What founders do when the domain is taken
11,422 launches, matched against their own product names. Just over half get the name exactly. The most common compromise is not adding a word — it is dropping one.
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Every Product Hunt launch from 1 September 2024 to 1 September 2026: 16,861 products, each one's web address recovered from its own /products page. After classifying out app-store listings and platform subdomains, 11,422 launches had a domain of their own. Each domain's label was compared against the product's name with punctuation, spacing and case removed, then sorted into exact match, name plus a suffix, a prefix plus the name, a shortened name, an initialism, or unrelated. Every count here comes from scripts/research/product-hunt/analyse-domains.ts over the published dataset, and the six categories are exhaustive, so the table sums to 11,422.
Advice about taken domains is mostly advice about adding things. Put get in front. Put app on the end. Try my, try, use, hq.
We matched 11,422 Product Hunt launches against the domains they actually registered. Prefixes and suffixes together account for 5.4% of them. Shortening the name accounts for 18.5%.
The distribution
Each domain's label was compared against the product's own name, with spaces, punctuation and capitals stripped from both. Daily Note and dailynote.com count as an exact match. Daily Note and dailynoteapp.com count as a suffix. The six categories are exhaustive and every launch lands in exactly one.
| Relationship | Launches | Share | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Exact match | 6,453 | 56.5% | dailynote.com |
| Unrelated to the name | 2,233 | 19.5% | Delivery Bags to spartanpac.com |
| Part of the name kept | 2,112 | 18.5% | SpeedNote AI to speednote.ai |
| Name plus a suffix | 330 | 2.9% | Menu Translator to menutranslatorapp.com |
| Prefix plus the name | 291 | 2.5% | Replio to usereplio.com |
| Initialism | 3 | 0.0% | Life After Tech to lat.link |
| Total | 11,422 | 100% |
Just over half get the name they wanted, spelled the way they wanted it. That is a higher share than the general conversation about .com scarcity would predict, and there is a reason for it that runs backwards from the obvious one. A founder who checks availability before settling on a name will always appear in this row. The name matches the domain because the domain was chosen first, and the product was named to fit.
The initialism row is not a rounding error. Three launches out of 11,422 turned their name into its first letters. Whatever appeal IBM and BBC still have, nobody starting a company in the last two years reached for it.
Subtraction beats addition, three to one
The 2,112 shortened names are the interesting group. These are launches where the domain is part of the product name with the rest dropped, from either end.
A large share of them are dropping a qualifier that the product keeps in its display name. SpeedNote AI registers speednote.ai. Quist AI registers quist.ai. Affiliate Winners AI registers affiliatewinners.ai. Zigma by NextUI (YC S24) registers zigma.io. The full name does the explaining; the domain carries only the part that has to be typed.
That is a different move from adding a word, and it points somewhere different when you are stuck. Adding get in front of a taken name produces a domain that is longer than the name and slightly apologetic about it. Removing the third word produces a domain that is shorter than the name and reads as though it was always meant to be that way.
When founders do add a word
They add few, and the same few. The two halves are ranked separately below, because putting get in front and putting app on the end are different decisions and nothing links the first prefix to the first suffix.
get, try and use are 165 of the 291 prefixes. app is 78 of the 330 suffixes and ai another 29. The whole strategy, across two years and eleven thousand launches, rests on about six words.
This is worth sitting with if you are about to reach for one. The words that occur to you are the words that occurred to everyone, which is why they are heavily registered in front of common nouns: a separate run of live registry checks found a list of lead-in words like get, try, top and best returning 11% available where seven other word lists returned 53% to 74%. A prefix does not route around the scarcity so much as serve you a second helping of it.
The fifth of launches that went somewhere else
19.5% of launches use a domain with no relationship to their product name. That is the second largest group in the table, and the messiest to interpret.
Some are deliberate. Delivery Bags at spartanpac.com is a product name and a company name doing separate jobs. Some are a product living on an agency's existing domain. Some are a name that was chosen without checking, followed by a scramble.
The data cannot separate those. What it can say is that the group is more than three times larger than every prefix and suffix strategy combined, which puts the usual advice in proportion. More founders end up somewhere else entirely than end up at getname.com.
The launches come from the public Product Hunt API. The full method, the decisions that could have gone another way, and the dataset as a CSV are on how we measured this.
What to do with this
If the name you want is taken, the evidence says try dropping a word before you try adding one. Check the shortened form, the first word alone, and the version without the category qualifier, and do it before you start sticking get on the front.
And if you have not named the thing yet, the 56.5% who got an exact match are quietly telling you that the cheapest time to solve this problem is before you have a name to be attached to.
Common questions
- What do you do when the .com you want is taken?
- By a wide margin, founders shorten the name rather than decorate it. Among 11,422 Product Hunt launches, 18.5% registered a domain that is part of their product name with the rest dropped, against 5.4% who added a prefix or a suffix. Dropping
AIoff the end, or keeping the first word of a three-word name, is the most common compromise in the data. - Is get- or -app a good way to get around a taken domain?
- It is much rarer than the advice suggests. Of 11,422 launches, 291 used a prefix and 330 used a suffix, together 5.4%. Within those,
getis the most common prefix at 94 uses andappthe most common suffix at 78. These work, but they are a minority solution, not the default. - How many startups get the exact domain for their name?
- 56.5%, or 6,453 of 11,422. That is higher than the scarcity conversation implies, and part of the explanation runs backwards from the obvious one. Many of these names were chosen after checking what was free, so the name matches the domain because the domain came first.
- Should I rename my product to get the domain?
- 19.5% of launches use a domain unrelated to their product name, which is a larger group than every prefix and suffix strategy combined. That covers both a deliberate second brand and a name chosen before anyone checked availability. Either way, running the name and the domain as one decision rather than two is what the majority of this data reflects.
Run it yourself
The construction this piece measures: Prefixes + Brandable Nouns on ..com. Nothing runs until you click search.