A Whole New World/Domain
-- by Jessie Gabriel and Erica Akitani-Bob
We are making a small but meaningful change here at All Places. Since this is a change that we know many of you (or your portfolio companies) have gone through (or are considering going through), we wanted to share what we have learned in this process. Welcome to our brief handbook on changing your company’s domain name.
The TL;DR (Jessie)
When I went through the exercise of deciding on a name for my company, I received the following advice: come up with a list of ten names and then run each of them through a trademark search, a domain name search, and a search for social handles. Thank you, Linda Honan. Of course, anyone who has ever looked for a domain name knows that all the straightforward ones are taken. That’s why we have so many companies with nonsensical names or unusual domain extensions.
For the name All Places, I was satisfied to find all-places.com. Just a little hyphen, and otherwise perfect. The ideal domain, allplaces.com, was taken and even though I paid GoDaddy $500 to negotiate a purchase for me, it went nowhere (expert tip: don’t EVER do what I did).
The problem with all-places.com is that it’s a mouthful. What’s your website? All hyphen places dot com. What’s your email address? Jessie at all hyphen places dot com. We had the additional problem that there is a design element in our logo that people sometime assume is a hyphen, which has led to people often thinking the name of our company is “All-Places”.
The Breakthrough (Jessie)
For reasons unclear to me at the time, sometime in the summer of 2025, I decided to see where things stood with my dream domain. As luck would have it, it was for sale and not for an absolutely insane price (but also, let’s be honest, not cheap). I picked it up and immediately programmed it to forward to our active website. After that, it just sat there. Why? Because, as it turns out, transitioning to a new domain is a major pain in the *&(#HoS(&#. Now, more on that.
The Plan (Erica)
Once our team had the bandwidth to attack this, we started with planning. As anyone who works with us knows, we are meticulous. We weren’t going to do this unless it was going to be seamless for our clients. That’s no easy task, given that changing your domain includes changing all of your email addresses. And given that spam filters these days are crazy overzealous. In laying out the plan, our two main goals were no disruption to our clients and minimal disruption internally. Yeah, you know all those saved logins you have . . . . Uh huh. They are all tied to your email address. As you continue down this rabbit hole, you start to realize how overwhelming it can become to do this well. This was the main surprise for us—just how much is tied to our website and email addresses, and thus how much has to be updated to complete the transition. But for our perfect domain, we were up for it!
Phase It Out (Erica)
As the plan came together, it became clear that this project would need to be done in phases. Phase I: talk to your outside support teams. For us, this was our web designer (Outset) and our IT provider (CMIT). They helped us understand the process and their own timelines for implementation. Phase II: put together the plan. With the additional vendor insight, we created a detailed project plan and timeline. Phase III: start testing. For us, this will involve setting up aliases and then making sure we are clearly communicating externally so there are no surprises to clients or newsletter subscribers. Phase IV: roll it out. The new domain becomes our primary, and we continue to communicate with our outside stakeholders. Phase V: ongoing maintenance and any clean up. This is not a set and forget type of situation.
Final Pieces of Advice (Erica)
First, we strongly recommend working with an outside IT provider. We have a very sophisticated team internally when it comes to tech, but we learned a ton from our outside IT team. Without them, we are sure we would have hit some significant snags. Second, designate someone on your team to manage the whole process. There are so many pieces to this that if it’s not clear who has ultimate responsibility, things are likely to get missed.
If you’re thinking about taking this on, let us know next time we’re on a call and we can share more. And if you’re already mid-process, bon courage!
