Entrepreneur 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/14722048099817594...
More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
81–90 of 109 posts
Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
this, .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
They 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.
This. Discover bank literally said email ending with .in is not a valid email. As if no Indian moves to US & still keeps his own domain.in email address. It happily accepted .us email.
Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
They 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.
That 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.
.in is rejected by discover for email address, its a cctld. .us was fine.
Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Reminds me of nissan.com, which is now nearly worthless because Nissan Motors doesn't care anymore.
I 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.
Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
#85I 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!
Honestly 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.
Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
No 3 letter.com domain is available to register (all combinations are registered, can only be bought). 4 letter mixed numbers letters are sure available. I am not sure of 4 letters only is available. 5 letters only sure is available.
Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
#87Earlier 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.
So many random 5 letter, letters only domains are available. If you add numbers & hypen to mix, it baloons to thousands.
Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
#88People 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 doe…
That 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.
Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
#89More 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.
that happened decades ago. squatting is not a recent thing
Re: More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
#90I 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.
To 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.
borggames.com is available and will cost you $10/yr.