To Courier.com. It just raised $35M — Courier upgraded
It purchased Courier.com for $200,000 two years ago.
There is a well-trodden path that startups can take regarding their domain name. That path involves picking the best available domain you can afford as a brand fresh venture and then upgrading to your first-choice domain name later.
Here’s an example: Courier, a developer platform for notifications across email, text, web, and mobile.
Founded in 2019, Courier focuses on providing an API to handle app notifications and route the notifications to providers such as Slack, Twilio, and SendGrid. Notifications can be powerful tools for businesses, but only if implemented correctly.
As stated by a Statista note from 2021, 42% of people change app notification settings when they feel they are receiving too many notifications, while 39% simply turn off all app notifications for that app. Overuse of notifications can have a detrimental effect on app usage and engagement.
While Courier doesn’t offer support for push notifications yet, it has effectively managed notification systems for hundreds of firms to date, saving countless hours of engineering.
Courier is a brand name that makes perfect sense for the product the firm offers, but since it is a single-word name, Courier.com was out of reach when Courier launched.
Instead, Courier secured TryCourier.com and sensibly built its brand and product from the ground up, with founder Troy Goode, a former VP of engineering, leading the way. Courier even incorporated as TryCourier.com, Inc.,
In August 2020, Courier purchased its exact-match .com, Courier.com, from commercial printing firm LSC Communications. The buyout came just ahead of Courier disclosed a $10.1 million Series A funding round, adding to the $2.4 million worth of funding it had previously disclosed.
At the time, details of Courier’s purchase price of Courier.com were unknown, but a LinkedIn comment from founder Troy Goode confirmed the firm paid $200,000 for Courier.com. Goode also confirmed that Keith Richter of Lumis represented the firm in the deal.
Goode’s comment was made in response to Pilot founder Waseem Daher’s post that confirmed the $400,000 buyout of Pilot.com.
Since switching to Courier.com, Courier has continued to build its product and recently disclosed a $35 million funding round that brings the firm’s total funding to $47.5 million. The funding round was led by GV with contributions from Y Combinator, Twilio, and Bessemer.
