I'm guilty, I've fallen in love with two names and can obtain both domains. They have a very different feel to each other, and halfway in between is the feel I want to achieve.<p>I am the cofounder of a cloud computing start up and we are developing an application to assist in managing cloud deployments.<p>The two domains are in the format:
XXXXXXXcloud.com
YYYYYapp.com<p>I'm not dumb enough to use both just because I love both, but the first one sounds perfect for a company name and the second for the app name.<p>Is it foolish to use both as we only have one product? Should the company name and the app name be the same?
<p><pre><code> Company: Microsoft
Brands:
Office
Windows
Sharepoint
Dynamics
etc.
Company: IBM
Brands:
Lotus
Rational
Tivoli
Cognos
WebSphere
DB2
</code></pre>
The point being, that it's pretty routine to have a "company name" and then one or more "brand names" that hang off of the company name. All of that said, it's a judgment call on when/what/how many brands to have... The one thing of interest that I'll throw out is this... marketing guru Jack Trout (of <i>Positioning</i> fame) is a big fan of launching new products under a new brand name, instead of doing a "line extension." Now that's in the context of an established company, not a startup... but I think you can generalize the point to "yes, it's OK - perhaps even preferred - to have multiple brands."<p>In my own case, my company name is "Fogbeam Labs" and I fully intend to name the <i>product(s)</i> something very specific when we have something to ship. <a href="http://www.fogbeam.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.fogbeam.com</a> will always just be a link to the main company website... any hosted / SaaS apps will have their own domain. I should probably point out, though, that our primary focus is on the B2B / Enterprise Software market, and my biases are towards thinking in those terms. Any or all of this may have absolutely zero relevance to your situation. :-)
Two brands makes sense if they map to different market segments which require substantially different branding strategies, e.g. Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 (and yes I know these also have different feature sets) or Chevy and GMC (which do not have meaningfully different feature sets).
While it's done all the time (see Obvious Corp and Twitter), one potential downside for a bootstrapped startup is that you'll need to make an extra effort to protect two names (trademarks, licenses, etc.).