but seeing it there triggers off the lightbulb.

Sure you can do the exact same thing with a command line whois, but then you don't get the benefit of serendipity. Someone else's list of brandable domains shows an item you weren't expecting to see, and that triggers off your own creative process into a different direction, and you find an end result you may not have arrived at without that serendipitous discovery.

You are seeing the results of someone else's creative process of discovering brandable domains. You don't have to pay for that effort, but you can be motivated by it. The $250 charge is if one of those domains is a perfect match, not for the process of finding an available perfect match and brandable domain.

The route that satisfies your expenditure expectations is watching expired domains lists - that's another source of someone else's creative inspiration. But you either have to scan tens of thousands of junk entries, or have a keyword list of some sort to focus on. Even then, because of the volume, you'll miss excellent domain names that are slightly outside of your current thread of ideas.

Then there's http://impossibility.org/ - generating available domains centred around a keyword. It's interesting, more serendipitous than expired lists, and purchasable immediately by registration. This is probably one of the better "suggested domain name" tools around, though it's just sticking words before or after your keyword. Sometimes an good domains does pop out, but it takes a bit of a graft, or a lazy Sunday afternoon.

Or sit there typing one domain idea at a time into a whois. It depends on your own level of innate creativity as to which approach will reap dividends. Personally, I use several different avenues. This is one more to keep an eye on.

Don't underestimate the creativity and inspiration. This is perhaps a better source of quality domains than Sedo/GoDaddy auctions, ebay/flippa/digitalpoint. Better, because of it's focus on brandable names rather than generic keywords / keyword-heavy / geo-targetted domains that are the current vogue in domainer/internet marketing circles.

These guys won't know what matches perfectly for you, only you do. If the price upsets you, you are not forced to buy even if it's a perfect match, you can just find another perfectly matching domain that is available.

The costs in terms of our time, plus the design time are going to be way more that $250 - so if this has something you want and can use, great. If not there are literally millions of other names out there.

These guys, IMHO, are adding value. If you think not - fair enough, but they aren't selling just a domain. They are selling time saved. Some peoples time won't be worth as much, some people are already talented designers. For the rest of us, this is a great idea.

Second, professional designers do not give you the rights to the typeface they use for their logotypes. You ask them, they obtain them, and then they invoice you the several hundred dollars the logotype cost them.

Third, why would you want the font used for this particular logo? It's a terrible display font. Its only value is in creating logotypes like this one.

I find this particular critique unfounded.

> I'm curious how you think that it's related.

It is only tangentially related because it is about domain squatting in general.

> removing a domain name from blacklists.

Of course the list would only carry squatted names, not names that have been brought from squatters. It would have to be regularly updated with a simple way to remove domains.

Some squatted domains do show up in search engines, so it could be used as a filter for that. Even better, when you accidentally land on a squatted domain (by following a link to a now-dead site, or by typoing a domain name) you get automatically redirected to Google or another search engine instead.

Gabriel Weinberg from Duck Duck Go has a similar list that he uses for his search engine, but he also had a Firefox toolbar that would prevent you from visiting squatted domains and instead get you to the correct domain when it was a typo. (The toolbar doesn't exist anymore).

I wish we had enacted policies against squatting back in the '90s. But Internet governance did very much the opposite thing. This argument ended a long time ago. Why piss in the wind about it? In the post-domain-squatting world, this is a great offering.

For some domains, true. In other cases considering that back in the day there were an infinite number of domains that you could register (and by the way they cost $70.00 after they were initially free) and $35 per year (until ICANN and competition dropped the price) I wouldn't say it was simply "thinking of it first".

As somebody who spent much time programming algorithms to figure out which domains to, um, SQUAT on, I would hardly say I own names just because "I merely thought of it". It seems like that way now because now value has been established and it's obvious.

Do you think it was obvious back then? It wasn't. I was there.

Do you think people should be allowed to buy and sell things they own?

All arbitrage is a "pure wealth transfer", but it's also how we increase the liquidity of markets.

If someone else is using a domain name you'd like to use, and they're willing to sell it to you for a price you find reasonable, that's OK, right? Why should the sale be forbidden if they're not currently using the name?

What makes this case a lot more palatable is that they have actually put the time and effort in to mock up a logo to go along with the domain. Sure, it's not much, but they did actually add some value, they are not simply generating names and registering them automatically. It may or may not be worth $250, but it's a lot better than people selling just domains for thousands just because they got there first.

But it would also prevent many people from getting their own site because of the cost. I don't think you would have many people taking as many chances as has happened with the current pricing.

Lowering costs has helped the net even though there are undesirable consequences as with anything.

(See where this is going?)