The startup community and the domain industry are often closely linked. Many conferences, including Domain Startup Summit, cater for both startups and domainers, and there are a number of domain brokers who work closely with the startup community to help them find the perfect name for their brand. Many startups receive funding in order to survive, with Y Combinator one of the popular destinations for investment.
Y Combinator is a seed accelerator, also known as a startup incubator. Twice per year, Y Combinator invests around $120,000 in to a large number of startups in return for 7% of the business. The startups then move to Silicon Valley for three months to work with Y Combinator. Funded companies include Reddit, DropBox and AirBnB.
Since Y Combinator launched in 2005, over 1,000 companies have been funded by them. Inspired by a tweet from domain investor George Kirikos, we have analyzed the domain names of all 1,100 startups that have been funded by Y Combinator to take a look in more detail at the domains behind the businesses.
This list is from Y Combinator's own API, and we trust that it accurately represents the list of companies that they have worked with. Some companies may have upgraded their domain name since their data was added to this list by Y Combinator.
Domain Extensions
You will not be surprised to hear that the most popular extension is .COM, with 951 out of the 1,100 companies using a .COM. This figure equates to 86.45%.
The next highest is .IO with 43 users, followed by .CO with 30. From what I can tell, those companies using .IO are mainly operating on generic one-word names such as message.io. The large majority of companies listed are using gTLDs (or those billed as gTLDs) as opposed to ccTLDs.
There are a couple of examples of new gTLDs that are being used such as quero.education, democracy.earth and seneca.systems, but these are definitely in the minority. Interestingly, there's no sign of new extensions such as .CLUB or .XYZ here.
The full list of extensions and the number of companies that use them is available to download below.
Length
Are short domains popular with startups? The average length of all the domains in total is 9 characters (rounded up from 8.56), while the longest domain is 19 characters in length; ansibletechnologies.com.
The shortest domain name is lu.gg. Out of the 12 companies that use three-letter domains, just four use three-letter .COMs; ark.com, lob.com, mux.com and urx.com. There are two companies that use three-letter/number combinations: 20n.com and go1.com.
There are 37 companies using four character domains, 66 using five character domains and 132 using six character domains. The median and mode for the character length are both 8.
Letters
Out of all of the characters in all of the domain names, 36.6% of them are vowels, with 11.1% of all characters being an "e". If you're looking to buy a brandable domain targeted at a startup, statistics suggest that "e" is the most popular vowel, followed by "a".
The least popular vowel is "u", while the least popular consonant is "q" at a frequency of just 0.25%. As it turns out, hyphens are extremely unpopular with Y Combinator startups. There's just one company that uses a hyphenated domain, and that is Xzell who use x-zell.com.
Here is a chart showing the frequency of each letter, courtesy of mtholyoke.edu:
Get Domains
I found it interesting to see that 30 companies from this list use the prefix "get" on their domains. This seems to happen when the exact match .COM is taken, or is out of their price range. 29 of the 30 domains that use "get" are .COMs, so this would suggest that while owning the exact match .COM is not feasible, they prefer this type of domain to an alternate extension.
A good example of this could be a company called Final. The company have opted to use GetFinal.com rather than pursue another extension such as final.co and final.io, both of which are available to buy.
Many of the companies using "get" domains provide a software or an app as their main product, so Get+Keyword.com may perform well for them as a call to action.
There are a few companies who have upgraded from their "get" domains:
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Along with the table of domain extension statistics, there's also a full PDF list of all domains that we analysed. There is no data with these names since the complete list is 1,100 domains. There's probably more that we could explore within this data, so if you have any ideas, please let us know in the comments below and we'll consider doing a follow up article.
Since Y Combinator launched in 2005, over 1,000 companies have been funded by them. Inspired by a tweet from domain investor George Kirikos, we have analyzed the domain names of all 1,100 startups that have been funded by Y Combinator to take a look in more detail at the domains behind the businesses.
This list is from Y Combinator's own API, and we trust that it accurately represents the list of companies that they have worked with. Some companies may have upgraded their domain name since their data was added to this list by Y Combinator.
Domain Extensions
You will not be surprised to hear that the most popular extension is .COM, with 951 out of the 1,100 companies using a .COM. This figure equates to 86.45%.
The next highest is .IO with 43 users, followed by .CO with 30. From what I can tell, those companies using .IO are mainly operating on generic one-word names such as message.io. The large majority of companies listed are using gTLDs (or those billed as gTLDs) as opposed to ccTLDs.
There are a couple of examples of new gTLDs that are being used such as quero.education, democracy.earth and seneca.systems, but these are definitely in the minority. Interestingly, there's no sign of new extensions such as .CLUB or .XYZ here.
The full list of extensions and the number of companies that use them is available to download below.
Length
Are short domains popular with startups? The average length of all the domains in total is 9 characters (rounded up from 8.56), while the longest domain is 19 characters in length; ansibletechnologies.com.
The shortest domain name is lu.gg. Out of the 12 companies that use three-letter domains, just four use three-letter .COMs; ark.com, lob.com, mux.com and urx.com. There are two companies that use three-letter/number combinations: 20n.com and go1.com.
There are 37 companies using four character domains, 66 using five character domains and 132 using six character domains. The median and mode for the character length are both 8.
Letters
Out of all of the characters in all of the domain names, 36.6% of them are vowels, with 11.1% of all characters being an "e". If you're looking to buy a brandable domain targeted at a startup, statistics suggest that "e" is the most popular vowel, followed by "a".
The least popular vowel is "u", while the least popular consonant is "q" at a frequency of just 0.25%. As it turns out, hyphens are extremely unpopular with Y Combinator startups. There's just one company that uses a hyphenated domain, and that is Xzell who use x-zell.com.
Here is a chart showing the frequency of each letter, courtesy of mtholyoke.edu:
I found it interesting to see that 30 companies from this list use the prefix "get" on their domains. This seems to happen when the exact match .COM is taken, or is out of their price range. 29 of the 30 domains that use "get" are .COMs, so this would suggest that while owning the exact match .COM is not feasible, they prefer this type of domain to an alternate extension.
A good example of this could be a company called Final. The company have opted to use GetFinal.com rather than pursue another extension such as final.co and final.io, both of which are available to buy.
Many of the companies using "get" domains provide a software or an app as their main product, so Get+Keyword.com may perform well for them as a call to action.
There are a few companies who have upgraded from their "get" domains:
- GetAirhelp.com: Airhelp.com
- GetAMeta.com: MetaVision.com
- GetBannerman: Bannerman.com
- GetCleanly.com: Cleanly.com
- GetPebble.com: Pebble.com
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Along with the table of domain extension statistics, there's also a full PDF list of all domains that we analysed. There is no data with these names since the complete list is 1,100 domains. There's probably more that we could explore within this data, so if you have any ideas, please let us know in the comments below and we'll consider doing a follow up article.
