There was an interesting article by Christopher Steiner on Forbes. The article titled, “Most Startups Still Believe They Need A Dot-Com Domain, But That Is Changing.”
Steiner seems to be a bit all over the place with both data supporting securing a non com and some reasons why to stick with .com.
He also seems to be a bit mistaken when he describes domain owners.
From the article:
Is this wise—would it be better to leave the desired dot-com domain to the squatter who is sitting on it and simply go with desiredname.io or some variation thereof?
Squatter ? You mean the rightful owner of the domain name who may have owned it for years before you sat in a garage and thought no one else would had ever thought of the name you just thought of ?
Steiner notes that Paul Graham, co – founder of Y Combinator believes in sticking with .com.
Not having a dot-com, he wrote back in August 2015, “signals weakness.”
He re-endorsed that point of view to me, via Twitter, recently. He added that a dot-com domain is probably even more important for SaaS and b2b companies because their mission is to look as legitimate as possible in a business setting, which is harder to do from an alternative domain.
Lastly Steiner presented data that .com is less represented by the last several classes at Y Combinator.
That said, the percentage of companies with dot-com domains during the last several years of classes at YC has been decreasing. For this most recent class, which finished up in March 2017, only 68% of the startups had dot-com URLs.
