Manhattan's overpriced. People are moving to Brooklyn.
More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
31–40 of 109 posts
Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well sure you can also run a random string generator and get a short .com TLD, but that's not the point.
Pretty sure all 4 and 5 letter .com domains have been taken since at least a decade.
4 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
Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
#33I wonder if it would have been seen as a sign of prestige for startups if yc had become a domain provider for .yc
Two-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!
Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
#34I wonder if it would have been seen as a sign of prestige for startups if yc had become a domain provider for .yc
Two letter tlds are reserved for countries
Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
#35When 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.
I'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.
I 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:
Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pretty sure all 4 and 5 letter .com domains have been taken since at least a decade.
4 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
A fellow ascii art enjoyer :)
Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
#37I 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.
Having 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.
Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
#38My 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
Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
#39More 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.
Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
#40From 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…
It may make sense to put bulk email on a completely separate domain anyway, so then you could do something like:
example.tech
exampletech.com