We've been getting a lot of media recently following the announcements about winning JLAB and becoming part of PayPal's Start Tank program. A couple of weeks ago, we chalked up one more big achievement. We splashed out and bought a new letter M.
It cost us a lot of money (by our startup standards at least), but we felt there were good reasons to do this and thought we'd share them with you in case you find yourself in the same situation.
1. Help your customers find you
We mostly target enterprise level customers and those that have heard our name and simply type in an assumed url, usually run with a .com address at first try. We've noticed a lift in our organic direct traffic since pushing our site live.
2. Don't miss any important emails
We were finding that people were inadvertently adding an M onto our @localz.co email address and were not reaching our inbox. Worse, the handy autofill solutions provided by some email software meant that they repeatedly got the wrong address. Very frustrating for them and us!
3. Global presence
While we're looking forward to the day that .rocks becomes the pre-eminent top level domain, it hasn't happened yet (and yes we already have localz.rocks!) In the meantime .com is still the most ubiquitous choice across the geographies that we're looking to work in over the next few months. There is also still some perception of scale and global presence that goes with the additional M.
Our last piece of advice would be to grab it early (i.e. before you start getting any press) as we have close friends who have watched their unknown and basically unused .com domain have 1,000% added to the ask, just because of one (very good) piece of coverage. By the way, they still bought it.
Cheers
Tim
