[trienthusiast]

I will be counter-intuitive here and ask you this.

Is the domain worth 20k for you? If it is, and you think in the long run it will add 20k to your bottom line, then buy it.

If for any reason the startup won't succeed (knock on wood), if that is an appetizing enough .com, it will still be worth its asking price.

I recently read the examine.com guys bought it for 42k. I thought that was a very big risk for a starting blog. But in fairness, i think a domain name like examine.com could be re-sold for a very similar amount in short time.

If you think the .com is not worth 20k for you, or if you don't have 20k - then go for a prefix/suffix.

Buy cheap brand PPC campaigns on Googlee for your brand (I assume the parked domain isn't doing it) so that when people Google the name, they get to you. And eventually if you have constant Ads on top, and your site has a content as opposed to a parked domain,it will rank better in google too.

[hartator]

We can put 20k on a domain name if we really want to.

But from my experience, a domain name is a domain name and it's usually not worth that much of the money. 20k can be spent in a marketing campaign that will out weigth the benefits of having the "pure" .com

[SoloX5]

That's a bit simplistic.

Having "Examine.com" as our brand brought us weight - the domain is easy to remember, easy to understand, has a link to what we're selling, and so forth.

BUT - that 42k was never all we had. It was maybe ~25% of what we had. We decided that the brandability of the domain was more important than buying ads.

As you have a SaaS business, buying ads may work out. On the other hand, having a non-.com may backfire.

YMMV.