TechCrunch: “Maybe Friend wasn’t crazy for spending $1.8M on a domain after all”

Friend.com was in the news at the end of July. Avi Schiffmann posted on X that the company purchased Friend.com for $1.88M on a payment plan. Some thought it was crazy to spend that much and voiced their outrage on X.

TechCrunch published an article on the purchase and went deeper into branding and domain names.

The first thing I found interesting was that Avi Schiffmann, the founder and CEO of Friend, told TechCrunch over email that the purchase has already paid for itself. I am not sure in what way that has happened. I would guess he is talking about brand equity.

A marketing professor from Columbia had an interesting take on when to go unique and when to go more generic.

Olivier Toubia, a marketing professor at Columbia Business School, said one nuance to consider when thinking of a name is how often you want customers to interact with your business. If it’s a consumer product that users will turn to often, or a software that businesses will use every day, coming up with something unique and memorable, like Google or Twitter, could be a smart play.

And if a company’s product is something that users turn to less often, or only when they need to, it’s better to choose a name that is generic enough to easily come up on search engines.

Alex Harris a VC chimed in on getting the domain name right, he stated it adds a touch of legitimacy to a business. “A professional-sounding name and domain helps people trust a company if they haven’t heard of it before, be they customers, potential hires, or even investors.”

You can read the full article on TechCrunch