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More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com

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Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com

#11

Post by prepend »

AgentK20 wrote: post #4

I 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.

Meanwhile 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.

Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com

#12

Post by tabtab »

prepend wrote: post #11
AgentK20 wrote: post #4

I 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.

Meanwhile 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.

That's Iwei robbery!

Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com

#13

Post by paxys »

prepend wrote: post #11
AgentK20 wrote: post #4

I 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.

Meanwhile 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.

Well sure you can also run a random string generator and get a short .com TLD, but that's not the point.

Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com

#14

Post by binkHN »

.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.

Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com

#17

Post by taubek »

I 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".

Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com

#19

Post by klabb3 »

gkoberger wrote: post #5

When 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.

> 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?

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