India is a country with over a billion people and millions of businesses. A startup founder has always this in mind that there are many opportunities in this growing market. And, the best way to capitalize is to start with an idea that sells.
There are several startups that has succeeded and some have achieved the extraordinary result of being labelled as unicorn such as Flipkart, Snapdeal, Paytm, OlaCabs, etc.
Lets review some of the successful Indian startups and the domain they use:
- Olacabs uses the dot com exact match extension – olacabs.com
- Pepperfry uses the dot com exact match extension – pepperfry.com and pepperfry.in forwards to the dot com website.
- bankbazaar uses the dot com exact match – bankbazaar.com, also the variant bankbazar.com. Thet dot in bankbazaar.in forwards to dot com but, bankbazar.in shows an unresolved page.
- Freshdesk uses the dot com freshdesk.com but the .in shows an unresolved page
- Bajaj Finserv uses the dot in exact bajajfinserv.in domain. The dot com shows an unresolved page. The whois shows Bajaj Finance is the registrant of both .com and .in domains. As a normal practice dot com should have been forwarded to .in website or other way around.
- Mysmartprice uses mysmartprice.com domain. And mysmartprice.in doesn’t resolve. The prefix my is a popular one but it should be limited to a two word combination. Smartprice.com is better remembered but it’s used by another company. Smarprice.in is a running website – seems to be used by some other entity
- HackerEarth uses hackerearth.com and hackerearth.in doesn’t resolve
- Cashkaro an Hinglish business name and it uses cashkaro.com whereas the CashKaro.in doesn;t resolve
- Dream11 uses dream11.com domain name. It’s an alphanumeric business name. The dream11.in also forwards to dream11.com. Dreameleven.com is a registered name and doesn’t resolve. Generally, an alphanumeric domain loses its traffic if it doesn’t register the numeric domain in words too.
- Practo uses practo.com domain name but practo.in doesn’t resolve at all. Its a six letter short keyword based domain name. Seems to be derived from the word practitioner of medicine.
as a disclaimer I have not checked the whois for the corrosponding .in domains which have not resolved. It could have been registered by the same dot com registrant but were not forwarded to .com or it may be owned by a different registrant who avoided parking it due to trademark issues.