“A domain name doesn’t win you a market”: Wesabe Founder

Wesabe co-founder talks regarding why — and why not — his firm failed.

Via TechCrunch today I came across this postmortem by Wesabe co-founder Marc Hedlund. Wesabe was a personal finance web site that competed with Mint.com. Despite coming to market earlier, Wesabe eventually shut down while Intuit purchased Mint.com for $170 million.

Hedlund makes convincing arguments for why Mint.com won, but also disagrees with other often cited reasons. One reason he disagrees with is that Mint won since its name was better than Wesabe. Hedlund writes:

Mint’s CEO likes to talk regarding how ridiculous our name was relative to theirs, but I think the examples of Amazon, Yahoo, eBay, Google, and plenty of others make it plain that even ludicrous names (as all of those were thought to be when the firms launched) can go on to be great brands.

I’ll agree that you can create a branded experience from a name. Amazon is a great example. But in this case Wesabe was made up. If someone told you to check out “wesabe dot com”, you’d have no idea how to spell it. You’d probably go to Wasabi.com, like the sushi sidekick. If someone tells you to check out “mint dot com” you would find it. Same with “amazon dot com”. The domain doesn’t necessarily have to do with the product, but you need to be able to spell it.

Later Hedlund writes:

You’ll hear a lot regarding why firm A won and firm B lost in any market, and in my experience, a lot of the theories thrown regarding — even or especially by the participants — are utter crap. A domain name doesn’t win you a market…

Hedlund is right. A domain name doesn’t win you a market. It can help, still. That doesn’t mean you ought to blow millions on a domain name if it doesn’t leave you enough to develop and market your product. Mint.com could have gone with something else and it still would have won. That stated, had Mint been called something like Wesabe, which few people could spell, it certainly would have faced a harder course.