Laurent’s blog

Why we need an “Early-Adopter Name Reservation System”? [opportunity]

This morning, both Loic Le meur and Mark Evans mentioned they would love to see a name reservation system. Bouncing the idea further around coffee earlier, we think it can have great potential with incentive on both side of board, for the startups and the early adopters.

30 some words to describe EAR?

The EAR service allows user to register for one or more names in priority sequence. Every time a new startup launches, it sends a standard request to EAR that will dispatch the news to all of its users (by rss, email, sms, im, …) and invite them to reply and secure their favorite name within a period of time.

Incentive for early adopters

As mentioned in the posts, it’s obvious that reserving your username for services like twitter, friendfeed and all the likes is great. We all like to be known under the same name. Mine for instance is only 3 letters (@LFP) but I could not secure it on all services so I’m also known as @laurentfp and @lofp… annoying. And I would have loved to be simply known as @laurent.

On some systems it’s particularly difficult to locate people and having that same name is reassurance that you can be found. Isn’t it the goal of all those social networking? Moreover, its a great way to prevent someone from stealing your identity on a new service.

Incentive for startups

As a startup, this is a great way to be known. Attracting many eyes at once, most of them being early adopters (who else uses twitter?). And as a result it could brings a good quantity of new users reaching critical mass quicker. This without mentionning the resulting press coverage.

The indirect benefit is that while reaching all those early-adopters, through EAR you also reach already interconnected users, meaning, you have new users AND their connections!

Financial

So, I’m willing to pay $20 per name I reserve in the list (depending of my priority). That’s already 80$ from me @laurent, @lfp, @laurentfp, @lofp. Moreover I’m willing to pay an extra $0.50 per service I choose to register, knowing that this money (the 50c) is going directly to the startup.

Extra benefit for the new product = funds.

Can I have some stocks with this?