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

  • Random advice from the internet.

    Why even waste energy thinking about this?

    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.

    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.

    Good luck.

  • IANAL, so this is my education opinion only:

    Are you offering on 'myexcellence.com' a similar service to what's already offered on 'excellence.com' ? If so, then yeah, I'd avoid the name-clash as they can legally apply to take ownership of the domain name.

    If your service is in a completely different market sector, then you should be OK, as there's 1,000s of examples of similar sounding domains but providing very different services.