Of course if you can get the .com somehow, you have to grab it. But what are you guys doing when you can’t? I see only a two options:
Having a non-.com website is more reasonable today than it was, say, 10 years ago. But still .com is king marketing-wise.
What are peoples thoughts here?
One good route to go is to take the name of your project and add “app” to the domain. So my project is called example but my URL would be exampleapp.com. A good number of unfunded startups do this initially.
.io is very trendy right now. Or you could come up with a name where the last part of the name is the TLD of a country. For example, I own the domain herte.by, my last name! 
(though I’m not using it for anything atm).
.net is easier to get too I think.
This is not really a meteor question so maybe not the best place to ask, but try namemesh.com and this Shopify name generator
https://www.shopify.com/tools/business-name-generator
There are still tons of .com names
It seems to me that .cc, .co and .io, for example, are widely use by most startups.
I guess that the .com relevance as a domain is gonna eventually fade.
I’ve tried these name generators but they’re not really great. Shopifys is probably the best I’ve seen though. There are a ton of .coms, but it’s definitely becoming a serious undertaking to locate a decent one.
I know it’s not a meteor-specific question, but if you build a lot of MVPs in meteor, this is something that comes up a lot. Figured I’d see what others are doing. Its in the offtopic section.
What makes you say this?
Search engines care very little about the address and they care far more about content, backlinks, trusted sources, reviews, etc. As long as you have good SEO, your somesite.io will beat out somesite.com any day of the week.
I mean if somebody hears about your company called “MyCompie” and they go to look for your website, they’re going to look for MyCompie.com and if you own MyCompie.io because somebody owns MyCompie.com then it can cause some issues. It isn’t the end of the world. I was just wondering if other people had good tips/tricks.
Most of the people I know enter the name on Google to access the site instead of surfing straight to the domain.
sometimes you just have to buy it from the owner. I’m been fortunately most of the names I’ve wanted. Recently got blackship.com (running Meteor/react/redux app) for $3000. Super happy because it’s exactly what I wanted and I would have paid much more for it!
You can also backorder domains which are soon to expire, I recently got lucky and scored a three letter .io domain name for nothing more than the backorder fee and the registration fee.
lucky indeed! whenever I’ve tried to do that, I’ve waited a year and then lost out because it was renewed 
exactly the sort of tip I was looking to learn!
I think I did get lucky, the domain had already expired when i applied for the backorder - the domain owner had a grace period where they could have renewed it. Once that passed it was mine for 30 days and i just had to order it. 
As a founder and CEO of Zamphyr, which is also an Official Meteor Partner - yay, I can tell you that branding today depends largely on you ability to find a domain. It’s simple to think of a good name if you are articulate and have a clear vision, it takes a lot of doe to bag a name like Simple.com random example. When a friend wanted to start a development we I gave him the domain name ‘naughtymammals.com’. Now picture that crowd and then imagine Naughty Fred from Courage the Cowardly Dog.
That. Is. BRAND.
What’s wrong with .org, .net, .io, .biz and other? They are all good too, both for SEO and for business.
They aren’t ALL gone. Be creative! Also, be willing to spend a little. There are plenty of one and two English word domains that end in .com.
PayInfinite.com is still available for sale. Disclaimer: I own it and want to sale for just under $500
