Its our.in | India's Pride
I have advised founders on domain name decisions for nearly three decades. Across cycles, bubbles, crashes, and reinventions, one pattern has stayed stubbornly consistent.
Founders do not regret moving fast.
They regret locking themselves into weak identities.
In the early days of a startup, everything feels expensive. Servers feel expensive. Hiring feels expensive. Marketing feels expensive. Legal and compliance feel painfully expensive.
Against that backdrop, a cheap domain feels like relief. It feels practical. Sensible. Even responsible.
That feeling is understandable.
It is also misleading.
The Real Risk Is Not Cost
The real risk is identity lock in.
A domain is never just a technical address. It becomes the anchor for how your company is remembered, referenced, and trusted.
What begins as a placeholder becomes permanent faster than founders expect.
The name ends up everywhere. Pitch decks. Investor emails. Invoices. Contracts. Demo links. Customer conversations. Slack messages. Support tickets. Screenshots shared internally. Screenshots shared externally.
At that point, logic tells you the name should change.
Emotion tells you the name is too risky to touch.
That is how temporary decisions quietly become long term constraints.
Cheap Domains Create Invisible Friction
Founders usually measure cost in money.
Markets measure cost in trust.
Cheap domains introduce friction that is hard to see when traffic is low but impossible to ignore as the company grows.
Enterprise buyers pause when a name feels improvised.
Sales teams spend time spelling the domain.
Marketing loses momentum to confusion.
Inbound quality drops because serious buyers self filter out.
Conversion rates soften without an obvious reason.
None of this shows up cleanly in analytics dashboards.
It shows up as hesitation. As longer cycles. As deals that almost happened.
Founders sense something is off but cannot isolate the cause.
The cause is usually identity.
The Speed Justification Trap
When founders say brand does not matter early, that is rarely true.
What they actually mean is speed matters more than reflection.
Speed is not a flaw. It is often the advantage that keeps a startup alive. But speed should be a conscious trade off, not an accidental one.
There is a difference between choosing a placeholder and pretending it is a foundation.
Experienced founders know this distinction. First time founders often do not.
Names Carry Strategic Signals
Every domain sends signals long before you speak.
Is this company building to last
Does this founder understand leverage
Is this team thinking beyond the first product
Is this business built for scale or survival
Investors and enterprise buyers rarely comment on the domain itself. Silence is mistaken for approval.
In reality, the judgment happens instantly and quietly.
Why Market Context Matters
One of the biggest advantages founders have today is visibility.
You can observe how real names are priced. How negotiations happen. How ownership transfers occur. How serious buyers behave when value is clear.
Platforms like DaaZ matter not because they sell domains, but because they expose founders to real market signals. They show what is considered credible. What attracts demand. What holds value over time.
This context helps founders calibrate ambition instead of guessing.
Lean Does Not Mean Weak
Starting lean is smart.
Staying weak by habit is not.
There is nothing wrong with operating constraints. There is risk in building emotional attachment to an identity that no longer fits the business you are becoming.
Strong founders periodically ask one uncomfortable question.
Is this name helping us grow or quietly holding us back
The Long View
A cheap domain saves money today.
A strong domain saves years tomorrow.
The difference rarely shows up in month one.
It shows up when the business finally has momentum and realizes its identity cannot keep up.
That moment is far more expensive to fix.
If you are building something you believe will matter, make sure the name can grow with it.
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