We have a rule at our studio: buy the domain first, build later. It sounds backwards. But after launching 14 products in under a year, I can tell you it changes how you think about every project.
The domain is the land grab
When I started Inithouse, the first thing I did for each product idea wasn't writing a spec or prototyping. It was opening a registrar and checking if the .com was available.
Why? Because a domain is the one thing that gets harder to acquire over time. Code can be rewritten. Designs can be iterated. But a clean, memorable .com that matches your product name? Those disappear. And once they're gone, you're stuck with hyphens, weird TLDs, or paying $5k on the aftermarket.
For VoiceTables (a voice-first workspace builder), the domain was available and it perfectly described what the product does. Same with WatchingAgents, our AI prediction platform. Both names were registered months before we wrote a single line of code.
Some domains start working before the product exists
This is the part most people don't expect. A few of our domains started ranking in Google before we had anything live.
VerdictBuddy is a good example. The domain itself signals what the product does. Google started indexing the holding page, and by the time we launched the actual product, we already had some search visibility. No ads, no backlinks. Just a domain name that matched what people were searching for.
Same story with AuditVibeCoding. "Vibe coding" started trending as a term, and having "audit" + "vibe coding" in the domain gave us a head start when people started searching for tools to review AI-generated code.
The .com tax is worth it
I know there's a whole debate about whether .com still matters. For us, it absolutely does. Here's why:
People type .com by default. When someone hears "Pet Imagination" and wants to check it out, they'll type petimagination.com without thinking. If we had petimagination.app or petimagination.io, we'd lose a chunk of direct traffic to whoever owns the .com.
The one exception we make is for local markets. VibeCoderi.cz targets Czech developers, so .cz makes sense there. And for ZivaFotka, our AI photo animation tool, we went with .cz for the Czech market but also grabbed alivephoto.online for international, zywafotka.pl for Poland, and lebendigfoto.de for Germany. Multiple domains, same codebase.
Our decision framework
Not every domain purchase makes sense. Here's roughly how we think about it:
Buy immediately if the .com is available and under $15/year. The yearly cost is basically nothing compared to the optionality you get. We grabbed MagicalSong, PartyChallenges, ScaryChallenges, NaughtyChallenges, HereWeAsk, BeRecommended, and WithoutHuman all this way. Each one cost less than a coffee subscription for the year.
Think twice if it's a premium domain ($500+). At that point, you need conviction that the product will actually ship.
Skip if you're forcing a name to fit a domain. The name should come naturally. If you need to add "app" or "hq" or "get" as a prefix, the name probably isn't right.
The portfolio effect
Here's where it gets interesting. When you have 14 products, domains start reinforcing each other. A blog post on WithoutHuman can mention WatchingAgents. A solutions page on VoiceTables can reference BeRecommended. Each domain becomes a node in a network, and links between them carry SEO value.
This isn't something you plan from day one. It emerges naturally when you have a portfolio of real products on real domains. And it compounds. Every new product you add creates linking opportunities with all existing ones.
The cost math
Let's do some quick numbers. We own roughly 20 domains across our portfolio (including localized variants). At $10-15/year each, that's about $200-300/year total. For context, a single Google Ads click in most of our niches costs $1-3.
One domain that ranks organically for its target keyword pays for the entire portfolio's registration costs many times over. It's not even close.
What I'd tell someone starting out
If you're building side projects or launching a startup, here's the practical version: spend 20 minutes checking domain availability before you commit to a product name. If the .com is taken, reconsider the name. Not because .com is magic, but because naming constraints often lead to better, more distinctive names anyway.
PetImagination is a better name than "AI Pet Portrait Generator Pro." MagicalSong beats "AI Music Creator Tool." The domain forces clarity.
And once you buy it, point it somewhere immediately. Even a single landing page with your email. Let Google know the domain is alive. Time is your friend here. The longer a domain has been active, the more authority it builds.
That compounding never stops working.
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