Thread by @_shahedk

Alright, story time... 🍿

https://twitter.com/_shahedk/status/1818438513144348680

In 2017, we rebranded from our original name Opentest — to Loom.

A name we thought was original, resembled what we were doing ('weaving' conversations), and hoped to turn into a verb (send me a 'loom').

It was apparent that most of the domains and social handles associated with the name had been taken, but we still decided to move forward.

We paid $10 for and registered @useloom everywhere we could.useloom.com

The Loom brand was built on 'useloom' from 2017 through most of 2018.

As Loom grew, so did our brand.

One of our early investors suggested we trademark our name to weed out any confusion with similar brands.

He was right (more on this shortly).

We offered chat support on our website and had our users often confuse us with another 'Loom' in the market who sold a completely different product, but also happened to provide chat support on their website.

This was happening while we were in midst of closing our Series A

With a new round of cash coming in — and our promise to new investors of positioning ourselves as the 'Loom' in the market...

We knew we had to take our brand far more serious than we had up until this point.

I went off on a side quest to figure out who owned the Loom domain, social handles, and SEO...

The WHOIS listed a public SaaS company as the contact.

They acquired a company with the same name four years earlier and shut the brand down.

This was an inactive domain within a public company, serving no use to them.

I was able to get in touch with the CEO, who then forwarded us to the person in charge of IP.

We went back and forth on email for weeks.

[They hadn't sold dormant IP before, they needed to create a process around it, get approval, and get back to us]

I offered them $50k for the domain, knowing well, it would be appraised by a third party for more than $400k.

I mentioned we were a small seed-stage startup without a big budget — and they agreed to selling it to us for $75k.

Thinking I just negotiated the deal of a lifetime, I was ready to sign docs & send the wire until their legal team went silent on us.

Weeks had gone by.

I sent email after email. Messaged their legal team over Linkedin connection requests.

Almost a full month after we had settled on a price, I hear back from their legal team.

Just a few days earlier — they hear from a separate party also *very* interested in the domain...

The legal team put us in touch with the competing party and told us to negotiate on price and come back to them with the highest offer.

This startup, was pre-product, raised less than we had...

and already had approval from his Seed partner to spend upwards of $500k on this domain (!!)

There was no way we would compete at a price that high, but the other company was not willing to back down.

Lucky for us, they hadn't shared their budget with the legal team / and the legal team never mentioned our bid to them.

After numerous Zooms and emails with their CEO — we were eager to win this deal.

We told him we had just closed our Series A and were willing to compete as we had a trademark on the name — and our users had officially associated us with Loom.

Joe, Vinay, and I had to become creative.

We needed to convince him to find a new name.

The CEO's biggest worry was wasting time on finding a new name and coming up with an entirely new brand design.

Our only chance at settling this immediately was to offer to pay for this company to rebrand away from 'Loom'.

So we offered him $75k cash, upfront. Contingent to him walking away from the domain.

To our complete surprise, he accepted.

He walked away from the negotiation. The legal team agreed to sell the domain to us for $75K.

He walked away with $75k.

We paid $150k altogether for a domain that was worth well over $500k.

We won with luck.