interviews - Inside Interview: Why Perch Purchased Perch.com

In 2017, entrepreneurs Court Cunningham and Phil DeGisi founded Perch, a service that is rapidly transforming how people go about buying their homes. The company, who raised a total of $30 million in funding, are going from strength to strength. One of the company's most prized digital assets has to be Perch.com.

In this brief discussion with Phil DeGisi, we talk about how the team came up with the name Perch, how they upgraded from a two-word .CO name and the advice they'd give to other startups.

Can you tell us a little about yourself and Perch?

Perch is the new marketplace for buying and selling your home. We want to make it as easy to buy and sell your home as it is to trade in your car. We do that by enabling customers to sell their home directly to Perch without the hassles of repairs and home tours, at market price. For home buyers, Perch enables them to choose from an inventory of Certified Pre-Owned houses, making it easy to discover and close on a move-in ready, quality home.

We've launched our services in San Antonio, TX and have been scaling the business over the past year.

Why did you originally decide to brand your company under the name “Perch”, and were there any other brand names you were considering?

We definitely considered a number of names for the business. We ultimately landed on Perch because we felt it was friendly, approachable, and connoted the idea of "home". We also loved that it's short and worked well in context of our visual identity we were developing for the brand.

Did you start off with the Perch.com domain, or was it an upgrade from a previous name?

We started with PerchHomes.co and then moved to Perch.com when we had an opportunity to get the domain. Ultimately, your website domain is a big part of your brand, particularly for a B2C company that is not primarily app-based. At Perch, we're asking customers to try a new solution for the biggest financial transaction they'll make in their life. As a new brand, we think a ".com" domain gives us a boost in trust from a consumer who may not have heard a lot about Perch yet.

Do you think that buying the right domain name should be a priority for startups?

I don't think there's a one-size fits all approach to domain strategy for startups. I think it really depends on a host of factors. For example, whether you're B2B vs B2C, a web-based or app-based business, the industry you play in, etc. The one thing that is common is that you should ideally have a take on what the right domain strategy is for your company as you're naming the business.

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This interview has been edited for clarity.

Thank you to Phil for taking part in our Inside Interview series! Unfortunately, details of the Perch.com transaction such as price and negotiations aren't able to be disclosed.

Inside Interviews is a blog series profiling the buyers of high-value domain names. Find out their motives, negotiation tactics, and their opinions on popular domaining topics only on the NamePros Blog.

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