Last night I went to a sneak preview of ClayValet.com, hosted by founder and all around wonderful guy Mikhail Seregine. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I encourage you to do so.

Before the event got into full swing I was chatting with a couple of other entrepreneurs. Two different entrepreneurs – in totally separate conversations – each shared with me something that just seems totally inconceivable from a doing-business-smartly perspective.

Both have startups that weren’t able to secure the .com domain to match their company name. Let’s call them Trovel and Sniffl. Both names are fictitious. Sorry if that’s really your company name. Trovel was able to get trovel.net but not the .com domain. Trovel hasn’t launched. Nobody knows them from a hole in the wall yet. Sniffl was able to secure sniffl.us but not the .com domain. They’ve been in the market for a couple of years and have a huge brand asset in the Sniffl name.

The current owners of the respective .com domains have offered to lease the domains to the respective startups. For Trovel, the offer is $10,000 for a 1-year lease and then the right to buy the trovel.com domain later, but price will be negotiated at that time. Sniffl’s offer was even worse. The current owner offered to lease the domain for 3 years at $17,000 per year. The offer includes a right-to-buy but the current owner won’t negotiate the price until the end of the lease.

I have two pieces of advice:

1) Don’t name your company anything, unless you can get the .com domain that you actually want. Think of your .com search just like your trademark search. You wouldn’t name your company anything without ensuring you could get a trademark for it. Make sure you can get the .com domain too.

2) Don’t lease the .com domain if you don’t know how much it will ultimately cost you to buy it outright. Your .com domain isn’t like an office lease where you can just pack up and move at the end of the lease. The more successful you are and the more time goes by, the more that domain is going to cost you.

A right to buy without establishing today the price it will be at time of sale is a right to nothing. What a horrendous mistake it is to do this deal. If you have a blowout year, the current owner of the domain has you by the cajones and is really going to make you pay.

So you might be wondering what these two entrepreneurs are going to do. Trovel is going to go ahead and lease the .com domain for $10,000 for 1 year. Sniffl has hired a marketing consultant and has decided to change the name of their company soon, so they can finally get the .com they want.