February 13, 2025
The Dot-Com Battle
Grant Shaddick
We picked the name Tella because it was a five-letter word that was easy to pronounce and easy to spell.
It was also a five-letter word that didn’t have the .com domain for sale.
But we were making video software, so it didn’t matter. The good people of Tuvalu were the obvious choice for our business and so we purchased the domain tella.tv.
The .tv domain has served us well. Over the years it has morphed into our brand, with many customers calling us TellaTV or Tella dot TV. But Tella is just Tella and .tv is just an obscure domain — no matter what you’re making.
But back to the beginning. No sooner had we incorporated Tella and purchased tella.tv than we wondered: would life be better with a .com domain?
The essays of Y Combinator founder and startup godfather Paul Graham are the motivating canon for founders across the globe. For a YC startup like Tella, PG’s words are dogma. But after reading Change Your Name that divine motivation turned into mortal despair. This is from its second paragraph:
The problem with not having the .com of your name is that it signals weakness. Unless you're so big that your reputation precedes you, a marginal domain suggests you're a marginal company.
Blinded by a kind of silent rage that comes from feeling inadequate (first time I felt this way tbh), we took the worst possible option available to us and refused to change our name. Instead we embarked on an expensive, yearslong wild-goose chase to buy Tella.com.
Part 1: Finding Nemo.com
Tella.com wasn’t for sale on the usual sites. GoDaddy and Namecheap had no record of it and Instant Domain Search said it wasn’t available. There was, however, another company called Tella, but they didn’t have it either. Who was using Tella.com?
No one was using it and it wasn’t for sale. It was up for lease.
Leasing a domain works like this: the domain remains the property of its owner, but you — the leaseholder — can use the domain for a website by paying rent to the owner. The owner configures your DNS settings and you’re good to go.
This was the first we’d heard of domain leasing and it didn’t sound like a good idea. We wanted to own Tella.com. Would they sell it?
It was hard to tell. Mostly because we couldn’t figure out who the owner actually was. We only knew about the leasing site. But besides actually starting the lease there was no way to contact them either. There was little public information about the company or who worked there. So we turned to the pros for help and hired a domain broker. Their job was to find the owners of Tella.com and start a purchase negotiation.
But three months went by and the brokers had not broken through. They’d made contact with the owner, but couldn’t convince him to sell. Frustrated with the progress, I checked the leasing site again (it had been a while). My jaw dropped. The domain was gone. In its place was Paul Graham's weak and marginal quote. Beneath it read, “Tella.com will be debuting in the next few months”. Were they taking the piss?
Someone else was launching a startup at the same time as us, using the same name as us, using the same domain we wanted, from the exact same place we were trying to get it. I had been marginalised. I was weak.
Part 2: Nightvision
Co-founders tend to have distinct defining characteristics. Woz was playful, Jobs was relentless. Paul Allen was curious, Gates calculating. When it comes to Tella, Michiel is calm and confident and I am emotional and neurotic. And so while I was complaining, worrying and generally resigning myself to defeat, Michiel was actually fixing the problem.
In the days that followed, Michiel trawled LinkedIn for hours. He came across another domain broker whose posts often mentioned domains on our leasing site. Michiel messaged him about Tella.com. The broker replied with what we already knew: Tella.com was no longer available. But given how recent the transaction was the broker offered to introduce us to the new leaseholder. A lifeline.
We’ll call the new Tella.com leaseholder Nightvision. Michiel’s calm, confident sleuthing had gotten us this far, but now it was my time to shine. I wrote Nightvision a long, sappy email pleading with him to change his company’s name — we’d even pay him.
To my surprise, he was open to the idea — so long as he could find another good domain. But finding a good five-letter domain to buy (or lease!) isn’t easy or cheap.
Three months went by until we got another email from Nightvision. He told us he’d found another domain and would give up the Tella.com lease in exchange for $10,000.
10 grand to rent a domain?!
This would have been the biggest purchase Tella had ever made. We were also making no money. So spending ten thousand dollars to start renting a domain felt like setting money on fire. I wasn’t keen.
But Michiel (my rock) reminded me that this wasn’t about renting — it was about getting direct access to the ultimate owner of Tella.com. Once we took over the lease we could finally negotiate its sale.
So we treated the $10,000 like a downpayment and we moved ahead with Nightvision’s deal. Tella.com was ours, kinda.
Part 3: Mood Cycles
Next move, purchasing this puppy. We had front row seats now. No middle-men, no brokers, no competing customers, just us and the owners.
So, there still was one middle-man. The leasing site still wouldn’t let us speak with the owners, nor tell us who they were. As soon as we asked about purchase they shut it down immediately.
“The owner has no intention of selling whatsoever.”
Maybe this is what the brokers were dealing with. The rep from the leasing site went on to explain that they’re purely in the business of leasing, that’s where they see the value of domains. He suggested we move on and just enjoy using the domain.
Game over again. My mood swings were becoming long-term mood cycles.
What’s the right way to think about leasing? Is it like renting a storefront? A retailer wants to focus on selling its goods, not purchasing expensive real estate. This explains why retailers don’t own their High Street stores. They just rent. But why isn't domain leasing as popular as commercial property leasing? You never hear about it.
It turns out, this isn't a good comparison. Commercial property is not the same as a domain. A five-letter .com may have the same prestige as a Fifth Avenue storefront, but it has more than that too.
In Tella’s case the domain is part of the product. When someone makes a video with Tella they share it with their viewers as a unique link… on the Tella domain. That’s millions of videos living on the Tella domain, with millions more viewers.
If you don’t own the underlying domain, then no matter how long the lease is or how great its terms are, you ultimately don’t have control over your IP. A little riskier than moving your store from one part of town to another.
With many precious hours wasted on this Godforsaken pursuit, we finally decided to take the situation on the chin. “At least no one else can rent Tella.com” I said. We stopped asking and forgot about it.
Part 4: The Last Dance
Almost three years passed. Tella started making money, we were growing fast and things were good. But every now and then we’d be reminded about our failed .com dreams. Plain.com launched, Railway.app became Railway.com, Avi Schiffman spent his seed round on Friend.com, and we’re all posting on X.com.
One day Michiel said “why don’t we ask to buy Tella.com again”. It had been a while, maybe they had changed their minds. So we did.
They replied a few days later. This time we were in contact with a rep from the actual firm that owned the domain. “We don’t really sell domains, but you’re welcome to make an offer” they said.
At last, game time.
So we made an offer. It felt like the best offer we could reasonably make at the time. Just like the amount we paid to take over the lease this offer (higher) would have been the biggest single purchase we’d ever made as a company.
But they rejected it. They wanted 80% more than we were offering. I should have read Never Split The Difference again.
I told them we couldn’t go higher. This was our absolute limit. With no pressure to sell they refused to go lower.
Ludus Finis. By now we were stoics. We put this latest rejection out of our mind and got back to work.
Tella ended 2024 in its best form ever: revenue up and to the right, low burn, and we’d hit our goal a month early. So we said fuck it, let’s actually get this domain. I went back to the owners with an improved offer — 50% higher than the original, but not as high as they were holding out for.
They accepted.
We had dragged ourselves out from under the margins by our fingertips (on the keyboard). Our weakness transformed into strength. Our dot-com shaped biceps now on display for all the world to see. Peace at last. Emotions at equilibrium.
So how much did it cost?
Just over six-figures. Which was lot more than we paid for the lease, but a lot less than Friend.com (incredible domain btw). It's still a big number, no matter how you look at it. But it’s our brand and our IP, so worth every cent.
Side mission
While working with the domain brokers back in 2021 we also explored some alternatives. One option was dropping one of our Ls and rebranding as Tela. There was a small-ish software company using Tela.com based in the Midwest (IIRC). The brokers contacted the owner — he was open to selling. But it was a four letter .com so he wasn’t going to throw it away. He wanted $200,000. Dropping an L for 200 Gs was not going to be an option and so Tella remained Tella.
What did we learn?
Lesson 1: While writing this I realised we should have just made a serious offer the moment the brokers made contact with the owners. We were too coy, trying to feel things out. Good domains cost serious money, so we should have been willing to pay up. Making a proper offer at the outset might have saved us a year or two.
Lesson 2: In the grand scheme of things we didn’t spend that much time on this. We always knew that just building a good product was the most important thing, regardless of our domain. We built a growing business and a talented team and then we bought our dream domain. Not the most orthodox order, but if we’d gotten Tella.com earlier and hadn’t made progress, that would be shit.
Lesson 3: In the two years we leased Tella.com, we left it virtually unused. If we’d switched the site over to Tella.com and then something bad happened — the lessor went under, sold it to someone else, we breached the agreement terms etc. – then we’d have no way to redirect our users to a new domain. Dead links strewn all over the web. A huge mess. The chance of that happening is low, but it’s not worth it when the risk to your company is existential. Always buy your dot-coms.
We picked the name Tella because it was a five-letter word that was easy to pronounce and easy to spell.
It was also a five-letter word that didn’t have the .com domain for sale.
But we were making video software, so it didn’t matter. The good people of Tuvalu were the obvious choice for our business and so we purchased the domain tella.tv.
The .tv domain has served us well. Over the years it has morphed into our brand, with many customers calling us TellaTV or Tella dot TV. But Tella is just Tella and .tv is just an obscure domain — no matter what you’re making.
But back to the beginning. No sooner had we incorporated Tella and purchased tella.tv than we wondered: would life be better with a .com domain?
The essays of Y Combinator founder and startup godfather Paul Graham are the motivating canon for founders across the globe. For a YC startup like Tella, PG’s words are dogma. But after reading Change Your Name that divine motivation turned into mortal despair. This is from its second paragraph:
The problem with not having the .com of your name is that it signals weakness. Unless you're so big that your reputation precedes you, a marginal domain suggests you're a marginal company.
Blinded by a kind of silent rage that comes from feeling inadequate (first time I felt this way tbh), we took the worst possible option available to us and refused to change our name. Instead we embarked on an expensive, yearslong wild-goose chase to buy Tella.com.
Part 1: Finding Nemo.com
Tella.com wasn’t for sale on the usual sites. GoDaddy and Namecheap had no record of it and Instant Domain Search said it wasn’t available. There was, however, another company called Tella, but they didn’t have it either. Who was using Tella.com?
No one was using it and it wasn’t for sale. It was up for lease.
Leasing a domain works like this: the domain remains the property of its owner, but you — the leaseholder — can use the domain for a website by paying rent to the owner. The owner configures your DNS settings and you’re good to go.
This was the first we’d heard of domain leasing and it didn’t sound like a good idea. We wanted to own Tella.com. Would they sell it?
It was hard to tell. Mostly because we couldn’t figure out who the owner actually was. We only knew about the leasing site. But besides actually starting the lease there was no way to contact them either. There was little public information about the company or who worked there. So we turned to the pros for help and hired a domain broker. Their job was to find the owners of Tella.com and start a purchase negotiation.
But three months went by and the brokers had not broken through. They’d made contact with the owner, but couldn’t convince him to sell. Frustrated with the progress, I checked the leasing site again (it had been a while). My jaw dropped. The domain was gone. In its place was Paul Graham's weak and marginal quote. Beneath it read, “Tella.com will be debuting in the next few months”. Were they taking the piss?
Someone else was launching a startup at the same time as us, using the same name as us, using the same domain we wanted, from the exact same place we were trying to get it. I had been marginalised. I was weak.
Part 2: Nightvision
Co-founders tend to have distinct defining characteristics. Woz was playful, Jobs was relentless. Paul Allen was curious, Gates calculating. When it comes to Tella, Michiel is calm and confident and I am emotional and neurotic. And so while I was complaining, worrying and generally resigning myself to defeat, Michiel was actually fixing the problem.
In the days that followed, Michiel trawled LinkedIn for hours. He came across another domain broker whose posts often mentioned domains on our leasing site. Michiel messaged him about Tella.com. The broker replied with what we already knew: Tella.com was no longer available. But given how recent the transaction was the broker offered to introduce us to the new leaseholder. A lifeline.
We’ll call the new Tella.com leaseholder Nightvision. Michiel’s calm, confident sleuthing had gotten us this far, but now it was my time to shine. I wrote Nightvision a long, sappy email pleading with him to change his company’s name — we’d even pay him.
To my surprise, he was open to the idea — so long as he could find another good domain. But finding a good five-letter domain to buy (or lease!) isn’t easy or cheap.
Three months went by until we got another email from Nightvision. He told us he’d found another domain and would give up the Tella.com lease in exchange for $10,000.
10 grand to rent a domain?!
This would have been the biggest purchase Tella had ever made. We were also making no money. So spending ten thousand dollars to start renting a domain felt like setting money on fire. I wasn’t keen.
But Michiel (my rock) reminded me that this wasn’t about renting — it was about getting direct access to the ultimate owner of Tella.com. Once we took over the lease we could finally negotiate its sale.
So we treated the $10,000 like a downpayment and we moved ahead with Nightvision’s deal. Tella.com was ours, kinda.
Part 3: Mood Cycles
Next move, purchasing this puppy. We had front row seats now. No middle-men, no brokers, no competing customers, just us and the owners.
So, there still was one middle-man. The leasing site still wouldn’t let us speak with the owners, nor tell us who they were. As soon as we asked about purchase they shut it down immediately.
“The owner has no intention of selling whatsoever.”
Maybe this is what the brokers were dealing with. The rep from the leasing site went on to explain that they’re purely in the business of leasing, that’s where they see the value of domains. He suggested we move on and just enjoy using the domain.
Game over again. My mood swings were becoming long-term mood cycles.
What’s the right way to think about leasing? Is it like renting a storefront? A retailer wants to focus on selling its goods, not purchasing expensive real estate. This explains why retailers don’t own their High Street stores. They just rent. But why isn't domain leasing as popular as commercial property leasing? You never hear about it.
It turns out, this isn't a good comparison. Commercial property is not the same as a domain. A five-letter .com may have the same prestige as a Fifth Avenue storefront, but it has more than that too.
In Tella’s case the domain is part of the product. When someone makes a video with Tella they share it with their viewers as a unique link… on the Tella domain. That’s millions of videos living on the Tella domain, with millions more viewers.
If you don’t own the underlying domain, then no matter how long the lease is or how great its terms are, you ultimately don’t have control over your IP. A little riskier than moving your store from one part of town to another.
With many precious hours wasted on this Godforsaken pursuit, we finally decided to take the situation on the chin. “At least no one else can rent Tella.com” I said. We stopped asking and forgot about it.
Part 4: The Last Dance
Almost three years passed. Tella started making money, we were growing fast and things were good. But every now and then we’d be reminded about our failed .com dreams. Plain.com launched, Railway.app became Railway.com, Avi Schiffman spent his seed round on Friend.com, and we’re all posting on X.com.
One day Michiel said “why don’t we ask to buy Tella.com again”. It had been a while, maybe they had changed their minds. So we did.
They replied a few days later. This time we were in contact with a rep from the actual firm that owned the domain. “We don’t really sell domains, but you’re welcome to make an offer” they said.
At last, game time.
So we made an offer. It felt like the best offer we could reasonably make at the time. Just like the amount we paid to take over the lease this offer (higher) would have been the biggest single purchase we’d ever made as a company.
But they rejected it. They wanted 80% more than we were offering. I should have read Never Split The Difference again.
I told them we couldn’t go higher. This was our absolute limit. With no pressure to sell they refused to go lower.
Ludus Finis. By now we were stoics. We put this latest rejection out of our mind and got back to work.
Tella ended 2024 in its best form ever: revenue up and to the right, low burn, and we’d hit our goal a month early. So we said fuck it, let’s actually get this domain. I went back to the owners with an improved offer — 50% higher than the original, but not as high as they were holding out for.
They accepted.
We had dragged ourselves out from under the margins by our fingertips (on the keyboard). Our weakness transformed into strength. Our dot-com shaped biceps now on display for all the world to see. Peace at last. Emotions at equilibrium.
So how much did it cost?
Just over six-figures. Which was lot more than we paid for the lease, but a lot less than Friend.com (incredible domain btw). It's still a big number, no matter how you look at it. But it’s our brand and our IP, so worth every cent.
Side mission
While working with the domain brokers back in 2021 we also explored some alternatives. One option was dropping one of our Ls and rebranding as Tela. There was a small-ish software company using Tela.com based in the Midwest (IIRC). The brokers contacted the owner — he was open to selling. But it was a four letter .com so he wasn’t going to throw it away. He wanted $200,000. Dropping an L for 200 Gs was not going to be an option and so Tella remained Tella.
What did we learn?
Lesson 1: While writing this I realised we should have just made a serious offer the moment the brokers made contact with the owners. We were too coy, trying to feel things out. Good domains cost serious money, so we should have been willing to pay up. Making a proper offer at the outset might have saved us a year or two.
Lesson 2: In the grand scheme of things we didn’t spend that much time on this. We always knew that just building a good product was the most important thing, regardless of our domain. We built a growing business and a talented team and then we bought our dream domain. Not the most orthodox order, but if we’d gotten Tella.com earlier and hadn’t made progress, that would be shit.
Lesson 3: In the two years we leased Tella.com, we left it virtually unused. If we’d switched the site over to Tella.com and then something bad happened — the lessor went under, sold it to someone else, we breached the agreement terms etc. – then we’d have no way to redirect our users to a new domain. Dead links strewn all over the web. A huge mess. The chance of that happening is low, but it’s not worth it when the risk to your company is existential. Always buy your dot-coms.
We picked the name Tella because it was a five-letter word that was easy to pronounce and easy to spell.
It was also a five-letter word that didn’t have the .com domain for sale.
But we were making video software, so it didn’t matter. The good people of Tuvalu were the obvious choice for our business and so we purchased the domain tella.tv.
The .tv domain has served us well. Over the years it has morphed into our brand, with many customers calling us TellaTV or Tella dot TV. But Tella is just Tella and .tv is just an obscure domain — no matter what you’re making.
But back to the beginning. No sooner had we incorporated Tella and purchased tella.tv than we wondered: would life be better with a .com domain?
The essays of Y Combinator founder and startup godfather Paul Graham are the motivating canon for founders across the globe. For a YC startup like Tella, PG’s words are dogma. But after reading Change Your Name that divine motivation turned into mortal despair. This is from its second paragraph:
The problem with not having the .com of your name is that it signals weakness. Unless you're so big that your reputation precedes you, a marginal domain suggests you're a marginal company.
Blinded by a kind of silent rage that comes from feeling inadequate (first time I felt this way tbh), we took the worst possible option available to us and refused to change our name. Instead we embarked on an expensive, yearslong wild-goose chase to buy Tella.com.
Part 1: Finding Nemo.com
Tella.com wasn’t for sale on the usual sites. GoDaddy and Namecheap had no record of it and Instant Domain Search said it wasn’t available. There was, however, another company called Tella, but they didn’t have it either. Who was using Tella.com?
No one was using it and it wasn’t for sale. It was up for lease.
Leasing a domain works like this: the domain remains the property of its owner, but you — the leaseholder — can use the domain for a website by paying rent to the owner. The owner configures your DNS settings and you’re good to go.
This was the first we’d heard of domain leasing and it didn’t sound like a good idea. We wanted to own Tella.com. Would they sell it?
It was hard to tell. Mostly because we couldn’t figure out who the owner actually was. We only knew about the leasing site. But besides actually starting the lease there was no way to contact them either. There was little public information about the company or who worked there. So we turned to the pros for help and hired a domain broker. Their job was to find the owners of Tella.com and start a purchase negotiation.
But three months went by and the brokers had not broken through. They’d made contact with the owner, but couldn’t convince him to sell. Frustrated with the progress, I checked the leasing site again (it had been a while). My jaw dropped. The domain was gone. In its place was Paul Graham's weak and marginal quote. Beneath it read, “Tella.com will be debuting in the next few months”. Were they taking the piss?
Someone else was launching a startup at the same time as us, using the same name as us, using the same domain we wanted, from the exact same place we were trying to get it. I had been marginalised. I was weak.
Part 2: Nightvision
Co-founders tend to have distinct defining characteristics. Woz was playful, Jobs was relentless. Paul Allen was curious, Gates calculating. When it comes to Tella, Michiel is calm and confident and I am emotional and neurotic. And so while I was complaining, worrying and generally resigning myself to defeat, Michiel was actually fixing the problem.
In the days that followed, Michiel trawled LinkedIn for hours. He came across another domain broker whose posts often mentioned domains on our leasing site. Michiel messaged him about Tella.com. The broker replied with what we already knew: Tella.com was no longer available. But given how recent the transaction was the broker offered to introduce us to the new leaseholder. A lifeline.
We’ll call the new Tella.com leaseholder Nightvision. Michiel’s calm, confident sleuthing had gotten us this far, but now it was my time to shine. I wrote Nightvision a long, sappy email pleading with him to change his company’s name — we’d even pay him.
To my surprise, he was open to the idea — so long as he could find another good domain. But finding a good five-letter domain to buy (or lease!) isn’t easy or cheap.
Three months went by until we got another email from Nightvision. He told us he’d found another domain and would give up the Tella.com lease in exchange for $10,000.
10 grand to rent a domain?!
This would have been the biggest purchase Tella had ever made. We were also making no money. So spending ten thousand dollars to start renting a domain felt like setting money on fire. I wasn’t keen.
But Michiel (my rock) reminded me that this wasn’t about renting — it was about getting direct access to the ultimate owner of Tella.com. Once we took over the lease we could finally negotiate its sale.
So we treated the $10,000 like a downpayment and we moved ahead with Nightvision’s deal. Tella.com was ours, kinda.
Part 3: Mood Cycles
Next move, purchasing this puppy. We had front row seats now. No middle-men, no brokers, no competing customers, just us and the owners.
So, there still was one middle-man. The leasing site still wouldn’t let us speak with the owners, nor tell us who they were. As soon as we asked about purchase they shut it down immediately.
“The owner has no intention of selling whatsoever.”
Maybe this is what the brokers were dealing with. The rep from the leasing site went on to explain that they’re purely in the business of leasing, that’s where they see the value of domains. He suggested we move on and just enjoy using the domain.
Game over again. My mood swings were becoming long-term mood cycles.
What’s the right way to think about leasing? Is it like renting a storefront? A retailer wants to focus on selling its goods, not purchasing expensive real estate. This explains why retailers don’t own their High Street stores. They just rent. But why isn't domain leasing as popular as commercial property leasing? You never hear about it.
It turns out, this isn't a good comparison. Commercial property is not the same as a domain. A five-letter .com may have the same prestige as a Fifth Avenue storefront, but it has more than that too.
In Tella’s case the domain is part of the product. When someone makes a video with Tella they share it with their viewers as a unique link… on the Tella domain. That’s millions of videos living on the Tella domain, with millions more viewers.
If you don’t own the underlying domain, then no matter how long the lease is or how great its terms are, you ultimately don’t have control over your IP. A little riskier than moving your store from one part of town to another.
With many precious hours wasted on this Godforsaken pursuit, we finally decided to take the situation on the chin. “At least no one else can rent Tella.com” I said. We stopped asking and forgot about it.
Part 4: The Last Dance
Almost three years passed. Tella started making money, we were growing fast and things were good. But every now and then we’d be reminded about our failed .com dreams. Plain.com launched, Railway.app became Railway.com, Avi Schiffman spent his seed round on Friend.com, and we’re all posting on X.com.
One day Michiel said “why don’t we ask to buy Tella.com again”. It had been a while, maybe they had changed their minds. So we did.
They replied a few days later. This time we were in contact with a rep from the actual firm that owned the domain. “We don’t really sell domains, but you’re welcome to make an offer” they said.
At last, game time.
So we made an offer. It felt like the best offer we could reasonably make at the time. Just like the amount we paid to take over the lease this offer (higher) would have been the biggest single purchase we’d ever made as a company.
But they rejected it. They wanted 80% more than we were offering. I should have read Never Split The Difference again.
I told them we couldn’t go higher. This was our absolute limit. With no pressure to sell they refused to go lower.
Ludus Finis. By now we were stoics. We put this latest rejection out of our mind and got back to work.
Tella ended 2024 in its best form ever: revenue up and to the right, low burn, and we’d hit our goal a month early. So we said fuck it, let’s actually get this domain. I went back to the owners with an improved offer — 50% higher than the original, but not as high as they were holding out for.
They accepted.
We had dragged ourselves out from under the margins by our fingertips (on the keyboard). Our weakness transformed into strength. Our dot-com shaped biceps now on display for all the world to see. Peace at last. Emotions at equilibrium.
So how much did it cost?
Just over six-figures. Which was lot more than we paid for the lease, but a lot less than Friend.com (incredible domain btw). It's still a big number, no matter how you look at it. But it’s our brand and our IP, so worth every cent.
Side mission
While working with the domain brokers back in 2021 we also explored some alternatives. One option was dropping one of our Ls and rebranding as Tela. There was a small-ish software company using Tela.com based in the Midwest (IIRC). The brokers contacted the owner — he was open to selling. But it was a four letter .com so he wasn’t going to throw it away. He wanted $200,000. Dropping an L for 200 Gs was not going to be an option and so Tella remained Tella.
What did we learn?
Lesson 1: While writing this I realised we should have just made a serious offer the moment the brokers made contact with the owners. We were too coy, trying to feel things out. Good domains cost serious money, so we should have been willing to pay up. Making a proper offer at the outset might have saved us a year or two.
Lesson 2: In the grand scheme of things we didn’t spend that much time on this. We always knew that just building a good product was the most important thing, regardless of our domain. We built a growing business and a talented team and then we bought our dream domain. Not the most orthodox order, but if we’d gotten Tella.com earlier and hadn’t made progress, that would be shit.
Lesson 3: In the two years we leased Tella.com, we left it virtually unused. If we’d switched the site over to Tella.com and then something bad happened — the lessor went under, sold it to someone else, we breached the agreement terms etc. – then we’d have no way to redirect our users to a new domain. Dead links strewn all over the web. A huge mess. The chance of that happening is low, but it’s not worth it when the risk to your company is existential. Always buy your dot-coms.
Tella — the screen recorder that edits videos for you.