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Comment by npt4279 | Hacker News Reader

The author did not address pg's point that lacking a .com has the potential to signal weakness... such as among potential investors, potential employees, press, and other influencers (like pg himself).

(Yes, there are always exceptions - like angel.co - and hacks like getdropbox.com also work).

But perhaps the tradeoff of retaining your "perfect" .io domain is not worth the extra friction of convincing influencers that you are credible company, when an hour creative brainstorming session for a .com might solve the problem?

Sure, if you have a hockey stick growth chart growing revenue 100% month over month, it doesn't matter, but it's rare that most startups have that right out of the gate. So why add to your burden?

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I don't care at all about whether or not a business as a .com domain name. I care about usefulness and utility. As long as the business shows up when I google them, I'm good.

That's fair. But the question here is: "Do even 10% feel a different way? Followed by: "Is the tradeoff worth it?"

For instance, the author's own web site is standupti.me. It's actually something I might consider trying out. But it comes across as someone's side project by a solo developer, not a company. As a potential customer, I might still get around to trying it out at some point in time, but I do have a slight negative connotation in that it might just disappear tomorrow. It would be 1000x worse for a larger enterprise customer.

Until I clicked the link and saw "StandupTime Blog" I thought the domain was trying to say "standup to me" in a colloquial manner.

So, the counter is: sounds like you don't care what the name of the business is either way.

However, from a usefulness & utility standpoint, do you care that when customers type the company's name in to their browser, they end up on their site? Do you care if first contact e-mails, etc. don't get delivered to the business? Even if you don't care about those things, don't you think other people might?

You may not care about the name, but the business may cease to exist if, when you tell someone about it, they are not able to find it.

If I tell my friend "Uber is awesome", their first step in using it will likely be heading to "uber.com". If it's not there, they might just end up forgetting about the recommendation. Existing customers would still be happy, but the business itself will have unnecessary trouble in being discovered.

Most people would type "uber" into the search bar or the URL bar and get Uber back, even if it was at uber.co.

A lot of people would do that. A lot of people would go to uber.com.

Even if it's only 10% of people (it's probably a lot higher) who go to uber.com, that is a big problem for a business that's trying to grow as fast as possible.

If you don't have strong fundamentals, how much does foobio.com really beat foob.io or foo.community? Where the last one (foo) is a better word than foob?

The main questions should be: "How can people successfully close a viral loop?" And "Wh would people come back?"

I'd argue nearly any .com reduces friction, adds more credibility, and therefore increases the likelihood of answering those questions.

"Why would people come back?" is usually correlated with recruiting awesome co-founders, talented employees, great mentors, influencers to talk it up, and top tier investors. Then, the company has the time and resources to discover the best answer to that question.

Maybe once in a decade there's something like Facebook, which just explodes out of the gate instantly (and just buys the better .com later). But I wouldn't want to bet my company on that... especially when I can just spend an hour and brainstorm a .com to address the problem. Anything less is a failure of creativity.

I would argue that the app name in the store is way more crucial these days. Definitely helped us :-)

I remember writing about it four years ago: http://qbix.com/blog/index.php/2011/03/phase-1-successful/

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