Upgrading your company’s name later: what it costs

Many companies start on a compromise: getacme.com, acmeapp.com, acme.io. It is a sensible way to launch. The cost shows up later, when you decide to move to the name you wanted all along.

What has to change

Your email addresses, and every place they are saved: customers, suppliers, banks, government portals.
Your logo, website, app-store listings, packaging and printed material.
Links: every article, directory and social profile that points at the old name.
Search rankings, which move to the new name only through careful redirects.
Contracts, invoices and legal documents that carry the old address.

What it costs

The price of the new name is the part you can see. The rest is time: design work, developer time for redirects and email, a period in which some customers still write to the old address, and search traffic that takes weeks to settle. None of it can be avoided, and all of it grows with the size of the company.

How to move with the least damage

Keep the old name. Renew it for years ahead, and permanently redirect every page to the matching page on the new name.
Run both email addresses side by side for at least a year, then set an automatic reply on the old one.
Tell search engines about the move through their webmaster tools.
Update the places customers find you first: app-store listings, social profiles and the directories that send you visitors.
Announce the change once, plainly, and say why.

When it is worth it

When customers mishear or misspell the name you have, when someone else owns the .com of your name, or when investors and partners ask why you are not on it. Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator, put the last point bluntly: a startup without the .com of its name signals weakness.

The earlier you move, the less there is to change. If the name you want is here, its listing shows the price and whether it can be paid monthly. If someone else owns it, we can approach them for you without saying who you are.