It's a hard choice to make, but especially when building a B2C brand & product and a large enough SEO channel (where a domain change might hurt your rankings),

It's a hard choice to make, but especially when building a B2C brand & product and a large enough SEO channel (where a domain change might hurt your rankings), I'd definitely stick with PG here. Lots of good examples and counterexamples in the comments, but if you want something memorable AND searchable, sometimes it's best to just churn out the money early on if you know very well what you're doing. For justwatch.com we paid a small fortune - almost a tenth of the seed investment - to a shady squatter that just wouldn't give in, but in retrospect I'd still say it was definitely worth it. Even in 2015, it still makes you come across a tad more serious, determined and professional to outsiders and the brand searches and direct openings of the domain are significant. When you've built a brand already, squatters will be happy to charge you for the work you did (which might or might not be a better deal overall than burning the valuable money in the beginning). YMMV. If you're shooting for a B2B SAAS business that's more sales or SEM driven, I guess you're off just fine with an .io or temp domain, but your main focus should be a clean search neigbourhood then where you have the chance to make the Google front page eventually.