Ask HN: What domain TLD's are safe to start a business on?
In a recent HN comment thread, I learned about Notion's struggles with the .so TLD. What other TLD's should I stay away from?
There are some exceptions:
Most national TLDs are widely accepted (so, minimal friction) in their own country. If you've got time and money enough, buy a bunch of your likely markets, and just use them to redirect to your .com.
.io has decent traction for gaming. If you can work it into your marketing enough that ~no-one accidentally uses your-company.com instead, it can work.
Depending on the business, some other TLDs might make sense, but this is when you need to look into who is running them, how widely they're supported, and make your risk assessment.
com/(net)/org are clearly the dominant trio.
National TLDs in countries with a culture of using them: co.uk, .de, .se, etc
National TLDs which have been rebranded and in some places are 'cool':
io - popular with startups/tech
vc - popular with finance/money
co - for people who can't afford an 'M'
ai - for AI
gg - popular with gaming
sh - popular with hackers
New gTLDs, these mostly haven't gotten any traction.
xyz - One of the hotter ones at the moment seems to be xyz. Alphabet (Google) is using it. Would you believe it if I told you there's been 5m in sales compared to .net's 3.4m sales in the past year?
Source: work for NameBio.com which has the largest domain sales database.