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Comment by dshankar | Hacker News Reader

PG is recommending you get the X.com, but that doesn't mean you need to pay $50,000 for X.com on Day 1 of your startup. I see people making this mistake all the time, buying expensive domains before validating their startup in the first place.

Think about what Dropbox, Stripe, and AirBnB did!

  getdropbox.com          -> dropbox.com
  devpayments.com         -> stripe.com
  airbedandbreakfast.com  -> airbnb.com

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Graham mentions this in a footnote, essentially not to assume such a thing unless the domain squatter has actually given an ask price. I'll extend on his argument by pointing out that Nissan and Tesla still don't own their .com names, and evidently Houston (of Dropbox) went through a lot of pain to get dropbox.com well after it'd been validated.

If your idea seems worthless, a squatter might figure this is the time to shed a worthless domain for a few hundred or thousand bucks. If you're at the helm of a runaway multi-million-dollar success, I imagine the squatter is going to try and squeeze you for significantly more.

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