Zaarly Getting Buzz at SXSW, Hopefully It Will Get Zarly or Change Its Brand Name

ZaarlyI read an article on TechCrunch about a neat new start up that is getting considerable buzz at South By Southwest (SXSW) in Austin. Zaarly is operational only in Austin at the moment, and it lets people posts what they want/need along with a price, and others can agree to provide it for them at that price. For instance, I can post that I want a coffee from Starbucks and I am willing to pay someone $10 for it.

I can see this becoming a popular service if they’re able to work out potentially seedy issues that I could foresee coming up (ie prostitution, drugs…etc).

Seeing that the Zaarly.com domain name was just registered back in  February, I would bet the company name was fairly hastily chosen. It’s a unique name, and sounds like a cool new brand, but the problem the company will encounter is that as people spread the word, they will be helping to build traffic to Zarly.com, a domain name not owned by the company (registered in 2005).

While it doesn’t appear that Zarly.com is being used, the company needs to take some of its funding to buy it. It doesn’t need to change its name, but it should make sure it owns the obvious typo to forward that traffic back to the intended website.

Zarly.com looks like it will expire on March 31, 2011, although the owner could obviously renew it.  If the company hopes to get the name on a drop rather than trying to buy it from the owner above registration fee, company directors should be cautious. It’s likely domain investors would back order this domain name thinking about what I am discussing, and the cost would likely increase exponentially.

My advice to Zaarly is to go after Zarly.com ASAP.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

13 COMMENTS

  1. Hello Elliot,

    Top o the day to you!

    These names that Madison Avenue advises their clients on are something else arent they? How do you think BING got adopted?
    You would think that some of these major corporations got their advice on branding from someone on the planet Zeno !

    Some day Business Owners will quit drinking the Madison Avenue Kool-aid and name their companies so that regular people without their code book can find them!

    Gratefully, Jeff Schneider (Contact Group) (Metal Tiger)

  2. I’m not sure I agree. I realize as domain sellers we’re supposed to think a certain way. In my opinion as long as its a dot com and not outrageously crazy, a brand is a brand. People still hate flickr and yet I don’t think I hardly ever mistype it. I didn’t have any problems with zaarly either. Yes people will accidentally go to the wrong site on occasion but I can guarantee more people have trouble spelling accidentally and occasion that they will zaarly. Users WILL find a good site. We underestimate people’s intelligence and ability to surf the net. My advice would be similar to yours and that would be to buy zarly eventually but this certainly will not effect company profits or launch in the slightest bit.

  3. @ Shane

    I don’t think they should change the brand, but I do think they should protect it. Right now, Zarly.com is harmless. However, if someone else buys it and the site becomes popular, what’s to say they don’t add malware or one of those survey sites that promises an ipad or something. 🙂

  4. They are using Zaarly.com as basically a short for Bazaar + the ly suffix that a lot of sites are using lately. I agree they should get Zarly just because most people probably wouldn’t put that together, but I at least saw the point of the name.

  5. Owner of Zarly.com must hope that Zaarly takes off. Looks like he is a Canadian like Frank Schilling, Kevin Ham, Garry Chernoff, etc.

  6. I agree with Elliot it will be essential that they get Zarly.com at some point. I think if I just heard the word in passing I would spell it “Zarly”, then I would get some badware

  7. I completely agree they would be better off with Zarly as the brand name, or at least get the domain name and re-direct it to Zaarly. However, unless I misread the TechCrunch article, I think that Zaarly’s main use will be as a mobile App ? If that’s the case the domain shouldn’t matter as much as usual.

  8. Elliot posted:

    For instance, I can post that I want a coffee from Starbucks and I am willing to pay someone $10 for it.

    ————–

    I wonder how much extra you’d have to pay to make sure no one spits it in 🙂

    • @ AB

      LOL… I actually think it’s a serious crime in many states to do something like that. My guess is that it wouldn’t be worth the the problems to do it, and if someone doesn’t want to make the money, they won’t respond.

      As an aside, if you live in NYC and someone down the block offers $10.00 for a $2.00 cup of coffee, there would be plenty of people willing to do that 15 minute errand for $8 profit. Imagine if it became popular and someone delivered 5 cups of coffee an hour @ $8.00/each delivery. That would be $40/hour. It would be very possible to do that in a city like NY.

  9. Looks like you made waves Elliot, Zarly.com now shows Zaarly as the owner. I suspect theyd buy other extensions if they were smart, like groupons did. The .ca is one they certainly should get as they own zaarly.ca already too.

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