A founder's guide to domain names

The name is a routing decision

A domain is the one piece of brand infrastructure you cannot refactor later without paying interest forever: old links, printed materials, email trust, SEO history. Treat the choice like schema design, not like naming a playlist.

The pragmatic hierarchy

1. Exact .com — still the default people type. If it costs less than a month of engineering salary, it is usually worth it.
2. Modern TLD with meaning — .io for developer tools, .app (HTTPS-enforced) for products, .cloud for infrastructure. Perfectly credible in 2026.
3. Country TLD — if your market is one country, .de or .es often beats a mangled .com.

Avoid hyphenated names and creative misspellings; both leak traffic to whoever owns the clean spelling.

Defend the perimeter — but only the perimeter

Register the .com plus your primary TLD, and the one typo your own team keeps making. Skip the other forty extensions; trademark law protects you better than a drawer full of renewals.

Operational hygiene

• Turn auto-renew on the day you register — with wallet balance behind it.
• Enable WHOIS privacy (free with every Exotik domain) and transfer lock.
• Keep nameservers with your DNS provider, not your registrar, so you can migrate either one independently.
• Put the renewal date in the company calendar anyway. Belt and suspenders.