The Good & Bad Results From My Hatchwise Project

Written By Dave Lavinsky
Three people on a table with reports two glasses of water and pens

I recently finished the development of a new money raising product about Crowdfunding (an extremely exciting way to fund any company, which is related to my core business of being a business plan consultant and offering simple business plan templates).

I wanted to have a logo designed for the product, so on a friend’s advice, I decided to try Hatchwise.com.

Hatchwise.com is very cool. You go to the site and set up a “contest” to get your logo designed. It asks you a few basic questions (name on your logo, what the product/service is, who your target audience is, etc.) and then your contest begins.

The contest works like this: graphic designers from around the world read your design brief (the questions you answered) and submit logos to try and win your contest.

What’s so cool is that you get to see the designs before you select the final designer and pay for it. So you know exactly what you are getting first. And you typically end up seeing lots of interesting designs.

You can see a sample of the logos that were submitted in my contest below.

Hatchwise

Now what I also really like about Hatchwise is that in addition to graphic design projects (which can include logos, websites, brochures, etc.), you can use it for NAMING new products.

Specifically, if you have an idea for a company name or a product/service name, you can submit the general idea to Hatchwise, and members will submit to you potential names and logos. And, they’ll even make sure the domain names are available for you.

This is really cool.

But, the last part (making sure the domain names are available for you) is something I want you to be aware of as this is where I got burned.

You see, if you look at my design contest again, you’ll see that the name of my Crowdfunding product WAS Crowdfunding Secrets.

Well, when I soon launch that product, it’s not going to be called Crowdfunding Secrets. That’s because, I didn’t decide to reserve the domain CrowdfundingSecrets.com until a few days AFTER my contest.

And what did I find? Someone who had seen my contest reserved that domain so I either had to pay them a premium to buy it or not use it.

Very frustrating.

Fortunately, the buyer/domain squatter probably didn’t even know what Crowdfunding was or realize that Crowdfunding is a brand new field.

So, there’s tons of Crowdfunding domains to choose from (so I just changed the product name to Crowdfunding Formula and the domain to CrowdfundingFormula.com).

But I want to make sure you understand this lesson – if you post anything about your future products or company online, make sure you have already reserved any domain names you may want. Because someone else could steal your name from you.

Not cool…but it happened to me…

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