Master Branding Like a PRO with Memorable Domain Names!

A brand exists within your day-to-day activities. So you get up in the morning and you start thinking about XYZ, and then you start brushing your teeth, and then it's not some abstract thing that happens outside of life. The brand is within your lunch.

Welcome to the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast, a show where we interview high voltage entrepreneurs growing and scaling through e-commerce, real estate, and other wealth without Wall Street ventures, showing you the path to making your first or next million. All right, folks, welcome back.

If you are into branding, If you're doing branding for anything, personal, consulting, or e-commerce, you're going to want to pay attention to this episode. We're going to be talking about branding from the domain name up and everything that goes in behind that, from creating intellectual property to an actual brand and not just flipping products for profit. So my guest today is going to talk a little bit more in detail about that. Grant, welcome to the call, sir.

Thanks for having me.

It's a pleasure.

Yeah, man, it's great to have you here. So let's just dive in and have this conversation. And, and what does branding mean to you? So those who are listening and are thinking about branding or starting a brand or want to start a brand either on e-commerce or consulting or Do you even brand flip? Let's go through all that.

That's a lot of questions. Let's start with what is a brand?

Any component of that you want to.

I think there's a ton of ways to look at what is a brand. One of my favorite is to think about kind of 2 prongs of a business. There is an offer, typically one irresistible offer, as I'm sure you can talk about. And then there, what I often think about is a reality-altering experience. How is this business going to change my perception? How is this business going to influence the way that I see the world or engage with the world or just how I'm engaging in a particular moment? It sounds like a lot, but one of the ones that I like to think about is Starbucks, right? Their offer is a caffeinated milkshake.

Yep.

Right? But when you go into a Starbucks, they do a lot more than just— if you went to a shack and they offered you a caffeinated milkshake, you'd probably think they were nuts.

Yeah.

But they have a really nice ambiance and nice customer service and really high prices. So it makes you, you know, think that the product is great and all those sort of things to change your reality. Now, that's not always a great example. What you really want to do obviously is connect how you make people feel, how you make people perceive, or what you make people perceive with the really great offer. Yeah.

I'll tell you what I feel about Starbucks.

Yeah.

No, I'm just kidding.

It's your favorite?

Overpriced coffee. No, I'm just kidding. Starbucks has done a great job being one of the first major coffee brands out there to really extol the feeling and the ambiance of taking sort of the Seattle vibe of that connection and bringing it out in a mass format. So I give them credit for that. Exactly.

And that's the perfect example of a brand. What's that? You bring a vibe with you.

Yeah. Are we vibing?

I hope so.

As my kids would say. There's a joke from a show. Are we vibing? We're totally vibing. Yeah, it brings that ambiance. It brings that emotion, brings that connectivity. But Starbucks is funny because their model of branding has actually become being a credit card bank. Like they're a huge bank now of just credit cards.

Oh, sure.

It basically turned into the gift cards, which nobody uses like 80% of the time. So they're sitting on all this cash. Talk about branding, right? That's a fabulous way of doing it.

Well, that's an irresistible offer, right?

It was a very irresistible offer. Yes. Turning themselves into a bank that happens to sell coffee. It's very slick. That is branding though, isn't it? Branding is just a narrative that turns into an emotional connectivity that turns into buying power.

One of the things I often like to think about is like a brand exists within your day-to-day activities. So you get up in the morning and you start thinking about XYZ, and then you start brushing your teeth. And then it's not some abstract thing that happens outside of life. The brand is within your lunch.

It is.

It's within— you pick up your brand and you put it in your mouth to brush your teeth. It's all of those things. And I think it's easy to start thinking about it as something abstract when It's not. And I think it's much more powerful when you think of, right, it's how is this brand actually being used? How is this product actually being used? How does it come to fruition? And when these moments in life are a lot easier to envision than some abstract brand.

They really are. Yeah, it depends upon what you can see the emotional connectivity to brands and people and how they think about brands by just playing with the idea that one is better than another. I'm sure you've seen that on social media, right? Where the people come in and they joke about all Apple product owners are fanboys and all Android people suck, right? They're all soy and they're beta. From down to—

I was just watching those old Apple, the PC versus Mac commercials. Remember when the Mac was like—

That was great. With the 2 guys that were standing there and there was the young kid, the hip kid, and there was the old sophisticated guy with his crap top. And yeah, and then they had Apple, which was this, it was a great series of branding campaigns.

Oh yeah.

It's memorable. I remember it. I'm sure somebody else here does too. Yeah, it creates that. So what is it in relevant to domains? How does that relative in assets and IP? Absolutely.

I think there's a missing piece when you have to— when you go from brand to domain, you have to talk about name. Your name is synonymous with your domain, should be at least if you're doing it right. So, so when you take brand, you have to name it something. The most used aspect of your brand is your name. So, so when you make that transition, and you want your name to be an outpouring in some sense, of your brand. I don't know how deep you want to get into name theory at this moment, but—

Show, dude. Rock out.

Show. Yeah. So, I mean, I really think that's the critical point. When you take a step back and you say, here's the brand I want to build. This is how I want people to feel. This is the story I want to tell. This is one of the things I really like to talk about is what I call— I'm sure there's a better way of talking about it, but a style. So, am I going to be a luxury brand versus a super pragmatic brand versus a really outlier brand, somebody who's cutting edge? And if you start with that, you can enter into the story and the experience that somebody's going to have. When I pick up that toothbrush, do I feel like I'm going to get really clean teeth or do I feel like this is the coolest new toothbrush that's ever come to market? I might be overusing toothbrush here, but you get the point.

No, it's great because you could go to the next level and be like, well, that was the toothbrush that we used to clean the toilet. So, how practical is that?

Right, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So it's all the value. It's all matter of value to you, right?

And you wouldn't use that premium toothpaste. No problem with the toothpaste.

It's the base one. Pick it up at Walmart.

That's right.

Discount.

That's right. So, so then you, so you have all these elements that are swirling around that are making brand. You're the feelings you want. There's big ideas. You talk to a lot of people and they say, I want my brand to be trusted, or I want my brand to be, have a lot of integrity. Whatever that, whatever those ideas is, those are the kind of things that are usually are behind the actual experience, right? The name, the website, the copy, the videos, all that stuff should exist. There should be some guiding principles behind that. So when you take that and you ask yourselves all these great questions, then you come up with a name. And a name needs to be fairly short. It shouldn't be 18 words long, right? It should be Easy to say, it should be easy to spell and easy to remember. So that's your transition. Once you get a great domain name, then you say, okay, can I find the domain that works for that?

Yeah.

Could you start with a domain and work your way up?

You absolutely can if you know where to find a really great domain. Many places that sell domains are going to just leave it to you to find the right domain. So you still— so you can't— there are certainly great marketplaces that have curated lists of domains and yeah, you should absolutely go to those. And look, and, and if you find something that resonates, 100%, 100%. But if you go to a standard registrar, you can't expect them to, to have a solution for you.

Yeah. So let's back up in the way machine, way back machine here for a second. And is this the business you've been running for a long time? Were you, did you fire the man somewhere along the way? What's your story?

The business that we're running?

Yeah, absolutely.

So I am one of the original, very early on I came onto the team. We have a, a CEO who's been running this for longer than I have. We started as a name crowdsourcing business. So when crowdsourcing was really hot, there was crowdsourcing in domain— or I'm sorry, there was crowdsourcing logos was a big one, design, those kinds of things. So that's where our roots were. We were bringing a group of creative people together and solving that naming problem fundamentally.

Yeah.

And what we realized is that the domain problem Obviously, it was linked, but it was even harder because you could come up with a great name and come with 100 great names, but you couldn't find the domain. So then it became really clear. It's not— I mean, it is obviously the creative side of naming that's really important. But then it gets into trademark, then it gets into domain. Then we also talk a lot about audience testing. Is your audience going to align with this name? What we're trying to do is, as I was saying, like, For many, a long time, the way to find a domain was to go to a registrar and just, and they would say, what domain do you want? And you would say, I don't know. And they would say, what domain do you want? You would say, I don't know. So we wanted to put that something in there.

There's 900 choices.

Yeah, right. So we wanted, there needed to be a solution. And that's where we tried to, and are trying and always trying to get it, make it better. We've got 50,000 clients, so must have found something that works Pretty well, but we're solving it both from the creative side and from the domain side. And really, it was exactly the point that you brought up is, can you go to someplace and start with the domain? And the question, the answer is yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

100%.

Brainstorm your way up from the top, right? What value of domains has changed a lot in this process, hasn't it? Like they have gone from 99 cents to $99,000 or more.

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you can still get a domain, although they keep changing. If you can find something that handles it, the problem is, and I look at real estate and domains a lot together. You— I don't know, where's your favorite place to visit?

Branson.

Branson. So there's only a limited— and there's probably like a town or a lake or something that is the best thing there.

Table Rock Lake.

Yep. Okay. So there's a limited number of houses along that lake, right? And that's the best place to be. So, and that's the problem with domains. There's a limited number of great words. Single English words are obviously the best names, typically. That's not always the case, but, and everything else is, is stepping one step back from that, especially if you're trying to launch something that's very big and powerful. Look at Apple, look at so many of these brands. And really it seems we've looked at, I think it's 6 million plus domains and names at this point. From the outside, if you're looking at like, how do these words combine? And people, it, when I started this, I'd be like, well, there's so many combinations. And there are theoretically, but when there's millions of businesses launching every day, or not every day, but every year and compounding over time, the options of how to combine good, powerful words becomes more and more limited. And that's where the value comes in. There's somebody goes out and registers the great domain, or they've been in use and then they own it. Somebody buys it from one person to the next. And yeah, the value goes up and up.

Yeah.

For sure. Absolutely.

What, in your mind, what does the process look like for somebody who's wanting, from your perspective, to define a new brand that leads backwards into these things? Where do we— maybe give us a few tips and some experience that people can lean from.

Yeah.

I have a process that I, you know, keep in front of me at almost all times. It starts with understanding your brand. You have to write those key things. We've already talked about those. How do you wanna make people feel? What's your story? Write 'em down on a piece of paper and try and find, you know, What is that leverage? What is that, that point that you really, really want to get across to people? And then you start creating name ideas or you find a place with curated domains, whatever it is, and you start saying, okay, where's this, where's the synthesis? Where's the similarity? Where's the alignment? Which ones are the, which works the best for me to take these ideas that I know I want to build off of and bring them to life? And then the hardest part is validation. Then you have to say, as we talked about, do you have the domain? Trademark is often really difficult. Trademark is a— in our life, in our world, very few things are really like, stop, no, you can't anymore, right? With all the technology and everything in the world, I just feel like so many things are becoming more and more frictionless. And a trademark is one of those things that's just no. Well, people come to, well, what's the way around this? No, no means no. This person is using it, right?

Yeah.

If you can't register, you can't register it.

If somebody else is using it, there's nothing. There's so, and I think that becomes, I mean, it's fairly frustrating when you get so far and I'll, I'll get into that in a moment, but you have everybody's buy-in and then it's just like, no. So that's one thing. Audience testing. We really highly recommend audience testing. So when you get to a list of a few domains, a few names, vet them against each other. There's— you can't imagine how many projects that I've seen. People have domains, they go and ask their friends, do you like this domain? I don't know how much— if you probably have done some testing along the— when you ask the wrong question, you get the wrong answer, right?

Mm-hmm.

And you trigger— when you ask people like, do you like this name? You trigger this concept in somebody's mind and you like imply, hey, you're a naming expert, which you're not. You imply that they have some understanding of your business. They imply like they know how to start start a business? There's just so many things that you did that you're implying that you shouldn't be asking, right?

Yeah.

And then people go, no, it should be more this. And usually the answer is no, it should describe what your business is doing. I have to come back to the client. I say, no, that's not how you build a brand. Does Apple explain what— is Apple selling apples? And then they go, oh yeah, okay. So you're asking the right question. So what you want to ask is things like, If you want to ask people who aren't involved typically because that's going to give you unbiased, you want to ask people which of these names or which of these brands are you most interested in learning more about? So, in a vacuum, how does this name draw people in?

Yeah.

That's a really good question. Or which of these brands comes across as trustworthy? So now, you're taking your core brand that we've talked about. I want a trustworthy brand or maybe it's innovative or maybe it's this and saying which one of these helps me Do that.

Yeah.

So those kind of things, and we've had really interesting companies were all backing one name and they asked their audience and the audience, nobody voted for it. Nobody liked it. Nobody voted.

And you can never be smarter than the market. This is one of the things that we've learned in our branding is that you need to present to the market an opportunity. If you can leverage another platform to capture that demand and create it as long as brand, trademark, and domain can all be matched up with each other. as a part of that process, then really most of the time you're creating a brand from thin air that no one's ever heard of anyways. So really, you're going to have to keep pushing that forward until people understand more and more what the value is of what you're doing and what it means to people. Apple obviously doesn't sell apples. People finally figured out, well, they sell an experience. They don't even sell computers.

Correct.

They sell an outcome, an experience, a look. They sell a feeling. They sell connectivity and relationship. They sell FaceTime, which seems to be one of the biggest components of why most people get on Apple. Is that they can FaceTime each other really easy. They have easy connectivity between their devices and communications. And I've found that experience myself, just using it and getting my family members on it. And even my parents and my wife's parents, it's like, well, this would be a lot easier if we were all on Apple because now you can all share your Messenger and bam, you can just FaceTime and bam, you don't have to do all this hard stuff. They can just push a button and go, especially for the older generation. So for them, it's fantastic. It's seamless.

Right.

Which means brand value. So, but creating that brand out of nowhere and then establishing it reminds me, actually just came off the cuff. I, we literally went to Brand City. 'Cause one of my favorite places to go.

Absolutely.

Took my wife there for a few days and we went to this little pizza shop. My wife is gluten-free and dairy-free and stuff. And so there's this one place in Branson where they make these, you know, amazing pizzas and it's all very clean and they do a really wonderful job. A little server comes up, he sees I'm wearing my shirt, says Voltage on it. It says Voltage Business Builders on the shirt. And he looks at the shirt and he goes, are you working in electrical? I was like, brand fail. This is like one word. It's easy to spell. It's Voltage. But clearly he didn't read the business builder side. It didn't say like electrical services.

So, you know, that's one of my favorite principles in naming and domains is every name sucks.

It doesn't until anybody understands what it means.

Well, exactly. Until anybody— but there's always some problem with it, right? Because if you— if your name was super descriptive, right? If you were thebestbusinessbuilders.com, then nobody would remember.

Nobody likes that.

It's boring. It's cheap. So there's I mean, again, a lot of my experience is sitting in groups of people trying to pick a great domain or great brand name. And it's just fun to, to listen to people and what their objections are to these names and domains. And it's always that one person, the same person will come in and be like, well, it's got to be shorter. And it's got to be more brandable. And it's got to tell people what we want to do. I go, well, Unfortunately, the English language doesn't work that way. So you have to compromise.

You have to compromise. And then you have to get a good narrative going really behind it. It doesn't necessarily matter if people don't know what Voltage means, if they think it's electrical services or building businesses, they've got to understand it and take a few seconds to clarify what the narrative is of why we're an incubator who builds businesses and grows and launches them, exits them, and acquires them. And it's like, oh, that's Voltage.

Okay.

Name, mnemonic, put in touch. Now we get it.

Yeah.

Clearly you're not in electrical services and you're not an electrician.

Although you could help electricians start their business, maybe.

Absolutely. I've helped some electricians start their Amazon and e-commerce businesses.

Yes.

So we've gone the other way, but it has to get down to that value in that narrative. So I think what people should think about, and I think you've covered this and I will summarize it in my own words, if that's okay, is really to understand who you're going to sell to, what their value is and how they state things. And then back in to a word or phrasing that you can then use to build a narrative around, even if it doesn't— best business builders, whatever, it doesn't matter what Voltage is, then the narrative is more important. So you can hook the two together and really understand I'm selling to X person certain kinds of products and value that I'm trying to extol. And then everyone will start to name it and claim it and say it and move it on down the line for the company. I like that.

The brand is The narrative that lives between the business and the audience.

It has to, because why else would they remember it, right? Why else do you remember anything? Why— I don't— the Honda that I like to drive, or the Hondas that I've driven to 200,000, 300,000 miles and enjoyed, were the emotional connectivity to the car that didn't break down and didn't strand me and just basically needed oil and gas for 300,000 miles until it broke.

Right.

So I had an emotional connectivity to it, and the narrative was like, this thing keeps going and doesn't die. And that is the quality and the build of the product, thus Honda.

And then they do that long enough that people like you and everybody else who's done that tell their friends. And now you got a brand.

And the name Honda ties to the meaning of quality, longevity, value for the price you pay for it. I think people try to start with that concept in mind first, and the names will come to them. And as the names come, they'll, whatever it is called, because who knows what a Kia is? Right.

Right.

What's a Hyundai? Does that actually mean something?

I don't think it does right now. Yeah.

Just borrowing car ideas for a second. Right.

Right. And one of the things in names and domains is the biggest thing you want to do is not have a bad one.

Right.

Right.

A 15-letter domain name or a 15-letter domain with a couple hyphens in it. A couple hyphens. That's right. Which is getting harder to do, isn't it?

It's getting harder to find It is, yeah, absolutely. But it's just as important. We just ran some research about .com is still king, even though people are buying .ais and .ios, and I like them very much, and I think there's a valid business reason to do that. They still don't perform nearly as well in trust when it comes to .com.

Absolutely.

100%.

The value of what people know.

We also ran some research. Absolutely. Which, yeah, that's right. Because it built its own trust, kind of cyclical that way. We ran some other research about do people consider the domain in engaging in an e-commerce experience? I think it was 73% said it was very important or important.

Yeah, which is why I leverage Amazon as a first channel. I don't know, everybody doesn't understand that. They're like, well, Amazon has no value. I'm like, no, actually it does because it's amazon.com. And everybody knows about it. And then 5% of all US retail sales and 49% of all online sales. So when I start there, I'm already leveraging brand authority for whatever name I come up with until such time as I will get marketing, branding, and influence to push the narrative out into other channels, having leveraged. That's how we do it, right? Is to gain that as a slingshot, basically.

I remember when I started in this industry, there was a guy who was talking a lot about who called borrowed credibility from YouTube.

Borrowed credibility.

He would go on to, he said, go on YouTube. Make some YouTube videos, share your YouTube videos because there's some authority that by being on YouTube, you're getting.

Right.

And the same thing on Amazon.

That's a powerful platform. Because if you just start a website by yourself, the old Iowa baseball thing, you build it, they will come, right? And rest in peace, Jones. We loved you, Jones. Sorry you went on to the cross the Rubicon. He's on the way. But it is that if you build it, they will come mentality. And most people just don't understand that aspect. So yeah, leverage authority. Is very powerful, especially in today's social media world.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Extremely social. Okay, is there a question I didn't ask you yet or something you didn't bring up that you wanted to cover on?

I think this was— I think I've covered most of the— most of the topics that I like to cover.

Right on, man. Well, guys, look, hopefully you got some value, some tips. I did. This is a part of understanding the value of branding, how to think about branding. Hopefully you picked up some golden nuggets here from Grant because I did. Just talking through this conversation reminded me of some of the power of the things we focus on in branding, and you should pick it up today too if you're listening and thinking about building brands or whatever. If they want to get in touch with you and talk more about domain name value for products and businesses they want to create and double-check and make sure the brands are available and the naming, where do they go to? atom.com. A-T-O-M dot com. Yeah, guys, go check that out if you got that brainstorming going on and you don't just want to go, well, here's an idea and have it regurgitate 5,900 domains that You don't even know are relevant. This is a slightly different process in the determining brand to name value as well as down to the domain. And I would encourage you to go check it out. That's a pretty cool little system they've built over there. So I would encourage that. Any last final thoughts?

Thanks for having me. It was a pleasure talking to you today.

My pleasure. Well, guys, like, comment, share, engage. You know how to get this done. Every time I tell you, hey, help us beat big tech, I don't keep you— leave a snide comment on YouTube. It doesn't matter. It just engages the algorithm. If you have something nice to say, that's cool too. We'd love to hear the review. Go give us preferably a higher star than negative one. That'd be cool too. And as always, share this with someone who's after their first million or wants to make their next million in business and is looking for great ideas and tips and things from the High Voltage Business Builders Podcast. Thanks again for having me or having you on here. Thanks for coming on here, Grant. Let's try that again. Thanks for coming on the show, Grant. You guys can cut that all out or just leave it in. I don't care. And I appreciate your time, brother.

Thanks for having me again. It was a pleasure.

You know, do these enough times, you think you could get that down to the T, but it still gets me hard every once in a while.

It's always the simplest part.

It trips you up at the end.

It's the end of the day.

I'm out of here. Let's go get a beer.

Sounds good.

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