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More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
- diceduckmonk 4y agoYC also mentioned more of the cohort being from outside the United States, which would mean a higher proportion of regional domain names.
- boringg 4y agoAKA .com's are too expensive. Next.
- gabereiser 4y agoAKA .com's are squatted. Next.
- boringg 4y agoWhat's the difference? It's too expensive because of squatters.
- tabtab 4y agoAren't some of the newer TLDN's pretty good alternatives, such as ".shop", ".store", ".social", ".insurance", ".save", ".software", ".search", ".game", ".travel" etc?
- AgentK20 4y agoI think this is honestly less about the notoriety of .com, and more about the lack of affordable and available domains for startups to purchase. Got a five letter named startup? That’ll cost you tens of thousands of dollars, IF you can even get it. Meanwhile there’s hundreds of gTLDs that you can buy a domain on for $10-$30/yr.
- prepend 4y agoMeanwhile my four letter domain, lwei.com, gets no offers and is appraised at like $1000. There’s still stuff available for reasonable prices but it’s just a lot of work so it’s easier to get some random tld.
- tabtab 4y agoThat's Iwei robbery!
- haliskerbas 4y ago"our company is called Iwei, and you can reach us at Lwei dot com"
- paxys 4y agoWell sure you can also run a random string generator and get a short .com TLD, but that's not the point.
- Kiro 4y agoPretty sure all 4 and 5 letter .com domains have been taken since at least a decade.
- echelon 4y agoAnd very few of them will ever serve anything useful.
- anamexis 4y ago4 letter ones are all taken, but there are still 5 letter domains available. I wanted a short domain for personal use and bought xlmpq.com
- nickstinemates 4y agoA fellow ascii art enjoyer :)
- ren_engineer 4y agothis, .com domains are an ego thing more than anything at this point. Why waste valuable money on a vanity thing rather than trying to fuel growth? I guess in the worst case somebody could try to trick potential customers but otherwise as an early startup you have bigger things to worry about than a domain name
- croutonwagon 4y agoThey are artificially necessary in some cases. I have a personal .com and a gTLD based domain. THis is mostly to retain control of mailflow (I use workspace but can always move it, and have in the past) The number of services/online forms that wont accept a .email domain is still very high. I would imagine at a business level this would be equally difficult, even if its just for B2B type transactions/relationships.
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoCan confirm. My .email is regularly reject even by my own country administration.
- input_sh 4y agoThat is indeed true for gTLDs (I've experienced it with .online), but from my experience never the case for ccTLDs. Maybe .tk that is (or was) handed out for free, but I never had any problem with ccTLDs I've owned (.me, .dj, .sh). So, .com isn't the only silver bullet, and from what I can tell from that chart, only .app and .tech may be somewhat affected.
- davchana 4y ago.in is rejected by discover for email address, its a cctld. .us was fine.
- croutonwagon 4y agointeresting. Just registered a couple ccTLD's. I have a .com. But its super long and I dont really like it. Its also the primary domain in workspace since i have had it since gsuite was free but before they closed the free tier registration ~2012. Now that I'm a paid user (by forced attrition) im looking to honestly just migrate the TLD of the workspace to something less cumbersome to type. .email is really the primary at this point.
- htag 4y agoHaving a dotcom is a signal of the organization's wealth. If your company is worth $3B, and your cash position is good, spending 0.01% of your valuation on a dotcom ($300k) is a no brainer. It might add to your legitimacy and prestige (even if marginally) and it's an asset that will most likely increase in value over time.
- diceduckmonk 4y ago> an asset that will most likely increase in value over time. This is actually a myth. See the changing of hands of sex.com. Also, Domain names are being less important as users stay within apps / content platforms like FB, Instagram and TikTok. Also Google Search and soon ChatGPT.
- Salgat 4y agoReminds me of nissan.com, which is now nearly worthless because Nissan Motors doesn't care anymore.
- HideousKojima 4y agoOr steam.com
- davchana 4y agoI thought that was what Nissan (the domain owner,not the motor company) wanted, that motor company leaves him alone, & don't bother him while he uses his lastname domain.
- Salgat 4y agoIf I remember right he owned a computer company he used the domain for, but he pretty much devoted his domain to his anti-nissan campaign until he passed away.
- htag 4y agoThe future value of domain names aren't certain, but I think they are a fairly safe bet. They are viewed in to email addresses, search results, web address bars, and hyperlinks. I don't think a platform is going to usurp these. Walled gardens have been attempting to do this since AOL keywords.
- lostmsu 4y agoTo prove your point I got borg.games for $20/yr for my p2p cloud gaming startup yesterday. Although lots of other good names were "premium" and costed upwards of $5000.
- remram 4y agoborggames.com is available and will cost you $10/yr.
- pentagrama 4y agoI also believe that changing your domain after you build an user base is challenging from a UX perspective. Many users have saved their credentials on their browser's password manager, and if the domain changes, the auto fill didn't work anymore. Courious about why Notion owns the .com but still using the .so.
- gkoberger 4y agoWhen I started my YC company, we used the .io (which we found on HN, actually! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6397526 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6397526). A few years later, once we could afford it, we bought the .com for $170k. I imagine that if you filtered based on only companies that make it to (for example) a Series B, the % goes way up.
- klabb3 4y ago> A few years later, once we could afford it, we bought the .com for $170k. How are these bigger ones sold? Do you sell it back or to someone else later?
- gkoberger 4y agoI might be misinterpreting the question, but the way to buy an expensive domain is to go through a broker. We bought it outright (sent money to escrow), but a lot of people will do rent-to-own. For example, we would have paid $10k/mo for it, and then when we hit $170k it would be ours. But in the meantime, if we missed a payment, the rights would revert back to the original owner.
- 6DM 4y agoI'm honestly shocked you decided to pay that for a domain name. I guess I can kinda understand as a percentage of your company revenue, but morally that is so hard for me to justify feeding a squatter, let alone in a sum of that amount.
- gkoberger 4y agoI don't love it either, but we didn't really have a choice. All simple .coms are already owned at this point, and I think with few exceptions pg's article is dead on: http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html
- josevalerio 4y agoRelated, PG’s “Change Your Name” http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html
- LeifCarrotson 4y agoThat post said, in 2015: > 100% of the top 20 YC companies by valuation have the .com of their name. 94% of the top 50 do. But only 66% of companies in the current batch have the .com of their name. Which suggests there are lessons ahead for most of the rest, one way or another. Compared to the article: > Today, only 42% of Y Combinator startups in the winter 2023 batch use a .com domain, while only 40% of the most popular Product Hunt startups used a .com in 2022. which supports the assertions in the article. It's still true that there are only 3 YC companies in the top 50 that don't have a .com, so maybe the lesson is "just plan to buy the .com later"!
- disport 4y agoFrom my perspective as a user, maybe someone who would visit your domain, I’m indifferent to the specific TLD used. You might be able to compose a clever word that grabs my attention, which I’ve seen a lot from .ly domains. However, from an email marketing perspective, TLDs are not interchangeable. Some TLDs (think .xyz) see a lot of abuse, tanking the reputation and deliverability for good actors using them too. So my advice is to stick with TLDs that most good actors are using (.com, .io), giving you better baseline deliverability, because email marketing remains incredibly valuable for growth.
- ryan29 4y agoIt may make sense to put bulk email on a completely separate domain anyway, so then you could do something like: example.tech exampletech.com That has it's own downsides if it confuses your users, but most email clients barely show sender addresses any more, so a lot of users may not even realize you're emailing from a different domain than you use for your website.
- eastbound 4y agoDoing support, if customer has subscribed for example.com, we will not associate support requests from @example.tech as legitimate…
- robmusial 4y agoAs a personal user of .xyz I couldn't agree more. People often get a chuckle at my web/email address when I give it out. Sometimes I have to repeat it because (especially non technical) people aren't expecting it to end in .xyz but often it works to my advantage. The repetition and uniqueness makes it memorable. Also .xyz is generic enough to be used for business and for personal sites. It's also not a ccTLD so I don't have to worry about registration restrictions. But... Even with using a correctly configured major provider to deliver my mail, it gets sent to spam all the time. Which for personal email, fine. Most of my recipients know to check spam, and mark me as safe. But I know of at least one destination that flat out rejects my mail and if I were a business that'd be nightmare. Also on the web front a lot of proxy and filter providers just block .xyz all together. When I purchased it I hoped Alphabet having abc.xyz would've helped with .xyz's reputation, but it hasn't. Oh well. Mine is for personal use so I'm willing to tolerate it. Businesses be warned though.
- meitros 4y agoI wonder if it would have been seen as a sign of prestige for startups if yc had become a domain provider for .yc
- dmurray 4y agoTwo-letter TLDs are reserved for countries. IANA has a slightly more generous definition of country than the UN, but they're still not generally available. Definitely a nerd status symbol if you can get your hands on one!
- 908B64B197 4y agoHonestly that was a bad decision and it's time to end it. Nobody uses those for their intended "national country" use. .io and .ai are tech-focused, .tv pretty much only has tv stations or video providers on it and so on.
- dmurray 4y ago> Nobody uses those for their intended "national country" use. Most of them do? I'm sure most .fr or .jp properties are operating in the French or Japanese markets. A handful of them (mostly the ones you list) have become trendy in other niches or provide opportunities for puns.
- Symbiote 4y agoMost countries except the USA have their local domain in general usage. Even the "hacks". Search "site:.ai Anguilla" for examples. You obviously be little reason to visit websites of Anguillan restaurants, government, telecoms, tourism etc but they exist. Within Anguilla it's a small signal of a local business.
- fourseventy 4y agoTwo letter tlds are reserved for countries
- paxys 4y agoThis is a good thing IMO. There are hundreds of great TLDs [1] just sitting there that can help ease the gold rush and squatting problem with .com domains, but are not favored because historically non-.com websites have been associated with scams and low effort content rather than established brands. Hopefully more and more legit startups out there with a .horse their name will finally normalize such domains. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains#ICANN-era_generic_top-level_domains https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_dom...
- glenstein 4y agoI completely agree. Back when the first wave of quirky TLDs was created, I remember a fair amount of HN users insisting there was no use case for them [0]. But I always thought our sense of normal would shift as time went on and new sites and apps became popular. 0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7492226 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7492226
- sampo 4y agoPlotting libraries should use larger fonts as default. The text in the plots in the post is so small, it's not readable.
- binkHN 4y ago.com domain availability has dried up and alternate TLDs dropped the price of squatted .coms. .io was too popular for a while and now everyone seems to be going with a .ai even if their product is far from actual AI. For my startup, I went with .dev. Don’t know if that was a good idea, but I was able to readily get a simple three-letter TLD there.
- ryan29 4y agoI don't know much about the marketing potential for .dev vs others, but I think .dev is one of the safest TLDs in terms of registry management and longevity. It makes sense for Google to keep their TLDs priced reasonably to keep the web accessible and there are some big anchor domains on .dev; web.dev, pages,dev, etc..
- bombcar 4y agoGoogle's also the most likely to suddenly decide they don't want to be a registrar anymore and just graveyard the whole TLD. They've done similar to bigger things.
- taubek 4y agoI think that the fact that every possible .com is probably already taken has played a big role in this. On top of taht, who types in the domain name? You either go to search engine, click the link somewhere, scan QR code. "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet" as William Shakespeare has written could be said today "A startup can have any domain name and it would still be the same".
- klabb3 4y agoThis .com=serious shtick is laughable, your fomo tricks have no power here. So why would I get a .com? Nobody even types the full domain anymore. People search and click. But the number one reason is I refuse to feed the squatters.
- Saaster 4y agoWe bought our .com after we became "successful" and had significant revenue, however it just redirects to our non-dot-com, because it's too much of a hassle and SEO risk to change at this point.
- hn_throwaway_99 4y agoIn addition to the price issue folks have mentioned, I also think it's less important to have a .com if your product isn't consumer end-user focused. E.g. if you're selling to developers or other businesses things like .io or .ai are fine. My guess is that .com is still important if you are selling something direct to consumer.
- donmcronald 4y agoIMO the biggest problem with anything that's not a .com is the registry owners. As a registrant I want low (or at least consistent) prices, minimal price increases, and an assurance the TLD is going to be around long term. The registries constantly adjust pricing and the new registrant agreements aren't as good as the old ones (ex: no price caps). The registry operators probably think they're geniuses that are maximizing profits via price discrimination, but I think they're fools that don't understand their product or the target audience. I don't care too much about premium pricing. It's the *fluctuating* pricing without any limits that turns me off. If shortsighted management ruins a TLD and it collapses, I don't want to be collateral damage. I know there's a bond to cover operations for a period of time, but that's not forever.
- cobertos 4y agoFor example, see the .audio domain or any of the other Uniregistry domains that went through a massive as much as 1400% price increase in 2017 after people had already bought domains. https://blog.dnsimple.com/2017/08/uniregistry-tld-price-increase/ https://blog.dnsimple.com/2017/08/uniregistry-tld-price-incr... It caused quite a stir. I luckily was able to get grandfathered pricing for a .audio domain through my registrar (namecheap). Although their system did fail at one point and charged me the non-grandfathered price at one point, and I had to go to support for a refund. What a headache
- chasing 4y agoManhattan's overpriced. People are moving to Brooklyn.
- smiley1437 4y agoMy concern would be email deliverability for less popular TLDs, although I imagine it's not an issue for the more popular alternatives like .io and .ai
- trentnix 4y agoMore than half of YC startups don’t have a dot com for the same reason people aren’t building new homes on Manhattan island - there’s no empty space and buying existing desirable space is unnecessarily expensive.
- unsupp0rted 4y agoWhat % are actively operating but don't have any website... not counting a placeholder "coming soon" page? I suspect the answer would be surprising.
- recursive 4y ago> I suspect the answer would be surprising. Seems like a paradox.
- EamonnMR 4y agoThere's an old game fan site that had an unpronounceable five letter dot com. I made a lowball offer and since then Unregistry has periodically tried to sell me this expensive domain to me, including by setting up a fake site temporarily to make it look like it was in use.
- benatkin 4y agoI have a .co but I've been to and love Colombia.
- slugiscool99 4y agoyeah .com's aren't going anywhere. they're just expensive now
- teddyh 4y ago“Nobody goes there anymore. It’s too crowded.” — https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/08/29/too-crowded/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/08/29/too-crowded/
- ROTMetro 4y agoI picked up/resold a lot of expiring domains in 2008 when people couldn't hold on to them/stopped speculating. Made around $30K off some scripts that took expiring domains and parsed english words, grabbed the number of return results for those words in Google as well as cost per click and some other mojo to determine potential worth, pick up the decent ones and send emails to relevant companies. I'm no longer that scummy but I wonder if there will be an upturn of lapsed domain renewals this downturn? I'm guessing there's a ton of competition now (even from the Registrars) as even then I think a lot passed through Godaddy auctions or some such before dropping of.
- grantsch 4y ago.com is very important Especially for email deliverability Using other TLDs is a mistake
- redbell 4y agoI found it to be really a helpful piece of info. If I only had access to it a year ago when I AskHN-ed [0] regarding this same matter. In the end, I ended up purchasing the corresponding names in .io and .app when still available. [0]. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29758152 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29758152
- nsxwolf 4y agoThey should just get a .chatgpt TLD because that's what 95% of them are.
- etidorhpa 4y agoWhat users even look at a domain, much less worry if it's a .COM, anymore? In the age of apps and abhorrently priced .COM domains, it seems to me that a new company with a relatively low amount of startup cash shouldn't choose to do something as idiotic as "investing" tons of cash in a domain name. Just buy a .gg or .co/ etc and get over it. If you're successful, and when you have the cash, then go wasting money on stuff like that. Not all of us have billions donated from large companies to spend on domains.. cough cough
- seydor 4y agoPeople used to spend hours to customize their phone backgrounds and desktop backgrounds and myspace profiles, then came the big guys and now everyone uses the defaults and all webpages look alike. Getting a non-.com domain is like that, it seems amateurish and somewhat unprofessional. There are .com domains if one is willing to be creative and settle for something that is not a simple dictionary word . The length doesnt matter as long as the word is reasonably memorable. 'facebook' and 'instagram' and 'snapchat' did not have a problem with their name. If they 'd gone for face.book, instagr.am snap.chat etc people would be confused "how do i access this site". The dot is not part of our mental dictionary. Some of them look even dangerous. for example MS onedrive links are from "1drv.ms " which makes my emails look like phishing scams.
- nekoashide 4y agoThat first line got me, everyone used to have ringtones and one day I just left my phone on vibrate and never turned it back on. Funny fact about me is that a certain Motorola ringtone from the mid 2000's will trigger a panic attack, old TV shows especially. And that's why I have a rule to pass the on-call to the next person in rotation if someone had a really bad night.
- spiffytech 4y agoEntrepreneur Pieter Levels posted a before / after screenshot of his traffic after switching from .io to .com. It's quite the jump! https://mobile.twitter.com/levelsio/status/1472204809981759491 https://mobile.twitter.com/levelsio/status/14722048099817594...
- sideproject 4y agoI'm in the domain industry (created a tool called Newsy - https://www.newsy.co https://www.newsy.co) and this is where the domainers take the opportunistic sales to established companies who can buy their .com domains they've been holding on for so long. You may not like domain parking industry, but for people who have decent set of .com domain names and many of them generate thousands of dollars through just ad-clicking, it's an absolute no-brainer to continue on with this trade and they will always say "it's an investment" and "it's like real estate".
- DeltaCoast 4y agoJust a heads up, the url you provided doesn't hit a website. Gives me the error "www.newsy.co redirected you too many times" on Chrome.
- triyambakam 4y ago> 100% of the top 20 YC companies by valuation have the .com of their name. 94% of the top 50 do. But only 66% of companies in the current batch have the .com of their name. Which suggests there are lessons ahead for most of the rest, one way or another. [1] I wonder what the updated figures would be. [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html