TE
TechEcho
Home24h TopNewestBestAskShowJobs
GitHubTwitter
Home

TechEcho

A tech news platform built with Next.js, providing global tech news and discussions.

GitHubTwitter

Home

HomeNewestBestAskShowJobs

Resources

HackerNews APIOriginal HackerNewsNext.js

© 2025 TechEcho. All rights reserved.

Ask HN: Should I use a one-word domain variant?

2 pointsby fgrimesabout 8 years ago
Or fear legal repercussions?<p>If I want to use &#x27;myexcellence.com&#x27; or &#x27;excellenceapp.com&#x27; for example, and there exists &#x27;excellence.com&#x27; from The Excellence Corporation, would that be a bad idea?<p>YANAL (or not), but what do you think? Especially those who may have encountered this situation before.<p>It&#x27;s a very generic word. There&#x27;s always the question of market sector, but this isn&#x27;t a clear case of auto repair vs. maid service, for example.<p>Instead it falls more into the realm of companies that offer business and marketing services to other companies, and deal with customers. Like most B2B services.

2 comments

brudgersabout 8 years ago
Random advice from the internet.<p>Why even waste energy thinking about this?<p>Just pick something else. Nobody really cares much about the name and if the company is making a pile of money, it can do a rebranding later. For a lot of businesses having something that is easily googlable may help more than having something perfect.<p>Alternatively, just use the name and move forward building a business. Blatant cases aside, fretting over what might happen because of the name is pretend work. Fretting over the business running out of money is real work.<p>Good luck.
Jaruzelabout 8 years ago
IANAL, so this is my education opinion only:<p>Are you offering on &#x27;myexcellence.com&#x27; a similar service to what&#x27;s already offered on &#x27;excellence.com&#x27; ? If so, then yeah, I&#x27;d avoid the name-clash as they can legally apply to take ownership of the domain name.<p>If your service is in a completely different market sector, then you should be OK, as there&#x27;s 1,000s of examples of similar sounding domains but providing very different services.