Tell HN: Don't Change Your Name, Yet
After Paul Graham's 'Change your name' essay lots of startups have been having sleepless thoughts about naming. Just offer an amazing service! When you hit product market fit, then maybe u can change your name! then, ur users will follow u. Product market fit is the key. I recently decided to stop being bothered about my http://classroom.ng (unified and uncluttered inbox for educative email subs you care about and can't miss), because no one will see a .com for less than $10k ... Many .com domain names of today aren't less than $10k for the ones that actually make sense!
Focus on users. look at Yahoo! Who knew?
It's important to separate fact from fiction regarding TLDs and to ask the question, "Will the new TLDs matter to marketers and consumers?".
Consumers generally know that .fr is for pages in France and that .ca is for Canada. However, I know it's not perfect, as a study from Moz suggests that nearly 25 percent of Americans can be tricked into thinking that .ca is for California; so they knew that the TLD was for a region, but guessed the wrong region.
Similarly, people know that a .tv site will be about a television show, .edu is for schools, that .org pages tend to be for non-profits. The .edu and .org are the two TLDs that carry the most meaning for consumers. Searchers know that .edu resources will be more reliable since they are from schools and not from businesses. And people associate .org with organizations, groups or non profits with goals other than profit. Many people don't realize that .com itself is short for "commercial" which was chosen in the early days of the internet to identify the sites that weren't the traditional school or government based web pages that first populated the nascent world wide web.
(rant continues in comment)