This afternoon on TechCrunch, I read that popular online form website, WuFoo, was acquired for $35 million (cash and stock) by SurveyMonkey. I’ve used WuFoo before, and I like how easy it is to create and implement forms on websites.
One downside of the WuFoo branding is that it can easily be confused with WooFoo.com. According to Compete, WooFoo.com doesn’t get a lot of traffic, but it does get up to a few thousand visits a month, likely misdirected type in traffic. The owner isn’t monetizing this traffic, but does have a for sale notice on the landing page.
Now one might suggest that the owners of WuFoo file a UDRP for WooFoo.com and be done with it, but not so fast on that. WooFoo.com was registered in January of 2005 and WuFoo.com was registered a year later in January of 2006. This quite obviously means that the domain owner did not register the domain name to capitalize on the WuFoo brand since it was non existent, and bad faith registration would be difficult to prove.
I have no idea what the owners of WooFoo.com want for the domain name, but I think the companies should work out some sort of deal. Any buyer of WooFoo.com would very likely know that WuFoo exists, and it would be likely that WuFoo/SurveyMonkey would file a UDRP for the domain name if sold. Additionaly, the current owner would be hard pressed to monetize this domain name without infringing on the rights of WuFoo.
Most importantly, WuFoo is losing some traffic to this typo. Of course, some people will then go to Google to find it, where WuFoo will have to compete with other companies either with sponsored ads or with SEO when the visitor searches for something like “online forms.” This is probably not a lot of money, but over time it may be, and it’s something that can be avoided with a relatively inexpensive acquisition.
If SurveyMonkey is willing to spend $35m on WuFoo, the company should reach out and try to buy WooFoo.com. The owner likely can’t sell it to anyone else, and there likely wouldn’t be a better buyer for it.
should be wooFool lmao
or wooFools
I still have the freebie version of Wufoo but since I don’t use it daily, when I periodically want to refer back to the site I do find myself scrambling due to the odd spelling. Why didn’t they pick a more memorable and more easily spelled domain? Perhaps this domain was acquired in the aftermarket but it is easy to find examples of companies which just don’t understand why they should spend more than $50 on a domain name.
“WuFoo Bought for $35 Million: Should Now Buy WooFoo.com”
What about:
WuFu
and
WooFu
?
@ Trico
neither seems to get much traffic now:
http://siteanalytics.compete.com/wufu.com+woofu.com/
Really E, this could become a weekly article… so and so should buy such and such lol
@ Josh
That is a very good point… When I was researching, I was half expecting to see the WooFoo.com registration postdating the WuFoo.com registration though.
Actually, WooFoo is a form of fighting style. From Wikia:
Woo Foo is a fighting style consisting of mystical martial arts(wushu, nin-jutsu, karate etc…) and magical techniques(Nin-jutsu hand signs, Tradinional Westen Magic etc…).
Probably explains why they went with WuFoo…….
I doubt if they would be able to file a UDRP for something that is totally unrelated.
Is survey monkey a public company to be shelling out 35M?
I told a group the other week, to pass on 100M for a new startup, they were shopping it for that and I told them, you get fast money now, you throw away 5B+ within a couple of years, you boys sitting on an IPO mother lode dudes…
35M nice change for a ‘business model’, I don’t see much in income from a ‘form creation’ tool to justify 35M
But if SM is a public company, yeah it makes sense
PC’s have to blow money to make it look like they’re doing biz
Like AOL throwing 400M+ to Ferber for what, a business model that was losing a fortune when they did the deal
So few business models are proven, and are really making money, that when you see one, it makes you say
Hmmmmmm
So that’s how you MAKE MONEY with a startup.
LOL