More Thoughts On Domain Names

I wrote earlier about how we were considering other domain extensions for new business ideas, using something like .guru as the domain name extension instead of .com. We registered two .guru domains this week for two new ideas we’re working on and we setup google apps email accounts for each of those domains.

However today we ran into issues. We were needing to purchase some supplies on a third party website and that third party website would not let us create an account with our .guru email addresses. The website checked for “valid” domain extensions and did not consider .guru to be valid, obviously not having been updated since the ICANN allowance of these new domains.

That spooked us. If within one week we ran into a problem like that, what other problems would we run in to? How many times would we have to educate the world that .guru is actually a real extension?

So today we decided to go back to the drawing board on our names and find ones that have available or purchaseable .com extensions.

What tricks do you have for naming startups and finding domain extensions?