[HN Gopher] More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
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More than half of YC startups don't have a dot com
Author : duvander
Score : 73 points
Date : 2023-02-23 18:33 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reproof.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reproof.app)
| slugiscool99 wrote:
| yeah .com's aren't going anywhere. they're just expensive now
| meitros wrote:
| I wonder if it would have been seen as a sign of prestige for
| startups if yc had become a domain provider for .yc
| dmurray wrote:
| 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!
| fourseventy wrote:
| Two letter tlds are reserved for countries
| benatkin wrote:
| I have a .co but I've been to and love Colombia.
| paxys wrote:
| This 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...
| glenstein wrote:
| I 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
| ROTMetro wrote:
| I 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.
| sampo wrote:
| Plotting libraries should use larger fonts as default. The text
| in the plots in the post is so small, it's not readable.
| spiffytech wrote:
| 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...
| donmcronald wrote:
| IMO 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 wrote:
| For 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-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
| redbell wrote:
| I 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
| chasing wrote:
| Manhattan's overpriced. People are moving to Brooklyn.
| gskye wrote:
| Brooklyn is overpriced, people are moving to Queens.
| Phrenzy wrote:
| Queens!? Nobody lives there anymore. It's too crowded.
| binkHN wrote:
| .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 wrote:
| I 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..
| grantsch wrote:
| .com is very important
|
| Especially for email deliverability
|
| Using other TLDs is a mistake
| boringg wrote:
| AKA .com's are too expensive. Next.
| gabereiser wrote:
| AKA .com's are squatted. Next.
| boringg wrote:
| What's the difference? It's too expensive because of
| squatters.
| tabtab wrote:
| Aren't some of the newer TLDN's pretty good alternatives, such
| as ".shop", ".store", ".social", ".insurance", ".save",
| ".software", ".search", ".game", ".travel" etc?
| klabb3 wrote:
| This .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.
| taubek wrote:
| 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".
| AgentK20 wrote:
| 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.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| 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
| croutonwagon wrote:
| 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.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Can confirm. My .email is regularly reject even by my own
| country administration.
| input_sh wrote:
| 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.
| ipython wrote:
| Same. I have a .family domain which is great, but about
| 1/3rd of the registration flows claim it's an "invalid
| email address". I have an older .org to fall back on, but
| it would be nice to use one domain for everything.
| seydor wrote:
| getting a .com means there s less chance of it being
| trademarked also. and it's not that hard to come up with a
| decent name that's not taken (eg. airbnb)
|
| Why choose a name that's unavailable? pretty much every tech
| company has a weird .com name, and that's fine
| prepend wrote:
| 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.
| tabtab wrote:
| That's Iwei robbery!
| haliskerbas wrote:
| "our company is called Iwei, and you can reach us at Lwei
| dot com"
| paxys wrote:
| Well sure you can also run a random string generator and get
| a short .com TLD, but that's not the point.
| ZainRiz wrote:
| Today I realized how xkcd prob got it's name
| allknowingfrog wrote:
| Possibly, although the official explanation is that it's
| "just a word with no phonetic pronunciation". There's a
| "What does XKCD stand for?" section on the About page.
| https://xkcd.com/about/
| Kiro wrote:
| Pretty sure all 4 and 5 letter .com domains have been taken
| since at least a decade.
| echelon wrote:
| And very few of them will ever serve anything useful.
| anamexis wrote:
| 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
| nickstinemates wrote:
| A fellow ascii art enjoyer :)
| htag wrote:
| 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.
| slyall wrote:
| If my company is every worth $3b then I'll think about buying
| the .com for $300k.
|
| However right now $300k is much better spent on staff,
| hosting and other business things.
| diceduckmonk wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| Reminds me of nissan.com, which is now nearly worthless
| because Nissan Motors doesn't care anymore.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| Or steam.com
| htag wrote:
| The 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.
| vlunkr wrote:
| Makes sense. Nobody just blindly navigates to a domain
| name. You either know it for sure or you search.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > Having a dotcom is a signal of the organization's wealth.
|
| The pricing of .com domains is extremely uneven, depending on
| your name. It could be $20.
|
| > legitimacy and prestige
|
| Since it's semantically equivalent to other TLDs, it lies
| entirely in the eye of the beholder. This non-.com ickiness
| seems to be an outdated US-centric perspective, never heard
| of it elsewhere. The rest of the world are used to other
| TLDs, and some (say ai, io, app) indicate other positive
| business values.
|
| > 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.
|
| So an established company should _switch_ domain name and
| you're not factoring in the cost of that? Or they should just
| have the .com on the side (but then how will the majority of
| your customers know about your state of the art .com domain)?
| Or should startups buy a $300k domain upfront?
| [deleted]
| missingdays wrote:
| Why would having .com domain add any prestige?
| unglaublich wrote:
| Because there's only one. It's like a bunch of Chinese
| restaurants fighting over the name 'CN Wall', but there's
| only one that'll be able to hold 'cnwall.com'.
|
| (~$5k).
| another-dave wrote:
| Moreso if you're a $3bn company, you certainly don't want
| _someone else_ owning the .com for the same reason -- it
| lends legitimacy.
|
| Even if they don't use the .com as their primary domain,
| they'll still buy it and redirect so that no-one else squats
| on it / phishes from it.
| gregsadetsky wrote:
| Speaking of (and confirming your point), ai.com redirects to
| chatgpt as of ~1 week ago...!
|
| https://mashable.com/article/chatgpt-ai-dot-com-domain-
| name-...
| lostmsu wrote:
| 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.
| pentagrama wrote:
| I 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.
| Saaster wrote:
| We 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.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| They should just get a .chatgpt TLD because that's what 95% of
| them are.
| gkoberger wrote:
| 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.
| 6DM wrote:
| 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.
| gkoberger wrote:
| 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:
|
| http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html
| klabb3 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I 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.
| diceduckmonk wrote:
| YC also mentioned more of the cohort being from outside the
| United States, which would mean a higher proportion of regional
| domain names.
| smiley1437 wrote:
| My 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
| etidorhpa wrote:
| What 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_
| teddyh wrote:
| "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded."
|
| -- https://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/08/29/too-crowded/
| josevalerio wrote:
| Related, PG's "Change Your Name"
|
| http://www.paulgraham.com/name.html
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| That 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 wrote:
| From 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 wrote:
| 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
|
| 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 wrote:
| Doing support, if customer has subscribed for example.com, we
| will not associate support requests from @example.tech as
| legitimate...
| robmusial wrote:
| As 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.
| trentnix wrote:
| More 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.
| seydor wrote:
| People 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.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| What % are actively operating but don't have any website... not
| counting a placeholder "coming soon" page?
|
| I suspect the answer would be surprising.
| recursive wrote:
| > I suspect the answer would be surprising.
|
| Seems like a paradox.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| In 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.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| There'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.
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