The .com is king but a country-code domain is worth considering. It can depend on the type of business you are starting. I live in Canada and for a local service business like plumbing or roofing, the .ca could make a lot of sense. It will almost certainly be cheaper than the .com and possibly available for registration. In Canada, it is about 50/50. ca and .com, it is advisable to get both when possible. In the UK Australia and Germany country codes are almost exclusively used. But as mentioned above com is king. A possible route for a startup is to get a short, unique, easy-to-spell .com that can be branded. This can be a name where the vertical is inferred like http://dlivs.com for a delivery company or a completely made-up name such as cezmo.com that has an emotional strength to it without having any actual meaning. A major benefit of this kind of domain is it makes you start up easy to find in Google search. The downside is it can be harder to rank for your specific business. Keyword domains are less important than they used to be but they still carry some weight. I believe enough in Brandable short names that I started a marketplace for them at 5 Letter Domains for Sale at budget prices