Daniel Donhauser is the co-founder of the three Maikai fitness studios in Salzburg. Maikai’s mission is to stand out from other gyms through its high-tech equipment. And the domain strategy is an important marketing tool for this. In our interview, Donhauser explains why the company has registered several .at domains.

 

What sets Maikai studios apart?

Donhauser: Our focus is on health, and we want to make health accessible for everyone. Whether it’s younger, older or impaired people: we try to offer the perfect health and fitness plan for every customer, and we use the latest sports science technologies to help us do this. The customer experience is highly individualised: on average, one personal trainer looks after five clients.

 

What does the name Maikai m

Donhauser: When people in Hawaii ask, "How are you?", they answer “Maikai”. That means, "I am well, I am healthy." That’s also the goal for our clients: to become Maikai. One of the criteria when choosing the name was that the matching domain was still available.

 

How important is your website for customer acquisition?

Donhauser: Our website is very important because we are highly differentiated from our competitors. And we want to demonstrate that on our website. After all, the health and fitness industry has a problem: only one in ten people goes to a gym, so relatively few people embark upon a fitness programme. We want to reach the remaining nine.

 

What are your domains?

Donhauser: We have the main domain maikai.at for our health studio, that was our first one when we founded the company. We went on to add a number of other domains over the past three years, such as therapie-salzburg.at for our physiotherapy area and nanis.at for the beauty and biohacking area – which involves things like oxygen therapy. We also have the domains personaltrainersalzburg.at and maikai-beats.at for our courses.

 

What criteria did you use to select your .at domains?

Donhauser: The domains match the brand name and ensure better findability on the internet. The word fitness does not appear in the name Maikai, so we secured other domains with keywords such as therapy or personal training. The idea behind it: Customers who have never been to a gym are googling for back pain or arthritis, not gyms. So they are researching a specific condition, and we have to make sure that these searches find us, too. In addition to the SEO-optimised website, a good domain name can also help. 

 

Were your desired domains available?

Donhauser: We secured 80 percent of the domains we wanted. All of the domains containing our brand name Maikai and the regional reference to Austria were still available. However, some of the names we were interested in were already taken, such as yoga-salzburg.at.

 

Did you try to get the domains anyway?

Donhauser: We offered to buy some from the existing owners, but in the end it turned out to be too expensive for us. Our experience is that once a domain name is taken, there’s little hope of acquiring it for a reasonable price.

 

Why did you decide on .at domains?

Donhauser: We have a strong local connection with our studios, so .at domains are crucial for us. We have also secured domains like maikai.de so that we will also be prepared in terms of domains if we expand internationally at some point in the future. The new types of domain extensions like .fitness have not yet caught on in our opinion, which is why we have not utilised them.

 

Have you secured other domain names for the future?

Donhauser: Yes, many, in fact. We have bought a number of domains for projects that we want to take on. One example is fitness yoga with electronic music. We call it Black Yoga and have already secured the appropriate domain for that. This type of thing doesn't usually cost much, and we want to keep our options open.

 

Looking back, were there any stumbling blocks or things that you would have done differently with your domain strategy?

Donhauser: We could have thought about which domains we wanted to secure for future projects much earlier – right from the start-up phase. The choice of domains would certainly have been even greater.

 

Do you have any advice for company founders in this regard?

Donhauser: Just do it. It's easier than it seems. We have found all the issues surrounding the purchase of domains to be simple to resolve. And with regard to finding a name, I can only say: better overdo it and secure more domains than necessary. Once a domain is taken by someone else, it’s a lot harder to obtain.

 

 

From inspiration to name: secure your online domain before you take any other steps.

No matter whether it's a business idea, a campaign or a new product: without a domain, your plan is incomplete. The fitness chain Maikai shows how it's done: you need to think as broadly as possible, starting from the initial idea and register several domain names at once. Your registrar knows exactly how it’s done and will be happy to help you. You can either register the domain directly with nic.at or with our various domain partners: