Is an owning an expensive .com domain worthwhile?

Defer actually buying it for as long as possible. Particulary after you have talked to potential customers. It's often the case that things change often in the early stages. Make sure that's the actual name u need before buying it if it's not cheap. Same with trademarks etc.

I don't really see the upside here. Maybe if it was an exact match for some particular search term.

1k is cheap for a .com that matches your brand. Other things to evaluate are can you get trademark it (search TESS), and get the twitter (b2b) or instagram handle (b2c).

That said, if I only had 1k I'd rather put the money into building an audience early and getting feedback for your product. So if you are b2b invest time/money in getting a lead magnet to build your list and push traffic to it. If you are b2c I'd make sure to prioritize a giveaway - Noah Kagan gave a lot of insightful tips here about giveaways:

https://www.smartpassiveincome.com/podcasts/run-a-contest-grow-your-brand-noah-kagan/

If you have 2k buy the domain and build the audience.

Have to agree with the rest of the comments - this $1k can be better spent somewhere else in the early stages of the project.
Also, have in mind that exact match keywords in the domain don't have much importance in Google's ranking algorithm (not like 5-10 years ago), so you should be perfecty fine with .app or .io domain.

My two cents -- if it's something that can be branded because its a very common word, like, you are buying "chocolates.com" and starting a chocolate company, then yes, I think it's totally worth it to own chocolates.com.

If it's just your unique company's name that could be anything, I would slap something on it like inc, "mycompanyinc.com" or "meetmycompany" or something like that, use a .co instead of .com, etc. and just go with that.

I think if it's a brand/search term specific, then it's a no brainer, get it! $1k is cheap. Think of the life time value and the value of a competitor not having it. I bought a dot com for $3.5k, but I'm already making money (it cost me about a month and a half worth of my current revenue), so it was worth it to me. My domain is very search term specific for my product. I will have it for as long as I have my business and my competitors can't get it. Plus it's a business expense, so I can deduct it from taxes. Good Luck!

.com is the norm, but people have over time moved over to just googling the websites they are looking for and at that point SEO is more important than the actual domain name.

I think the day of .com superiority is slowly dwindling, these days it's getting cooler to get more specialized domains like .app or .io

Google has outright said that it doesn't prioritize .com in its search rankings, so it really doesn't matter too much.

What I would do, is get a different .com or mycompany.io

To go alongside that, get an emoji domain and redirect it to the mycompany.io site. You can get emoji domains at emojicatch.com (www.❤.je)

$1k isn't that much money, i got quoted $30.000 for my company names dot com domain and went with .io first.

I then realized that I should have gone with .de, because some domain registrars (such as .io) are really bad. There have been two hour long outages in the last 2 years of the whole DNS nameservers as well as security problems.

Now I have the .com after 3 years of having the business and saving some cash. I didn't pay nearly the full price though, if you have the information how long the domain is for sale and it is multiple years, then you are usually on the better negotiation side.

My idea is not at all about SEO btw which many other users quote, but about signaling and trust. For a startup going after B2B customers, you want to use any chance to signal that you are going to stay in business for a long time and are not another fling.

It's a personal preference to buy an expensive .com domain from a domain broker. The .com is still used on majority of the websites and if you are well established company then you can try to buy it. If you are starting up your company, I would advice you to go with some other domain (.net, .co, .org, .io etc).

With right SEO articles, you can still rank it high on google. Since the domain broker has it, you can be confident that it won't be sold easily at higher cost, so someone will not be able to steal your identity anytime soon. So simple, ignore the cost use it for some other purpose. I hope this helps all the new business owners. You can also be creative and add new word before/after your company name, then register that domain name. :)

Test your concept first. If it's making money the expense wont' matter. If it's not, you'll be glad to have an extra $1k in your pocket.

I had bought a domain thinking I was going to do something with it, but got busy with other projects, and it fell by the way side. So I put it up for auction and let GoDaddy do all the work for me. A few months later, I had someone buy that domain for around what you are offering from me. When I go to the site.. they've done nothing with it. I mean, it's only been a month, but still.

You always want that domain... I've read a story on a guy who bought a domain for $200,000 but actually ended up making it all back. So sometimes its a hit, sometimes its a miss. Me personally? I think of a new name or a similar domain that does not go against the trademark of the other domain.

It depends on your market, based on my experience B2B customers that are not that into tech will go to .com first and like it, .com is in that case more credible. When you are planning to depend on marketing to attract new customers in this segment, .com will stick better (and thus improve roi).

Another aspect to consider is how good the investment is for you, so when you pivot to a different idea, do you throw away the domain name or can you keep it for other projects?

When you can afford it, go for it, otherwise why don't you change the company name to match a .com that is available. $700 does sounds like a good investment.

When your market are tech / startups io will probably be perfectly fine.

I'd say yes like 5 years ago when SEO actually depended on domain name and people didn't know other domains other than .com but it's much different now that it's not even worth paying half that price.

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