Does a startup still need the .com?
The honest answer is: it depends on who has to find you. When another extension is fine, when it is not, and how to tell which company you are before you commit.
It is a fair question, and the people asking it are usually asking because the .com they want is taken or expensive. So the honest answer has to begin by admitting that plenty of good companies live on .io, .ai, .co and country codes, and that nobody who matters thinks less of them for it. The question is not whether you can succeed without the .com. It is whether the .com would have made succeeding cheaper, and by how much, for the specific company you are building.
What the .com actually does
Three things, none of them glamorous.
- It is the extension people type when they are guessing. Somebody who hears your name on a podcast and types it into a browser will add .com without thinking. If that is not you, it is somebody else, or nothing.
- It is the extension people trust when they are unsure. An unfamiliar company on an unfamiliar extension has two things to explain; on the .com it has one.
- It is the extension that does not need saying. "We're Hexlo" is a sentence. "We're Hexlo, hexlo dot io" is a sentence with a footnote, and the footnote has to be repeated every time.
None of these is decisive for every company. Each is decisive for some.
The companies that can skip it
If your customers arrive by a link, the extension barely matters. A developer tool found through documentation and installed from a package manager, a B2B product sold by a sales team, a company whose whole audience is on one platform: these are found by clicking, not by typing, and the address is rarely seen. Developer tools in particular have made .io and .dev normal enough that a .com can look slightly dated in that world, though rarely wrong.
If your name is unusual enough that the .com will never be confused with anything, and the company will always be reached through search, the extension is a cost, not a strategy. Spend the money on the product.
The companies that cannot
Consumer brands. Anything that will be said out loud more than it is linked to: on radio, in a shop, on a label, in a recommendation between friends. A skincare line, a drinks brand, a clothing label, a restaurant group, a consumer app that is recommended by name. For these, the .com is the difference between the customer arriving and the customer arriving somewhere else, and the somebody else may be a competitor who bought the .com for exactly that reason.
Anything that takes money from people who do not know it yet. A marketplace, a financial product, a health service. Trust is the whole sale, and the extension is one of the first three things a wary customer looks at, along with the design and whether there is a phone number.
Anything that will be a company for a long time. The .com is the only extension that has meant the same thing for thirty years. Newer extensions carry a fashion with them, and fashions date. A name chosen to sound current in one decade sounds like that decade in the next.
The middle case: launch without it, buy it later
This is what most companies actually do, and it works when it is planned and hurts when it is not. Launch on the extension you can get, build the company, and buy the .com once there is money. The catch is that the price of the .com tends to move with your success, because the owner can see it too, and a name that was affordable at the start may not be by the time you want it. If the plan is to buy later, find out now who owns it and whether it is for sale at all. A domain that is listed for sale on a marketplace has an owner who wants to sell; a domain that is parked with no contact has an owner who may never answer.
The other catch is the customers you leak in the meantime. Every one who types the .com and lands on someone else's page is a cost you never see on any dashboard.
A way to decide in five minutes
- Will customers hear the name before they see it? If yes, you need the .com.
- Will customers pay you before they know you? If yes, you need the .com.
- Will the company outlive the current fashion in extensions? If yes, you want the .com and can probably wait for it.
- Is the audience developers, or reached entirely by link? If yes, and the first three are no, skip it and spend the money elsewhere.
If the answer to the first two is yes and the .com you want is not available, that is a fact about the name, not about the extension. The right move is usually to change the name while it is still cheap to change, which is a decision with its own rules, rather than launch a consumer brand on an extension the customer has to be taught.
What buying one involves
Less than most people fear. A .com that is for sale has an owner who has decided to sell, a price or an offer process, and a transfer that runs through the registrars. How buying a domain name actually works walks through it, including the parts where deals stall. The point of that piece is that it is a normal transaction with normal protections, not a favour from a stranger.
Names where the .com is already settled
Everything on Webba is a .com, chosen because it can carry a consumer brand: short enough to say, clear enough to spell, and without an extension to explain. The beauty and skincare collection is the clearest case of the first kind of company above, the one that is recommended out loud.
Beauty & skincareThe category where the name is said before it is seen.