It's all about the URL

Earlier this week we renamed our company from Bought By Many to ManyPets.

Naming (or renaming in our case) any company is hard enough but to make matters even harder you need to be able to get hold of the domain name. Rightly or wrongly that should ideally include the dot com and any country specific TLDs (Top Level Domains). This is now almost always the limiting factor, or the most expensive part.

The dot com for nearly all words and even combinations of words have already been registered. To prove my point I have just tried to register the domain of the two objects closest to me on my desk cupphone.com - it’s taken.

When Steven Mendel and I, founded the business 10 years ago, there was no budget for anything - let alone buying domains - so I plugged away for several hours trying to find an available dot com. Boughtbymany.com was available and close enough to what we wanted to do with the business, so we became it.

Five years later we made our pivot into pet insurance and it became more and more obvious that Bought By Many was becoming less and less meaningful. Deciding to launch in Sweden was the last straw the word ‘bought’ is basically unpronounceable in Swedish, the name had to change.

Long before we know what the name was going to be I decided to try and find some likely candidate URLs, there was no point spending months working on a new name if we simply couldn’t get the domain. We really didn’t want to have to drop all the vowels, as many companies now find they have to, or not use the big TLDs.

ManyPets was right at the top of our list so back on the night before Christmas in 2019 I contacted a lovely lady called Carol from the US mid-west.

Carol replied a few days later.

And so we did discuss it and came to a very friendly agreement.

Carol was back in touch this week after the rename to say she is delighted the domain is being to good use with a service that benefits pets and their owners.