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This article was published on August 5, 2011

Find a great domain name for your startup without paying the Earth, with NameLayer


Find a great domain name for your startup without paying the Earth, with NameLayer

The domain name market is a messy business – if you want a really good domain name, these days you’ll probably have to be prepared to shell out a small (or maybe even large) fortune. NameLayer is a new service launching that aims to make getting a good quality name easier and cheaper than it has been for some time.

With the ethos “Brandable domain names from a curated portfolio,” NameLayer prices domains at 25% of their market value. The result is that you can get a domain name that you might actually want to use for a price that won’t bankrupt your business before its got off the ground.

Some examples? Right now, TagLike.com, ShoeStep.com, HumanTracker.com, EverTag.com, and SocialDial.com among many others are all available for prices between $1000 and $3000, much more affordable that they’d likely be on the open market.

NameLayer is the product of LA-based duo Julian Shapiro and Edward James, who met in a college Economics class and have been working together in Web development ever since. With NameLayer, they’ve worked out a way to get hold of desirable domain names at bargain prices.

“We do two things,” explains Shapiro. “We buy out existing domain portfolios and we also use domain registration technology that we developed for 6 months to backorder domains on a large, yet efficient, scale. Backordering means bidding against other domain speculators on domains that are expiring. This is the same acquisition model employed by the high-charging big boys, but we managed to make it work on a small, highly curated scale.”

NameLayer launches today and The Next Web’s readers have a discount code they can use to get $250 off any domain. Here’s how to unlock the discount: On any domain’s Package Summary page, enter the Konami code (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a) immediately followed by tnw7tnw. You will then instantly see the $250 deduction next to the domain’s price. This code is good until the end of August.

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