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Our trashy domain killed our reach – don't make the same mistake

19 points by brka ↗ HN
Hi HN,

We've built a edtech platform to help students consume study material more efficiently, by leveraging AI to create and review (human-like) quizzes, flashcards, summaries and a chat room where you can talk to the uploaded documents.

Initially we were gaslighted by the r/domains to always use the .com domain even if it doesn't sound very catchy, so we went with myathenaai.com (athena.com is $2mil).

After the change to athena.study, daily unique visitors sky-rocketed up by 500%, conversion rate from visitors to registered users went up by 5%. We got lots of feedback that our first domain sounded scammy, even though it's a .com one.

TLDR: trash domain = -90% of your product value (at least in our case / B2C / no-marketing)

25 comments

[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 69.7 ms ] thread
talldayo
Both of them sound scammy. Vanity domains and cheap TLDs can be visually attractive but also inherently signify that you can't afford a .com commercial TLD. .com domains come with a prestige status, but you can make it look suspicious by creating a long drawn-out name (myathenaai sounds a lot scammier than athena.com).

You should be careful making broad conclusions about things that might not be causally related. The startup scene has a habit of using anecdotal experience as hard evidence of some big takeaway that's often not even true. I won't claim to know the situation any better than you do, but if you were a late-stage startup I would give you the same advice r/domains did.

brka
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

xivi0n
Hey, thanks for the feedback! I'm the co-founder alongside the OP.

We've performed some initial testing and captured the users feedback on both domains. After we switched the domain, without any other feature changes we've observed the website analytics and these are the reported numbers.

Even other popular options like .co, .net, .ai and so on are over tens of thousands of US dollars, so we had two options, either to change the name or to go with the .study TLD.

wruza
Couldn’t find athena on r/domains, can I ask for a link to that thread?
xivi0n
Hi, basically we didn't ask specifically for our case, as there are more than enough posts about the TLDs and most replies are '.com or nothing else'.
collingreen
So by "we were gaslit" you mean "we made the wrong choice in hindsight after reading reddit"...
h2odragon
double 'A' is gonna feel wrong to type for English speakers. They've never done it when it wasn't an error.
xivi0n
Agree, that was one of the complaints as well...
nhggfu
curious post given it seems you have 4 referrering domains, and close to zero traffic or rankings [according to ahrefs tool] on the latter domain
xivi0n
We built a product in a 45 days, which means we really didn't want to spend weeks waiting on Google to index and rank us in the sea of 'athena' named websites. We used plausible.io to verify the unique visitors count on both domains after reaching out to users in Discord servers. Also, the domain confirmation was needed before actual targeted marketing so we don't waste much money on promoting the domain that doesn't look professional enough.
nhggfu
so 'daily unique visitors sky-rocketed up by 500%' means you went from 1 to 5 visitors?

no idea why you even posted such attention-seeking nonsense here, honestly.

rendx
You may have been misled. Or lied to. Or something. You definitely didn't get 'gaslighted'. Gaslighting means turning your mind into a mess that doesn't trust its own perception any more, having a long term effect, causing PTSD, and requires much more than a simple "lie", or what sounds more like a simple difference of opinion or perspective.
brka
thanks for the clarification, English is not our mother tongue, seems like ppl on the internet misuse gaslight a lot
ipaddr
myathenaai sounds awful regardless of extension. Athena.study is slightly better. Most ai companies are using .ai so athena.ai would probably convert much better. How much was that domain?
xivi0n
GoDaddy has athena.ai and it costs: £3,062,349. We paid a bit less than a $100 USD
yarrowy
“My” sounds scammy. Im assuming athenaai.com was taken? I would have done something like getathena.com or athenaapp.com
xivi0n
We don't currently have any funding, so spending $5k on domain would not be smart thing to do. If it was under $1k that could be justified. getathena.com and athenaaap.com are taken, sadly.
dankwizard
This post is just an ad in disguise.
briankelly
They got one other post where they faked some replies.
brka
No replies were faked - we just shared the post in a Discord server with a bunch of friends who commented whatever they wanted to. We're new to HN so if you have constructive criticism about how we should write our post so that it can be more valuable we'd be happy to listen, instead of accusing us
briankelly
Sorry I shouldn’t have made that accusation, but you should understand that it still is arguably spam since those accounts have not participated here otherwise. My constructive feedback for your post is that using anonymized version of your addresses would’ve come across as a good faith effort to share advice rather than promote your business. People here are well aware of the growth hacking/“build in public” tactics and low effort attempts draw a lot of scrutiny.
dankwizard
And for the topic of the post, why do you break down the features of your new app? Let's not forget to throw in the AI buzzword!
wruza
They could use some benefit of the doubt, but failed too many tests. No traffic, no reddit post, no usernames. Smh.