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by pclmulqdq 1283 days ago
Out of curiosity, why pay so much for the domain name? Could you not have chosen a name that had an open .com domain?

Aldo, if this was your trademark before buying the domain, are you sure you couldn't have used the ICANN trademark squatting process to seize it? That would have only cost about $1500. Some people look for trademark registrations to preemptively buy the .com domain (and then sell it back to you for $10,000+), but the ICANN specifically has a process in place to prevent this kind of extortion.

1 comments

We were deciding on a business name at the time, so we didn’t already own the trademark. Based on other similar names that we were considering, voltive.com should probably have been under $10k, but the seller absolutely refused to budge (why not, carrying cost is only $12/year after all).

But getting a decent name is hard. We wanted something that was two syllables, not trademarked (trademarks are important when selling on Amazon, as we do), easy to spell if you hear it said, had a toll free phone number available (we have 888-VOLTIVE). That narrows things considerably.