What founders do when the domain is taken

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 16.3%.

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.

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.

Subtraction beats addition, three to one

The 1,858 shortened names are the interesting group. These are launches where the domain is the product name with something removed from the 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. Zigma by NextUI (YC S24) registers zigma.io. Astopia: Astrology & Horoscope registers astopia.com. 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.

get, try and use are 162 of the 289 prefixes. app is 68 of the 326 suffixes and ai another 25. 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 quarter that renamed

23.0% 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 four 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.

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 53.7% 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.