More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
1–10 of 109 posts
Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
#2AKA .com's are too expensive. Next.
Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
#3AKA .com's are too expensive. Next.
AKA .com's are squatted. Next.
Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
#4I 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.
Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
#5When I started my YC company, we used the .io (which we found on HN, actually! 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.
Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
#6Related, PG’s “Change Your Name”
Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
#7From 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.
Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
#8I wonder if it would have been seen as a sign of prestige for startups if yc had become a domain provider for .yc
Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
#9This 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_dom...
Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
#10Plotting libraries should use larger fonts as default. The text in the plots in the post is so small, it's not readable.