How and why we acquired our .com domain
The story of acquiring and migrating from supertokens.io to supertokens.com
The nightmare of every startup founder – trying to find a name for their startup.
We were no different. Rishabh and I started building user authentication in 2020. After 30 minutes of spitballing, we settled on the name “SuperTokens”.
You maybe asking – “30 minutes, that’s it? For something that’s going to last years, perhaps decades?”
SuperTokens is actually our second rodeo. At our previous startup, we spent weeks finding the perfect company name and getting the .com domain. Despite our best efforts, the company didn't work out. So, when we started with SuperTokens, we were hyper-focused on getting to product-market fit (PMF) and building user authentication.
Our domain and logo were collateral damage.
When we went to buy the supertokens.com domain, we were greeted by a $5,000 price tag from the domain squatter. This sucked. We hadn’t raised any money and didn’t want to spend $5,000 on something that may not work out (we’d made that mistake).
So, we went and bought supertokens.io from a domain registrar for the low price of $60 for 2 years and from then on, the name SuperTokens was final.
To test the waters, we sent in a $1,000 offer to the domain squatter for the .com. It was 80% less than the asking price, but we hoped for the best (and also negotiation 101).
We got a response back that night with a counteroffer of $3,500 – which was great! Reasonable, and a feel-good discount. Unfortunately, that was still too hefty for us. At that time, we let the bid lapse and went back to building our product.
But in 2022, we ended up buying it after all. Today, supertokens.io redirects to supertokens.com – this is the story of how and why we did it.
Why we bought supertokens.com
Like most things, PG has an essay about naming startups.
In his post, he writes, “100% of the top 20 YC companies by valuation have the .com of their name. 94% of the top 50 do. But only 66% of companies in the current batch have the .com of their name. Which suggests there are lessons ahead for most of the rest, one way or another.”
That described us. We joined YC for the S20 batch and were one of the companies without a .com domain name. PG’s quote talked about the correlation between having a .com domain name and company success. But we hadn’t launched yet, so we kept our heads down and built our product first.
We would take another look at supertokens.com again in late 2021–1.5 years later. At this point, we had finished YC, launched our core product, got users and raised a seed round. We had money, users, and were committed to SuperTokens for the long haul.
Brand: is an important part of the customer decision-making process. There was no doubt that .com has a better brand than .io. It is professional and communicates a greater sense of being an established entity – which is important for a company that provides critical software infrastructure.
Traffic patterns: One of the first things we noticed was that the traffic patterns between supertokens.io (our actual domain) and supertokens.com were nearly identical. Whenever our .io traffic had a big spike, so did the .com, even though there was nothing on it yet. More importantly, these spikes meant that a significant portion of potential users went to supertokens.com directly.
People were defaulting to the .com of our name when searching for us.
GTM: Our plan involved investing heavily into content and SEO. Although there were conflicting stories on the importance of having a .com domain name for SEO purposes, we figured that it wouldn’t hurt to play it safe. Plus, our efforts on SEO would be tied to our current domain name. If we moved to supertokens.com in the future, we would have to rebuild our SEO progress.
Appreciating asset: A less discussed reason to buy the .com domain is that the longer you wait and the more successful you become, the higher the price of the domain will be. Domains have a time value and buying an appreciating domain in the present has a positive ROI - assuming a company with that name continues to do well. Infact, this happened to us - as we’ll see next.
So, we ventured out to buy supertokens.com.
Buying the domain
At this point, the domain selling price was much higher – around $8,000. As mentioned, the price of the domain was ~2.5X what it was a few years ago.
It wasn’t a multi-million ask like some other domains, but still above our expectations. So, we reached out to a highly recommended domain broker for guidance on how to value the domain.
Below is the response from our domain broker (name changed):
We had previously heard horror stories of startups spending seven figures to acquire their .com domain name, and hearing an expert domain broker tell us that this was a reasonable price helped us come to terms with the price.
That being said, we wouldn’t be running a startup if we didn’t give things one more push. So, I sent one more email to the domain broker:
And the response from the broker:
After a few hours, the broker sent me this from the seller:
That’s exactly what we did. We had a brief discussion on broker fees, our domain broker had already proved himself and we liked him. The feeling was mutual, we got a great deal on his broker fees and paid $9,000 all said and done.
We were now the proud owners of supertokens.com!
Post Acquisition, Migrations, and impact on traffic
Purchasing the domain was only half the battle for us. The original reason for purchasing supertokens.com was to grow our organic SEO traffic. And now that we had the domain, it was time to figure out how to migrate from the .io domain to the new .com domain.
This was actually not a trivial task at all. This is also a big reason to acquire your endgame domain sooner rather than later, as it becomes harder to migrate over time.
A successful migration requires months of engineering resources and SEO expertise to get right. For example, even though Notion owns notion.com, their domain still redirects to notion.so (our guess would be that a lot of their SEO traffic links to notion.so that it makes sense to not migrate to notion.com). For us, we hired an agency (S/O to Speargrowth) that helped us through this process, and without them, the migration could have gone much worse.
Throughout the migration, we tracked changes to SEO, indexed pages, redirects, backlink changes, and analysed traffic drops.
It took two months to re-index 85% of pages and we had a drop in search driven traffic for that period. We migrated on the 15th of January and traffic was meaningfully lower till mid March - which was when we got organically featured by a very large Youtube channel. At which point, its only been upwards since.
One year after the migration, “clicks” from Google search results are 5X and “impressions” are 10X of what they were pre migration. And its not stopping! There is no definite way of isolating the importance of the .com but it is likely to have played a part. Our domain authority also increased meaningfully.
All in all, once you know your product is working and people are using it, I’d recommend buying the .com of your domain sooner rather than later.
I am the cofounder of SuperTokens and we provide open source user authentication. Would love to hear any feedback on this post or on our product!
If this was useful or interesting, please share with other builders, founders and investors!
PS: The former CTO of Stripe shares how they came up with “Stripe” and bought the domain name: Quora
Thanks for the inside look! Really appreciate it. Your domain broker comes across well. How did you find your domain broker? Tips for finding a good one or can you share his info?
Clearly, you got beamed.
Not a very good domain broker. He was just looking for a quick sale.