Building in Public: D is for Decision

Coffee is for closers

Quick one today as I’m in the middle of the first annual Conference Known Experimentation island! More on that next week.

For now, aptly, a thought experiment:

Let’s say you’re starting a company. Everything has lined up more or less as expected, but when it comes time to buy a domain, yourcompanyname.com is taken.

You do have alternatives — there are always alternatives. You’ve narrowed it down to two:

• yourcompany-name.com

• yourcompanyname.co

Which do you pick — and why? For me, I agonized over this for way too long. When I reached out to people to get their opinion, it was evenly split (“.com is .com for a reason” vs. “.co is cool and new!”). Here’s where the entrepreneurial rubber meets the road — YOU have to make the decision. Right or wrong, it’s on you. Paralysis is not in the mission statement.

For me? At the end of the day, the dash felt like a slightly bigger friction point than leaving the “m” off a URL. It likely may not even matter! But when you’re starting your own business, these early decisions can feel more important than they actually may be.

Maybe I should have bought both, done some fancy redirecting, and used the ensuring traffic data to determine the better option? While I did entertain that for a moment, it felt like a terrible idea. “Hey, check out my sites, elk-strategies.com OR elkstrategies.co. It’s like a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure where you end up at exactly the same place!” Yuck.

So why .co? Again, those conversations with the people you trust. The last person I spoke to said,“Look, who’s typing in URLs manually these days anyway? People are going to find you from search, email, or LinkedIn. Do what you want.” Great advice!

Don’t get me wrong though - I absolutely have alerts set for when the .comversion of my domain becomes available (do not buy it 😡). But four weeks in? I like where I’ve landed. Stop by; I’ve made a few updates www.elkstrategies.co

Now it’s your turn: what would you choose? Or have you been through this yourself? Drop your thoughts below!