[onion2k]

I like this a lot. Spending a lot on a domain seems to say a few things about your business - you're big enough to have money to spend, which reassures people that you're not about to disappear; you value the brand enough to 'invest' which gives people confidence that you're in it for the long haul; and you're being intelligent about SEO and domain trust to know that a .com is preferred by people over a .io (outside of tech).

Spending between $10k and $99k on a domain is just silly, but spending that money on marketing by buying a domain and then telling everyone you bought a domain is quite clever. You could get more value than that the cost of the domain back in PR and press out of a move like this if you were really savvy about it and had connections to the right journalists.

[gyulai]

Your first paragraph is vaguely reminiscent of a piece of folklore that I encounter a lot with small town wannabe entrepreneurs. It seems to roughly go like this: "One thing you need to do to make people trust you as a newly started business is to flash money. The more useless the stuff you spend your money on, the richer and therefore more trustworthy it will make you seem."

The reality is that you can expect your business parters, especially the ones that matter the most like equity investors and lenders, to be able to see right through that and expect you to exercise poor stewartship over their money.

The reason it's so widespread is because it's great for cognitive dissonance reduction. Say you leave a well-paid job as a middle manager in a factory to set up as a self-employed management consultant working for other factory managers. Your well-paid management job is a significant element of your identity, and leaving the job will create cognitive dissonance. On one hand you continue to think of yourself as deserving of the same financial status you had yesterday when you were employed and you think of the people who you hope will become your clients as your peers in terms of financial status. This implies you should be driving a brand new BMW. On the other hand you realize that you're taking a huge risk, and are asking the people who you hope will become your clients to take a huge risk on you, and it would be prudent financial risk management to make do with a used Volkswagen.

So there are two voices inside your head, one that says "Get a brand new BMW", another one that says "Get a used Volkswagen". Cognitive dissonance reduction sets in. The latter is the voice you're going to try to silence. You tell yourself: I am not shallow. But those people are shallow, and they will never hire me as a consultant if I drive a used Volkswagen. So, whether I like it or not, it has to be the BMW. Mission accomplished in terms of cognitive dissonance reduction. Whether or not it's the truth is a whole other matter.

[onion2k]

Whether or not it's the truth is a whole other matter.

It's not just cognitive bias in play. People do research things. In the specific example here of whether or not non-tech people trust gTLDs other than .com, there are insights available, and most of them point to people being more wary of TLDs they're not used to.

[1] eg https://www.semrush.com/blog/new-research-visitors-don-t-tru...

[gyulai]

Yes, it may be genuinely true that a .COM engenders more trust. Just like it may also be genuinely true that a BMW engenders more trust than a VW.

There's a lot of things you can do to try to game your way into trust: Your BMW could be leased. Your .COM might be a totally stupid name that no one wants. You may have a mailing address on Wall Street or in SOMA from a "virtual office" provider. You may have a telephone system that directs callers through 10 levels of operators before putting a call through to you and a hundred role e-mail addresses that all land in your inbox. You can buy an "aged entity" and highlight to people the fact that your company was incorporated 10 years ago, when you really haven't been in business for even just one year. You can put up an "our team" page on your website, and show a dozen faces of people who you're each paying for 5hrs/month on Upwork.

People eventually see through all the crap and will ultimately distrust you for having tried to fool them. The sum total of trust destroyed by trying to game people's perceptions of you will probably outweigh the trust you've successfully managed to game your way into. And in addition to destroying trust, it also destroys money.

Also: It's a zero sum game. If entrepreneurs collectively refused to play it, they would be better off as a group. For example, the trust advantage enjoyed by .COMs would evaporate over time if trustworthy people refuse to pay for that trust-advantage. (They would just use other TLDs that would then become just as trustworthy). The same is true for prestigious locations for business real estate, etc.

[CPLX]

Why do you think it’s small town wannabe entrepreneurs? Have you ever seen the cost of the art that hedge funds put in their lobbies, or the skyscrapers built by large companies with their name on the top?

This is kind of a universal element of human nature. Flaunting excess resources is a way to telegraph success and draws people to you.

Actually now that I think of it this isn’t an element of human nature at all it’s common to lots of other life forms too. Ever seen a peacock?