Old advice, still right: get the .com - I will not promote

Paul Graham wrote “Change Your Name” years ago and it wasn’t controversial then either: if you’re a US startup called X and you don’t own x.com, renaming is the cheap fix and waiting is the expensive one. A name you don’t own is a subscription you pay in leaked traffic, in spelling out your domain on every call, and in looking like the knockoff of whoever got there first. There is always someone who says nobody types domains anymore, and it’s usually someone under 30. True in the same way nobody reads terms of service. It doesn’t mean the document has no consequences. It means they show up later and land on you specifically. The person who has watched their .io get mistaken for the .com next door tends to be quieter in these conversations. The trust argument also got stronger, not weaker. Anyone can ship anything now, and anyone does, hourly. Someone clicking your link is deciding in about one second whether you’ll exist in six months. A .com is one of the few signals left that costs something to acquire, so it still reads as a real company while a fresh .xyz reads as somebody’s weekend. Not fair, not sophisticated, completely real. You’re declining a free credibility shortcut in the most crowded launch environment ever. Standard rebuttal: brand beats TLD, distribution lives in app stores, look at all the .ai companies doing fine. Survivorship bias with a great haircut. Most of them bought the .com the moment they could afford it, for a number with commas in it, to fix a problem that cost ten dollars at incorporation. And the line everyone repeats that isn’t true: “all the good .coms are gone.” About a third of registered .com names have a real site behind them. The rest is parked pages, for-sale placeholders, and squatter inventory nobody has loved in a decade. Tens of thousands drop daily and go back to normal $10 registration. Short, brandable names are in there. They’re just not in auction listings, which is where everyone looks, and auctions are by definition where names already have a price tag. “They’re all taken” usually means “I checked one site.” Tell me where I’m wrong. Especially interested in anyone who stayed off .com on purpose and can say with a straight face it cost them nothing.