I agree about the second thing and you're right - the post was intentionally a bit clickbaity to stir up discussion. That being said, we genuinely believe our domain had an effect on our reach - it's definitely worth considering the domain choice carefully before settling on one.

Thanks for the input - we're a bootstrapped very early stage startup so we do not have the option to go with an expensive .com domain - the .study is the one that made most sense as we are an education platform