A little bit of domain knowledge (pun intended 🙂
1/ New YC batches now have less than 50% companies with .com as a primary domain (source in the comment). YC doesn’t represent all startups but can be a good proxy
2/ Seems like .ai is the new .com these days – don’t have any data on this but that’s how it feels to me. On the contrary, .co feels like slightly out of fashion these days
3/ .xyz doesn’t have to be just for crypto/web3 companies. I’ve seen SaaS companies using .xyz domains in a smart way. Personally I think Alphabet’s domain (abc.xyz) is the best use of the .xyz domain (or any domain)
4/ I think these days “domain = what you buy from another party”. You just can’t find anything good available. The good news is, there are many fairly decent ones you can buy under $5000; squatters also need to push out their inventory
5/ Check out country TLDs, especially if the domain address completes a common word, in which case you could SEO your way to “own” that common word (by the way .ai, .co, .me are all country TLDs)