Could we please stop writing about Color? As in, just drop the curtain of silence and be done with it? The less buzz there is about it, the sooner it'll be gone from popular consciousness.
But should we generate too much buzz, it may become self-sustaining :-(
Btw., perhaps the 41mln investment isn't just about providing necessary funding, but also about giving people 41 million reasons to generate even more buzz?
If $41m is what is needed for this company to generate huge buzz, build a massive user base and make phenomenal amounts of money, it's a completely valid venture.
I'm not arguing that it will be a success - it just seems sensible to wait for the outcome before passing judgement on whether the investment was worthwhile.
Let this particular business succeed on its merits, just like the average start-up.
Surely one of those 'merits' is having the wiles to raise large amounts of funding and spend it appropriately, including on mindshare?
Agreed... I'd rather open HN and see headlines about a great app/service I've /never heard of/ than more headlines about an app everyone has already heard of, but doesn't seem to actually deliver much yet.
Everyone whose on this "are we still talking about color" thing is starting to get on my nerves. Theres still LOTS of mileage in it - more write ups, VC opinions, yada yada.
Its how the world works. They just raised $41m, one of the largest pre-launch rounds. Expect to hear about them.
Saying "are we still talking about color" doesn't make you cool. Nobody cares if your "over it because your so hooked in to the tech scene".
If you don't want to read about it, don't click on the link.
Look, I care about great products and services. That's connected with strong competition. In this case, the company/product/service is close to becoming a celebrity thanks to very high blog & press coverage. Which artificially raises the bar to competitors, basically sky-high.
I lack any blogging experience; if I had any, I'd try to give some counter-coverage, to promote competitors.
I regret not making that reasoning clear in the original post.
Reid Hoffman had a great line at the last Startup School to the effect of "Most mainstream web users can remember 7 +-2 web services. If this is true (and I believe it is) $500K on domain names is not a bad investment for a few reasons:
1. Easy to say/spell. I work for a startup where I have to spell the name of the company every time I talk to someone. We are a medical company so its not a big marketing issue, but having to explain your site is Colr.com or TheColorApp.com instead of just "Color" will impede consumers.
2. It makes you seem like a real company with the resource to own a short, properly spelled name rather than yet another creatively spelled SocNet. Talk to some non-early adopters and you'll see how important this can be.
My take is that most people are mocking the amount of money being spent on what is initially seen as a photo sharing service rather than a platform that will allow people to quickly assemble social networks of real life friends. in different contexts.
Only true if they planned to exit on the app alone. Maybe the plan is ambitious enough to warrant the expense.
In unrelated news: a friend of mine casually referred to her boss as a 'green' on Saturday... apparently it is the result of popular personality test that everyone in the company has to take. The result (one or more 'colors') is part of their email signature for internal correspondence.
Totally Agree. I think photo sharing is a classic "Thin Wedge" that Dixon and Wilson have written about before. Think about how powerful Color could be:
Business Networking - Go to a conference and create an ad hoc social network. You are basically automating what Fridge and Lanyrd are doing now.
Neighborhood Social Networking - Need to organize a carpool or soccer practice schedule? Moms can set up a network with their phones while sitting in the stands watching their kids play.
Same for schooling, retailing, and dozens of other opportunities where you might want to let people communicate then sell them stuff. If nothing else it might be so it is easier for advertisers to remember and more easily access the self serve ad mechanisms the founders described.
I could see all of those eventually having a traditional "Web" page though it might be assembled and interacted with very differently than a traditional soc net.
The neighborhood social networking example is not as straight forward as it sounds. The barrier to use isn't just the user experience, but the metaphor behind the application. Most regular people have a hard time learning new metaphors to interact with technology.
Do you really think that an entire group of middle-aged moms would all download an app on their smartphones to co-ordinate carpools? No! They don't want to deal with technology. Most likely they will just talk person to person (what a novel idea) or use their existing email list from the team.
Don't mean to get too personal, but this kind of thinking is one of the disadvantages from living in Silicon Valley. You become disconnected from how the majority of people live and interact with technology
Exactly. Normal people won't use technology unless it does something they can't, but need to do, or makes something significantly easier. They don't just use tech for its own sake like I do.
I can remember a couple of nights in my youth when I might have enjoyed putting together a location-specific ad hoc social network... right around closing time.
>Most mainstream web users can remember 7 +-2 web services
I seriously doubt this. AFAIK most people have 7+-2 "registers" of short term memory, which has strong implications for stuff like the maximal # of digits in a phone number - but it doesn't affect the number of phone numbers you can remember, or names of people, or ball players etc.
As for "real company name": Google, Yahoo, eBay, Skype, Paypal, Wikipedia, MySpace, Hotmail, Amazon, Apple, Dell, Starbucks... Company names can become meaningful without starting this way.
I actually had a hard time trying to find the app in the Android Market, because there's only one search term and it's really generic. Colr would probably have been easier.
Similar problem (tons of "color" apps), but Apple managed to rank them highly in results when I looked.
I assume they key off of selection criteria from the users (ie. most users installed X after searching for Y, so rank X higher for Y), but it could also be that their company name and app name are both "Color".
> 1. Easy to say/spell....having to explain your site is Colr.com or TheColorApp.com instead of just "Color" will impede consumers.
> 2. It makes you seem like a real company with the resource to own a short, properly spelled name...
This is not a very hard problem to solve.
kragen@inexorable:~/devel$ cat shortnames.py
#!/usr/bin/python
# Pick unused domain names. Kragen Javier Sitaker, 2011.
import socket, random, itertools
def lookup(domain):
try:
return socket.getaddrinfo('www.'+domain, 80)
except socket.gaierror:
return None
# We try an unlikely-to-exist domain in case our ISP engages in a
# man-in-the-middle attack on DNS traffic.
failing_dns_response = lookup('jaoiwgjaioawjio'+'aioj.org')
words = [line.strip() for line in file('/usr/share/dict/words')]
short_words = [word for word in words if 0 < len(word) <= 6]
print "Considering %d short words." % len(short_words)
for ii in range(20):
while True:
sld = random.choice(short_words) + random.choice(short_words)
if len(sld) <= 2:
continue
domain = sld + '.' + random.choice(['com', 'org', 'net'])
if lookup(domain) != failing_dns_response:
continue
print domain
break
kragen@inexorable:~/devel$ time ./shortnames.py
Considering 22221 short words.
LippiSeurat.org
crownseagle.net
JoleneMable.org
anorakbarf.org
baitdepend.org
opticbib.org
elopevictim.org
maniacAbner.org
glandhanker.org
nthprissy.com
dumpsSandra.org
measlyhafts.com
cassiaLaud.net
avowstarots.com
Elvianoun.org
duchyfeisty.net
dualgales.net
hikingpinup.com
dirgesBarnes.net
tillchars.net
real 0m15.749s
user 0m0.140s
sys 0m0.028s
How about dualgales.net, opticbib.org, napstiff.org, ticketgorge.org, damnharem.net, bargehutch.org, ravagepunk.net, jigglemutant.net, EliRx.org, jobunsafe.org, vendspanda.com, lathedkid.com, poppedcopula.net, triadsvia.com, civicsdiary.com, greyvalet.com, queenfigs.org, pagansultan.net, tacofoci.com, odderzoos.net, fleatablet.org, and so on? The whole blob of them all together looks like spam, because spammers register domains using a very similar approach, but any one of them is a perfectly respectable, easy-to-say and easy-to-spell, relatively short domain. This program can generate about 1.5 billion different domain names, modulo possible weaknesses in random.choice.
Domains are still very important for a number of reasons (prestige being an obvious one). Buying the domains before announcing the round of funding probably saved them a good deal of money too.
It's a drop in the bucket if you look at the big picture.
Facebook paid $200k for their domain a few years ago. Imagine what they would have to shell out now had they decided against it back then.
Facebook paid $200k for their domain a few years ago. Imagine what they would have to shell out now had they decided against it back then.
-------
What you fail to mention is that they got by on thefacebook.com for a while before they ponied up and got the current domain ... at that point it was clear they were going to be huge so it didn't matter.
Spending $500k on a domain out the gate instead of getting 5 badass developers working on making your product rock, is stupid to me, but thats just me.
"Spending $500k on a domain out the gate instead of getting 5 badass developers working on making your product rock, is stupid to me, but thats just me."
They have $40.5 Million left for developers and if need be can raise even more. The question is: would 5 more developers make a difference?
Putting aside the point of whether or not it was actually prudent to buy the domain, you take on an attitude that suggests that saving the $500k would have led to a better product. With $41M at hand, I'm not sure that's the case.
There's nothing silly about it. Domains are important but for brandable terms. Color is far too common a word. It conveys nothing that could be seen as a brand.
Further, it shows that they're spending with the notion of huge scale long before there's any sign that's necessary. (It's what sunk a lot of dot bomb companies.) Yes it might be cheaper now, but it's a risky way to spend their money especially when a brandable term is both more valuable and less expensive.
I think what he means is silly is that the post only focuses on the $1/2M spent on the domains vs the amount of expectation the company had pre-launch.
With $41M, color has more than enough cash to pivot onto something that will work - but for me the real reason color hit a big fail at launch was the same reason cuil was - the level of expectation people had about the company due to the fact they raised so much/had so much hype. If color had a different name, and was written by a small hardy team from y combinator or whatever, I think people who have still had some scepticism but would have been generally positive.
I, like a lot of people, looked at that app and thought, "this is $41M of development?".
They can still pivot and do something interesting, but I think this is one of those times that "release early, release often" does not apply. It's a great app for when your at a big event, but as I asked on twitter, what if there is no there, there?
When do people ever say, "I bought an Apple computer"? People usually say, "I bought a Mac". Ever rarer will you see someone say, "I bought an Apple phone." (I'm talking about most laymen aka consumers)
Apple's branding value has followed from their high quality and consumer-accessible products. No amount of marketing will support a crappy product. Focusing on marketing over quality is how products die a spectacular death. Remember Kin?
Mac bought the domain "me.com" which is awful. I love my .mac email address and never use ".me" for anything. Especially because it used to belong to a failed social networking site and so is blocked at a bunch of the (govt) sites that I work!
Here's the thing, the domains of most successful websites are somewhat informative about the service that the website provides. It doesn't matter how abstract or strange the name may seem. For example, look at sites/services like Reddit, Digg, Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, Netflix, Mint, and Yelp. All of those sites have names can be derived from their purpose. How about Color? That name is totally ambiguous and thus loses effectiveness.
What if Facebook was named "friends.com"? Sure, it probably would have been cool to have such a simple domain name, but Facebook is more effective because the name signals purpose.
In short, it's not only about the "prestige" in a name, it's about what that name signals. Color signals nothing.
Agreed. I do think domain names are valuable. However, they could have spent their money better. Probably less money too. The name color doesn't evoke anything to the purpose. I would have gone with something that speaks to social interaction and capturing moments. Catchit, lifeline, keeple, or something similar. -Keeple is pretty awesome, actually. :)
The whole point is that the rest of them have built a recognizable brand. You can do that with an offbeat word like yelp relatively easily, but they'll never do it with color.
The cynic in me theorizes that "color" is a term perfectly targeted to the company's real customers, advertisers, as it implies a deep store of data on the targets of advertisements. The "color" is that which has been added to potential ad viewers' demographic profiles through use of the service.
This. I don't understand why everyone thinks the price for color.com was too high. We paid quite a bit more than that for our domain names, so I do have a point of reference here.
I personally believe this was a horrible investment in a horrible product with a horrible idea, but to rip on the domain name purchase really seems like the least of all possible concerns.
It looks like from your profile that your domains were for a purchasable consumer good, I still think $500k is expensive for that, but given how much juice Google gives to owning the domain, probably a pretty wise investment. You didn't have a choice about what people would search for, if I want a necktie, I'm going to search for "necktie".
No one is going to search for Color and find a photo app, they are going to search for the name of whatever the cool app people are talking about is, so for quick, cheap SEO they would have been better off calling it MonkeySponge or something.
> I personally believe this was a horrible investment in a horrible product with a horrible idea, but to rip on the domain name purchase really seems like the least of all possible concerns.
The whole point of the post was "The domain name fiasco is the indicator of a much bigger and deeper problem"
1. Nguyen names company 'Color' and buys color.com
2. Sequoia hears about Color, contacts them
3. Sequoia gives them $14 million
4. Other investors want in, and keeps wanting in
money until the total size of the round hits $41 million.
If the implied timeline is correct (and do correct me if I'm wrong), then the founders were more than prepared to shell out for the domain name even before the round.
A tribute to Apple's color logo from the Apple II. This computer changed my life when I was seven (also a reference to another company name I've used.)
My dad bought one from ComputerCraft run by Billy Ladin in Houston. He was one of the first computer resellers back in 1977. In an odd twist, I meet him in an elevator 15 years later and worked for him. He introduced me to the Web.
Working at Apple was a dream. Color's name is a tribute to Apple.
So, you'd be right, it looks like Sequoia did get in after the purchase of the domain, which could indeed indicate that the domain helped them in some way.
Best rebuttal by far.
Though, one could also argue they might not have been so eager to accept Sequoia's capital if they weren't spending $500,000 on things like domain names.
Domains are an asset and very easy to justify paying for if you have the money. It's not like they just burned half a million dollars. If the company folds they can sell the name.
Also the name is vague enough to encompass any pivots. It's a great name, probably one of the best domains you could have for an app in the happiness business.
It was expensive, sure, but they have the money. And corporate accounting probably sees it as an appreciating asset anyway.
If you have $41 million I can think of few better purchases than a really great, memorable, meaningful, happiness-associated domain name.
Also it has netted them tons of free advertising. Think all the "The iPad will fail!!!!!!!" blog posts hurt Apple's bottom line? No one _really_ listens to naysayers. Pessimists are just an alternative form of advertising.
I'm not sure why they actually need that much money at this stage of their company's development. With that said, I certainly wouldn't turn down $41 million if someone wanted to give it to me :) However, the fact that they now need to produce returns on this large of an investment may add a whole new level of pressure to the already difficult task of launching a viable startup.
You nailed it. Who is more mockable: the start-up with a 1.0 product that accepts a ton of VC money, or the VCs who threw the ton of money at them? How many hackers with a 1.0 product wouldn't take the VC money in the same circumstances? I'm sure some might refuse to take more than they thought they deserved, but that has got to be a tiny percentage. The real question is what the VCs saw to cause them to believe that this was worth what they paid. Given that others are not seeing it in the 1.0 product, it either has to be something else that's coming, or it has to be a pretty stupid investment. Either way, if someone is to be mocked, it's not the entrepreneurs who accepted the money.
If you're going to spend millions on marketing it isn't crazy to pay half a million for two domain names that are easy for people to remember.
Remember when Barnes and Noble started an online bookstore and nobody knew if it was barnesnoble.com or barnesandnoble.com or barnesandnobles.com or barnesandnobles.com or barns-n-nobles.com or whatever?
You can be quite successful with a brand name that's a catchy neologism, but if I had the kind of investment they had I wouldn't feel bad about dropping that much money for a really good domain.
SOME domain names matter. I believe that it was a critical element to Mint's success. But in their case it was also backed up my a phenomenal service. If Color can back up their killer domain name with a service people flock to, then their investment will have been worthwhile. If not, its a generic enough name with broad applications that is likely to find a buyer in the neighborhood of what they paid to secure it today.
I think the real reason most people are mocking color is that they're turned off to large funding rounds. That's really it.
The product: not bad. If you can actually network with it (and I have), then it's actually quite interesting.
The domain name: Not expensive compared to the money they raised.
The funding round: Not a shady play, it seems like a few big partners are just genuinely excited about the product.
So all I'm left with is that people don't like the number $41m, and now they're doing anything they can to to justify that initial judgement by tearing at an otherwise good product.
I think that domain names are still extremely important, but I'm curious about the other side of the equation. Do you think that most consumers are just following links from Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. and no longer typing in words in the browser bar and appending .com? Just from shoulder surfing at my local library, it seems that many 'average' folks are still typing in keywords and adding .com to the end. For many sites this seems to bring up a (monetized) landing page with search results where they just click on a link that looks like what they want -- and if it isn't they hit the back button and try again or type different keywords in the browser bar. Based on this, it seems that having a memorable .com domain name is worth it.
Being tech-savvy, I'd never just type in keywords and append .com, but I think I'm in the minority on this one.
Color may turn out to be a number of grandiose things, but let's not forget the simple problem that it solves: sharing photos that different people take at the same gathering. I mean people do this already, through Facebook and other photo services, but this takes a whole lot of hassle out of the process.
I wish more commentators would acknowledge this basic USP before waxing lyrical about implied social graphs and relationship revolutions.
Incidentally, the other day it occurred to me what a big deal the iPad's back facing camera is. Apple want you to take your iPad to parties and gatherings, cause it's crowd-gathering appeal is unreal. You're more likely to do that if you can use it as a camera. At least if the party's in your own house. It basically transforms more social events into live Apple adverts.
Is that just a random claim, or does he have data to back it up? I think domain names still matter a great deal. At least to Google. I have a web site that is not even among the top 10 pages of search results for it's main keyword, because the domain name sucks (I claim my site is a lot better than 99% of the search results before it).
Also I think diapers.com makes shitloads of money.
Minor correction: diapers.com loses shitloads of money. By the time Amazon acquired them, the founders had diluted themselves down to about 2% and had taken on large amounts of debt as well.
What you can say, however, is that diapers.com sold for shitloads of money.
I always wondered who it was that bought the godaddy domain suggestions in the form of my[xxx]app.com - now I know, it's all been to bloggers who wanted to waste their money to prove a point.
Hey trotsky,
I'm totally down with people disagreeing with me, and I'd truly be interested in hearing your thoughts/opinion on why I'm wrong. But I think saying that I have "questionable intelligence" is unlikely to end up in the kind of quality discussion & debate hacker news is known for.
Did you really buy the domain names? What on earth are you going to use them for? It also seems that someone having my opinion (that domains in that form are embarrassing and not worth the small amount of money you paid) somewhat discounts your argument that domains don't matter. Clearly they do, at least to some extent. Are you honestly saying that if you had $41M in the bank you'd launch your brand with the domain myAwicklanderApp.com ? I doubt it.
Yeah, I did buy them, though I'm not sure what I'll do with them if anything. Maybe I'll point them to the color.xxx slide show. :)
My post was written, not from the perspective of someone that just got $41 million. But instead, how I would feel if I invested that money in a company and that's what they decided to spend it on.
Given the timing of the investment and the domain purchases it seems almost guaranteed (to me) that the investors knew they planned to buy them.
Also, I'm not sure how much of the quality discussion and debate that HN is known for you can expect on the 18th submission critical of color to hit the front page in the last few days.
The real reason most people are mocking Color is because they're jealous of the amount of funding Color received. In my opinion, Color has not done anything wrong yet. If you have all that money, why not go and buy an expensive, memorable domain name?
Seems like there's a basic lack of economic understanding .. when you buy a Toyota you don't throw $20K into the garbage- you walk away with capital, a large chunk of metal that plenty of other people would want besides just you. A domain name is capital too- they can leverage it in the course of business, or they can resell it recouping most or all of the cost.
As consumers we are so used to buying stuff and then wearing it all the way out- clothing, computers, soap, food. But when a business invests in capital, that capital holds value. When a textile plant closes, it liquidates its looms, it doesn't just write them off as an expense.
The example of diapers.com seems like a poor one in that its one of the few domains that I actively think about when I need to place an order -- "almost out of diapers. oh yeah, I have a coupon for diapers.com somewhere". It's one of the few domain names that has probably resulted directly in a sale to me.
Diapers.com and the the very specific ones are great but can't scale. So you sell diapers and do extremely well, can you sell baby powder? You can but at some point the name is overgrown. Color is cool and ambiguous enough
Honestly, considering the amount of startups that make clever use of TLDs for their sites, I'm sure they could've figured something a little more economical out. This does feel like a waste of money to me as well.
It reminds me of the 90s, where people would spend all this time thinking about a good name/domain name for their websites, and put only secondary thought into the quality of their site or its content.
Focus on making the product really good first, then buy the domain if you really have to, and if it's clear that your product is successful and lasting.
As a final thought, why not color.me, color.it, or color.us?
Ultimately the name "color" makes for weak branding, not only because it's already so widely used for so many things (even including a pre-existing software application), but because everyone and their grandma could introduce new applications with variations of the word "color" in the name and leech off color.com's hype, and I expect color.com may have a hard time claiming trademark rights to the word. It doesn't seem like the best plan, and you can't pivot to a new brand without sacrificing your effort and investment on the old brand.
I have a hard time respecting these kinds of "opinion as fact" posts. It would have probably been better to say he wouldn't or couldn't pay that much for a domain name and just leave it at that.
To mention thefacebook.com and twitr.com as examples completely undermined his entire point. Both of those networks changed their domain name prior to their user base exploding. Coincidence? Strategy? I don't know but there must have been some reasoning behind it and it seems to be paying off for them.
Everybody has an opinion. it gets tiring when it's repeated hundreds of time
I would justify the 41MM in funding as;
a) a great long terms cash reserve
b) instant fame and media spotlight
c) zero need for marketing spend
d) an ambitious vision, with slightly more chance than before the 41MM,a to come to fruition.
Sorry to go against the grain, but that's my take. If all goes down the gutter, then I hope the founding team took some money off the table (but not likely they needed it).
I don't think it has anything to do with the domain. Every time I see another post about Color, I become more and more convinced that the $41 million dollars were meant to trigger exactly this kind of frenzy. The usefulness of the application depends on a lot of people using it simultaneously and Color making it big without this kind of buzz was almost impossible.
Someone, I think it was TechCrunch made a really good point. The money on the domain names is not gone. They have become assets to the company and they can sell it again if they do not succeed. All the buzz around the company probably does not hurt value of the domain names either.
FWIW, of all claims, the diapers example is somewhat bogus. Diapers.com is a very successful retailer of you guessed what (and, recently acquired by Amazon, I believe).
While I obviously have no data, I would vouch that mydiapersstore.com would have way less credibility in customer eyes.
> if someone was selling diapers, and it was 1997, and they bought diapers.com it might actually make sense. And that's just the problem. It's not 1997.
Amazon bought (the parent company of) diapers.com less than six months ago for $500M+.
he just made a whole post about their domain name. it must be mission accomplished for the color guys.
domains don't matter because ppl don't expect you to have the most obvious of the domains. So in the situation if someone actually comes out and gets diapers.com or color.com ..then it's really an awe-factor.
their app (in functionality) failed and that is the only reason they are struggling. other than that their PR stunts (we raised huge money, we got great domains, we have great team, we have everything mobile/social/local) worked like a charm. no one can stop talking about them.
Having everyone say "you suck" isn't the kind of publicity you want. If your app sucks, you don't want it to be famous for sucking. I mean, Lotus Notes is famous, right? Are you running out to use it?
With this kind of publicity, you've got an uphill battle to convince people to use it - assuming you can improve it. Which the OP argues you COULD do if you diverted your PR money into actually working on the app.
I don't think there's much of an "awe-factor" in domain names. I heard the guy who made Instapaper interviewed, and he said that his domain and app name don't even make sense for his app; it was a domain he'd originally registered for a different idea. But nobody cares because they like the app.
I think the OP's point is valid: they could have easily come up with a short, memorable name, gotten it cheap, and hired 3 more developers.
Color.com was bought for about 1/80th of the money raised. The name color.com will most likely keep its value so it's not wasted money, or not 100% wasted.
p.s. the URL of the color.com basher is idealprojectgroup.com
color.com / colour.com are pretty much the best names for an app called Color. Imagine them going big, and sitting at "mycolorapp" (amazing creativity from someone who criticizes that exact point)..
But should we generate too much buzz, it may become self-sustaining :-(
Btw., perhaps the 41mln investment isn't just about providing necessary funding, but also about giving people 41 million reasons to generate even more buzz?