Watch Yac.com CEO Justin Mitchell discuss the origins of his company’s brand and how Saw.com’s domain buy service helped him acquire the perfect domain for his business.
Video Summary
Company Origins
In Justin’s words, “Yac is an asynchronous meeting tool for teams so we’re an audio first messaging platform. Think of sending voice messages in whatsapp or imessage but for b2b, so you’re sending 30 seconds of your voice, maybe a couple minutes of your voice, plus what’s on your screen. You’re sending that off to your team and they’re able to reply on their own time, very similar to the zoom call that we’re on right now, but everybody gets to do it whenever and however they want to instead of having to show up at a predetermined time for a meeting.”
Justin explains that Yac.com started out as yac chat, getting its acronym from Yelling Across Cubicles. In telling the origin, Justin says that they wanted to drop that chat moniker because a lot of people didn’t know that dot chat was even a tld. So for Justin, it was very important to have the dot com and buy the domain yac.com.
Conceptualizing the Brand
Yelling Across Cubicles eventually became y.a.c. Then, as Justin tells it, “we just got used to calling it yac and so it kind of naturally became yac about a month later. And we’ve been that way ever since. A big part of the brand was that it was supposed to be very approachable, easy to pronounce, and we really wanted to “verb it,” so just like you Google something or hop on a Zoom. There’s a way that these words just become natural extensions of your vocabulary… So the words were much easier to say and that was a huge part of what we wanted in our brand; a way for us to kind of normalize the use of the word, colloquially in normal language. So that was a big thing that we had going into the brand discussion as well.”
Justin again emphasizes the importance of buying the website domain yac.com. “We need you to be able to type it into a browser and it shows up. Nobody’s gonna know to type in chat and so that’s why the dot com was super important to us as well because it is a non-English word, y a c. It’s not something that’s definable in the Merriam-Webster so we needed them to be able to easily find it on the web.”
Finalizing the Name
For Justin, deciding on the name Yac was almost an instant, intuitive decision. But, as Justin tells us, it doesn’t always work that way. A lot of times you have to consider many different names and ask yourself a lot of questions.
“We go through a whole process of thinking about the image that we want to put out. We think about what we want your first few thoughts to be. Do we want it to be playful do we want it to be serious? Do we want to be enterprise or do we want it to be indie-like? We think through the first thing we want someone to think when they land on this web page. And what we wanted with y.a.c. or Yelling Across Cubicles is we wanted them to think, “They threw this together for fun in four days” because that’s literally what happened. Now, we want them to think this is an enterprise startup used by major companies all over the world. Those two brand images are very different and your name has a lot to do with that, the logo has a lot to do with that, the domain has a lot to do with that.”
Target Audience
Yac.com’s target audience are small firms or engineering or design teams within larger organizations. Justin tells us how his target audience dictates, in a lot of ways, the branding and design process. “Our startup and the brand name, the branding, and the domain has a lot to do with who we’re attacking and going after. So that brand, that domain, all of that has to look legit in a sense of, “This is a real company that I can trust.” But also that, “Hey, they look like they have some money behind them. They’re not going away anytime soon. This is someone that we could go through the effort of vetting and getting into the company.””
For Justin, using a domain broker service like Saw.com to acquire the yac.com was of utmost importance for his company’s brand and image. “So our .com is really a clout chaser in some ways. It’s this idea of us saying, “Hey, look at us, we’re serious. This is no longer an indie project.” That .com says to our brand, “We are a big company, a little bit bigger than our own boots.” Your website is akin to your storefront. If you had a retail store and if that was messy or dirty, didn’t look they ain’t gonna been cleaned in a really long time, then no one’s gonna go buy your clothes in your store.” And the same can be said about a website.”
Justin uses the analogy that a .chat name would be like a dirty back alley that people don’t really want to go down. While a .com would be the Main Street with all the legitimate and trusted businesses.
Simplicity is Key
In explaining how yac.com is helping his business, Justin espouses some advice that we tell all of our clients when making a decision to put in a domain name offer. “You want something that’s easy to pronounce, easy to spell, easy to organically find on the Internet. One thing that we’ve done really well with yac, is it is a household name. And part of that is the ability to just remember that word. You know that name. It doesn’t sound like another brand. We have an easily findable URL. A lot of that has to do with making a strong branding decision upfront to not spell it weird, not put an accent mark in there, not have a strange TLD. There are all these things that really help you. And what we found for sure is that the more organic traffic that you can get is just the less ad spend, the less education you have to do, the less effort you have to have in bringing people to your website. And that starts with having a brand name that’s easy to share, easy to find, easy to say, and easy to search for.”
How Saw.com Can Help
Justin explains how Saw.com’s domain offer service really helped him acquire yac.com, something he says he could not have done on his own. “It was a great process, very smooth. Brooke, you were really the only way that we could even get into contact with them. We were on a bit of a tight timeline and saw.com came through and actually really tightened up that timeline for us and got us to our domain acquisition faster than we actually expected. We were able to actually launch it in time for our big launch online.
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