Who’s Behind It

I founded PremiumBrands.com to put premium names in front of the founders who will build on them, each one shown with enough context to picture the company it could become. Nearly all of them are .com. The collection exists because a good name is hard to find at the moment a founder needs one, and I would rather the search started here. Agentso.com is in it because so much new software is being built around agents, and a young company in that field is compared with a crowd of similar names from its very first pitch.

Lessons from Newswire.com

In 2007 I acquired a press release distribution business that ran on i-Newswire.com. Six years later I secured iNewswire.com, and in February 2015 the business moved to Newswire.com. That move came after more than a year of negotiating for the name. Before committing, I also consulted SEO professionals. Changing the address of a working business is not something I would ever do on instinct.

The morning of the switch, a prospect told one of our sales agents, “Oh yeah, Newswire.com. I’ve heard of you guys.” That was impossible, since the business had only moved to the name that morning. Nothing about the company had changed overnight except its name, and the name was already doing part of the introduction.

The test every name has to pass

PremiumBrands.com was a purchase made before I had any plan for it. Premium names matter to me, and holding off would probably have meant losing the chance. Today it could easily be in the hands of a company building on it, and a name in that position is most likely never coming up for sale. Every name I buy has to pass one test: would I build on this? The ones I have not built on yet are the ones I am open to selling, and Agentso.com is one of them.

Agentso.com passes that test for me. It starts with the word the whole field works in, and the coined ending leaves the company free to decide what it stands for, whether that turns out to be one sharp product or several. An agent company spends its early months explaining what its software does and where a person stays in the loop, and a name that already sits in the right field lets that explanation start with the work itself. AI is a large part of why I like it. A capable team can build a working agent quickly now, and so can the team across the street. What a rival can’t copy is a name people already recognize.

Choosing the name early

The usual advice is to launch on whatever name is free and upgrade once the business has made it. Plenty of good founders follow it, and some do well. My objection is to what later costs. By then the name is in the web address, the sign-in emails, the support replies and the app listing, and it sits inside the integrations customers have already set up. The better name also has to still be available when you finally go looking for it. OnlineBusiness.com is my strategy and development studio, and the building I do there is exactly why I would rather settle a name before anything is built on top of it.

A great name won’t save a bad business; the agents still have to work and the support still has to answer. What the right name gives a good company is a head start. If that is the company you are building, tell me what it will do first, and see what the sale covers before you write. If the name you want isn’t in the collection, say so; through PremiumBrands I also help founders acquire names that aren’t listed. A premium .com is a trust shortcut.