Park.io – automating tasks to make $125k per month
indiehackers.com
indiehackers.com
I have my own service (as in process, not business) that I can run when I'm interested in sniping a domain. I don't use it in bulk or for squatting. Occasionally I will think "x.com" would be a great domain name that I could use for business idea X. Then of course it turns out it was registered by someone else who never did anything with it. I then add an entry to a SQLite database and turn on the service and forget about it.
Although now that I see how much money this guy is making maybe I need to compete with him...
EDIT: Or just ignore the facts and downvote emotionally.
Though it would still be profitable for some domains.
The money could pay for ICANN or whatever.
Maybe they could set a 'holding price' that is a function of the likely value of the domain name. I'll bet at $30 a month - a huge basket of names become completely untenable to 'sit on' whereas it would mean little to the business owner, possibly.
This is an age old problem concerning how to deal with public goods. Real estate is the prototypical problem ... we don't consider those buying and selling land - and not using it - to be a problem to the system, whereas we could make the argument they are. In Vancouver and London, they've introduced a tax on housing spaces that are empty, i.e. if you don't live in it, you have to rent it or get hit with a tax.
ICANN seemingly just keeps a very simple database of domain owners. Reportedly their revenue last year was > $200 million. I'm sure they produce lots of interesting documents too but they appear to be minting it already.
ICANN is a non-profit organization, they are definitely not "minting it". Feel free to look at their financials and complain:
https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/adopted-opplan-b...
'Non profit' means that investors are not making anything (there are none).
But there are other stake-holders: suppliers, customers, other kinds of financiers (debtors, other financial services), vendors, executives and employees.
They could feasibly be paying themselves 'significantly above market wages', they could be over-paying suppliers and vendors, and hiring far more people than they need, or otherwise operating very inefficiently.
I'm not accusing ICANN of any of this - rather - I'm making the point that their position as 'non profit' doesn't necessarily absolve the organization of 'raking in a lot more money than they need' kind of thing.
Hence my linking to the financials so you can see who is "raking it in".
More like, this guy built a million dollar business that arbitrages the DNS renewal system by squatting desirable names that he has no plans to use, then rent-seeking from those who do want to use the names. This is not a value-creating enterprise, but a zero-sum trader making money by taking it from other people.
I say "why don't you take that ingenuity and use it for something productive."
Once your domain has expired, it will be in Auto-Renew Grace Period (for 0-45 days), followed by a 30-day Redemption Grace Period. At the end of the Redemption Grace Period, you will not be able to renew your domain name. Your domain name will be released for registration by third parties.
https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/expired-2013-05-03-en
For example, daily.sh will be available on their platform on 2016-09-30, but it actually expired back in 2016-07-01.
Being fond of .io's I naivly googled my <brandname>.io, and found that park.io owns it - this happened last week. I immediately sent an email to inquire. We considered the price, and then when I came to buy it today, a week after, the price is tripled. This was a fixed price domain, NOT bid.
That's clever price manipulation. Detect when someone wants something, let it sit, and when they're ready - triple the price. Maybe that's a hint for how he made so much money? In any way we'll just do the get<brandname>.io or something like this, as a compromise. Thanks for being a douche, park.io!
And then, magically, this is now on HN :)
1. You are not getting .io names at a discount from nic.io? No insider deals/information?
2. The Only advantage you have at acquiring an expired domain names at nic.io is your propriatiatry program. A program that is just faster at buying these expiring domains--just faster than your competition?
3. You only know when a .io domain name is due to expire is by looking at the same WHOSIS info we look at?
4. I ask these questions because so many of these domain buying services are just to magical. We tend assume the worst.
They've bought up the closest server they can to the bid receiving server at the registrar and/or they send their purchase request before the domain becomes available -- accounting for the network latency -- so that their bid gets there at the exact millisecond that the domain drops.
My personal domain drops at 2018-0X-0YT00:00:00Z, then IIRC it takes 75 days for it to be cleared. So presumably if your request for that domain arrives at 1 microsecond after midnight on that date then you "win" it.
Surely there's no secret sauce beyond that?
We have no special advantage other than our knowledge and technology
Some aspects are different, but reminds me of a similar tactic Network Solutions pulled back in 2008 wrt to listening to domain name searches then raising their price: https://techcrunch.com/2008/01/10/network-solutions-using-qu...
https://moz.com/community/q/hyphens-in-domain-name
edit: here's a better article actually on it - https://moz.com/blog/how-to-choose-a-domain-name-whiteboard-...
I would never, ever recommend settling for a hyphenated domain name.
Please note: I said it MAY be illegal. There are very special rules when it comes to domains. Some people have a legitimate reason for 'holding' a domain. On quick glance, this looks like a legitimate concern.
I am the founder of OpenDomain and we fight cybersquatting - contact me if anyone needs help with domain issues like this.
A big no no is to steal domains that just lapsed on their registration by mere seconds or minutes and then engage in price gouging via a scheme that makes Park.io not legally responsible (because well it's the owner of the domain who had purchased it via Park.io who is doing it, and do we really know that it's that owner or park.io itself hiding behind a some fake user account?)
Anyway, the idea of stealing domains and then ripping off people who are interested in them is really super amoral and stinky.
People should do good in the world, not make it a worse place , and then bate others with how much they make for sake of publicity and more money.
B.S. business model.
Secondly, as other comments have pointed out, you're being judgmental about the acquisition of expiring domains without any real knowledge of how that process works. It is in no way immoral to buy a domain when it expires. Using the word "steal" is ridiculous. You sound like a media company exec complaining about the internet.
This sort of baseless and lazy shaming that's supported more by ignorance than by cohesive arguments/facts has become so widespread in our culture, and it's sad to see it on HN.
If you forgot to renew the lease on your apartment and 75 days later, someone else rented it, it might suck or be annoying, but you'd still have to move.
The easy fix? Set everything to auto-renew & have a backup credit card on file.
If Tenant fails to pay the rent in full before the end of the 20th day after it's due,Tenant will pay Landlord a late charge of $20, plus $10 for each additional day that the rent remains unpaid. The total late charge for any one month will not exceed $120.
Even though I definitely should have, I haven't actually enforce it beyond the initial $20 late charge. In fact, I've kind of accidentally encoded a 20-day "grace period" into my lease (a tenant could pay me on the 19th of each month with no penalty, unless I chose to move forward with lease termination). But if you haven't paid your rent by the end of the month, you could have up to $120 extra charged. I'm sure your rental agreement has something similar (probably even more restrictive).
Your registrar enforces a late fee. When it expires, your domain stops working and goes into a 27 day grace period. During that time, you can notice and renew at the regular price. After those 27 days, it goes into redemption period, which has the the late fees.
I think the most expensive domain registration I've ever paid is $9.99, and seriously if you can't afford that annually, you have no business owning domains in the first place. There are plenty of free hosting options for portfolios.
FYI indiehackers and park.io are run by two diffrent individuals. park.io website is still up. It's the indiehackers website that is down.
Interview here: http://www.domainsherpa.com/mike-carson-parkio-interview/
https://feinternational.com/buy-a-website/8340-platform-doma...
Profit of 500k / 12 = 41.7k per month, not 125k.
I went through his comment history, and the guy seems like a straight shooter. He did say he likes to buy domain names directly from the current owner.
I do question the faster program he coded, but then again in his comment history, he is very interested in Amazon servers. So, I should take him at his word, and look into this domain catching software.
There's a part of me that thinks he is buying up .io domains directly from owners, and putting them into a auction buying API? Actually, in one interview he claimed to own 700 .io domains. Maybe he was just one of the first to buy .io domains, and then set up a website to auction them off?
(personally I don't get the allure of .io domain names. Registration is $100yr., then drops to--I believe $50. And there's no ICANN protection.)
Given the way your current infrastructure is configured (vulnerabilities and all)... somebody could probably cost you ~$30-70k/mo in AWS resource utilization at a cost of ~$600/mo. The moment you park on the domain of someone who shares your internet ethics, that will be an interesting day for you.
Obviously, first-come, first-served doesn't ensure that a resource goes to the people who would use it "best". But what system does?
Park.io gives the average person an actual chance to win the race for a .io domain -- a chance they otherwise probably wouldn't have -- so I'd rather live in a world with Park.io than without it.
Here's the cached version if you need it: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:F0QdH3...
At best, you'll get hate and resentment. At worst, you'll get hate, resentment, and a new competitor.
Every community is different. Park.io received nothing but love on Twitter earlier this weekend (https://twitter.com/IndieHackers/status/779330003829944320). The HN crowd is particularly cynical and prone to outrage/judgment in the comment section.
I got a similar response when I launched Indie Hackers itself in August. But despite some negative comments, most visitors loved it and 99% of the feedback I've gotten since then has been positive.
/me facepalms
Or is the technology behind that unique?
Coming up with a good startup idea is sexy, but this is a pretty sweet deal too. You could argue that hours spent working on this prevent him from working on something that's potentially more lucrative and more fun, but from the sound of it he's at a point where it takes up much less time than a full-time job.
Even if he can only milk $1 million off of it, that's still really good.
Also, could you elaborate? I do wish to understand why, if I was wrong.
Simply because competing with him may be "easy," doesn't make the business model any less valid.
It was the first example I saw of someone automating something with some scripting. Coming from Windows side, I was like what~~? Scripting can do that?
This was when Yahoo was the king. (I'm not THAT old).
The thing is this kind of scripting is NOT new. It was done before by others. But with proper execution, park.io is able to generate a million dollar a year. Good for him.
Well, that usage was incorrect, but I agree that nowadays everyone's calling themselves a hacker of some sort.
The problem is that many people's interests have zero business potential. As technical people, we tend to have pipe dreams about what computers could achieve. Lone wolf AI directions, weird functional programming styles, utilities based on incredibly niche processing, continuing retro computing interests, custom OSes, etc.
Sure, some people have interests that happen to align with a commercially exploitable audience, but "pursue your interest" is not a globally applicable direction to recommend starting a business venture. Flexibility within your interest will not help you swing a profit if your interest isn't widely shared.
The point is keep an eye out for problems you run into, instead of making one up. Usually if you find it interesting, someone else will too. Plus it makes it easier to justify spending the hours necessary turning it into a product.
Whats the use of checking it _every second_ if you still need to manually act upon your email?
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ca98am79
Other projects, including what appears to be an initiative to start a new religion? (http://consciousness.io/)
Stating "judge nothing as "bad" or "evil"' and then stating "you are now free of any judgments, guilt, resistance, anger, or suffering of any kind." suggest that those things are undesirable traits. But isn't that a judgment?
I like it.
My current favorite quote about religion is from the pianist Seymour Bernstein (in the latest Documentary about him, from Ethan Hawke, titled "Seymour: An Introduction):
"I don't call it god, I call it a spiritual reservoir. Most people don't tap that resource of the god within. What upsets me about religion is that the answers always seem to be apart from us, in the form of a deity and we depend on the deity for salvation, but I firmly believe it is within us."
The externality, taking someone's individuality and telling them that it's something apart from them, that they don't control it, is also my largest concern with religion and the thing that needs to innovated on. I think your conciousness.io fits that bill ... Would be curious to hear if my assessment is incorrect though.
> That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship Jones.
I don't know what else to say until I know where you're coming from though, I'm honestly asking what do you mean by that quote?
Then he dies. What of his meaning and purpose then? If meaning and purpose lie within ourselves, then when we die, meaning and purpose die as well. But that would mean that there is no meaning and no purpose, for how can a being create itself before it has created itself?
Therefore, if we have purpose, if life has meaning, it must come from without, not from within. This is not to say that we don't possess "seeds" of truth and meaning and purpose within us--but they exist only to point us toward the truth, to motivate us to seek answers.
A search for truth that only looks within ourselves is doomed to failure, for we cannot provide answers that we do not have. And if we had the answers, we wouldn't need to search for them. Those who claim that the answers lie within ourselves are deceiving themselves and others with vague platitudes, merely taking a detour on the journey toward the truth--but how tragic a detour if time runs out along the way.
The search for meaning is a poorly formed question.
42.
Yes.
> The search for meaning is a poorly formed question.
"Why are we here? What are we meant to do? Where are we going next?" These are not poorly formed or useless questions.
Do you see the difference?
"why are we here" can mean "how did we get here, how did we come to be here" ... but if it means "for what purpose are we here" than it turns problematic again, no?
The search for reasons and hows and what happened and what's next seems a lot more interesting of questions, to me personally.
It seems like a step up, from worshiping one's priest to worshipping ones self, and maybe after that we (those that see the error in both) can have adult conversations.
Not that you necessarily intend it, but that is a false dichotomy. If the choices are between worshipping a priest (a human) and worshipping oneself (another human), you're right that the latter is a step up in that it refuses to elevate one human above another.
But it only brings us closer to the truth insofar as worshipping the priest is wrong. It really just brings us back to ground zero. If worshipping the priest is wrong (by "wrong" I mean that the priest is not worthy of worship, because he's just another human), then worshipping any human is wrong, including oneself.
So, either way, you're wrong--that is, you still don't know the truth, and you're still worshipping a human being.
That is where we disagree I think.
Well, if we are just piles of goo that randomly became sentient, then there's no objective "need" for purpose; we can simply keep existing and eating and sleeping until we die and decompose.
However it seems obvious that most people, at some point in their lives, wonder about purpose and meaning--which raises the question of why we wonder. Is there something planted within us that causes us to seek answers to these questions?
> or morality
I suppose the sociological answer would be that morality provides guidelines for behavior which help society operate smoothly, as opposed to everyone doing whatever they want, stealing and killing without consequences, which would prevent any kind of civilization from developing.
Which I guess raises a chicken-and-egg question: where did morality come from? How did the first guy who realized that chaos was holding civilization back (before "civilization" even?) convince everyone else to stop doing what they were doing and follow these rules he came up with? "Hey, man, don't steal my stuff and kill me. If you do, we'll keep having chaos, and we'll never be able to develop a society and make progress." Somehow I doubt that would have been convincing to a wild-eyed savage who was in the habit of raping and pillaging.
> and why ask that of your god?
I think this depends on who your god is--or more specifically, whether you believe a god exists. If there isn't one, and we are our own arbiters of truth and morality and meaning, then I suppose it's personal preference whether you care about these things; many people seem happy to live in ignorant bliss, and then they die, and what does it matter?
But if you believe that a god does exist, who created us, who exists outside of our universe, then said god would necessarily have the power over our life and death, and any afterlife that may come, and so it would seem sensible to inquire as to what that god wanted of us--just as a child tries to please his parents if he wants his parents' approval and support, or a soldier tries to please his superiors, or an employee tries to please his employer.
Of course, many people either don't believe or don't care, and time will tell how it turns out for them. In the end, we'll all find out whether a god exists and whether there's an afterlife.
Have a good one either way.
The Buddha innovated on it 25 centuries ago. It didn't prevent people from just praying to him when his philosophy got popular.
Buddhism with that rhetoric (that innovation) has persisted more positively than others that lack it I think.
But also, yes.
Cached version here: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:F0QdH3...
Or if you refresh a few times, it should come up.
That really shouldn't be an issue for a site like this though, because you can just host it on a CDN...
But if you're not getting recycling of TIME_WAIT, you can start to change the reuse/recycle attributes (caveat emptor) with: net.ipv4.tcp_tw_reuse or net.ipv4.tcp_tw_recycle
I know I have been benchmarking a servant app by throwing 2048 concurrent connections at it and just bumping up the ephemeral range has been enough for my needs.
I tend to run out of socket FD's or just FD issues a lot quicker than ports.
Just a thought, but 50-100requests/second doesn't sound like too big of a deal. I did a quick bench of what i have setup and I get this:
# wrk --latency -c 128 -t6 http://10.0.2.15:8080/foo/bar/
Running 10s test @ http://10.0.2.15:8080/foo/bar/
6 threads and 128 connections
Thread Stats Avg Stdev Max +/- Stdev
Latency 3.46ms 5.25ms 137.42ms 90.23%
Req/Sec 9.84k 2.13k 19.67k 69.50%
Latency Distribution
50% 1.65ms
75% 4.40ms
90% 8.59ms
99% 22.17ms
589624 requests in 10.07s, 476.28MB read
Requests/sec: 58560.86
Transfer/sec: 47.30MB
I like pointing people here for the explanation: https://vincent.bernat.im/en/blog/2014-tcp-time-wait-state-l...
But you're quite right on recycle for outgoing. To be honest I tend to shy away from adjusting either unless I really need to.
That's true, but HN posts tend to go viral on other tech news sites. It's likely the majority of the traffic spikes are not originating on this site's link. I could be wrong though.
I thought part of the value add was Beanstalk making it so you don't have to think about these things for bursts.
The new load balances may be a bit better in this regard Hough I haven't tried them yet.
Anyway, I'm in the process of just moving it from Elastic Beanstalk to serve it from S3 via CloudFront directly. Waiting for the CloudFront distribution to spin up...
Github pages can do the same thing - it just has fewer features.
Well, nothing different in this business plan either. Automating price gouging and domain squatting might be commercially viable and legal, but it isn't the right thing to do!
Welcome to HN: home of the insecure narcissists who like to argue over programming languages, humblebrag about their gifted childhoods, and prove that they're superior to anyone more successful than them.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12576182 and marked it off-topic.
I understand how frustrating HN can sometimes be, and how easy it is to get stuck on a picture of the community as a super-annoying arch-enemy, but it's incongruent to use HN to comment that way, since if you're commenting here, you're as much a part of the community as anyone else is.
He even took the time to write two very polite and friendly explanations of the action, even in the face of your hostile attitude toward him.
And all you need to do to become one is add a script? I always assumed there was special access to top tier domain snatchers or they had some sort of high-speed trading thing with a fast uplink.
Some of these domains (https://app.park.io/domains/view/algorithmic.ly) actually look pretty neat, and I could totally see this being a good market to be in.
People pay Google and Facebook to display their ads; I guess they're eyeball squatters.
The guy has a product he's paid for with real dollars by customers who gave them to him willingly to get something they want. It solves a need people have which is something I haven't been able to do yet.
lol then why bother paying $99. just pick it up from any registrar for $9 after it drops
He's doing the equivalent of standing in line for you outside the Apple store on iPhone 7 release day and then charging you a premium for his services.
This is the perfect example of why it is not always good to listen to the many naysayers. There are a ton of single purpose things that can be turned into a service. Most people overlook those things because building the next unicorn sounds so much sexier.
We have no idea how much he is making. Especially since if he is saying he is making that, he attracts attention and is therefore incented to say it - he's probably lying.
People are not upset because it's a 'single purpose' thing. They are upset because he's not creating value - in fact - he's not even playing in a zero-sum game - he's actually shrinking the pie by introducing a transaction tax where none should exist.
He's an anti-capitalist. For every $1 he makes, $1.02 is being drawn out of the system.
Despite people being able to do this for 'much less', the man built a successful business providing a service that people are willing to pay for.
Every business has competitors and often you can do the same thing that a business does yourself. This is true for everything from restraunts to taxis to clothing stores.
The lesson here is to not overlook creating something simple that can provide value to other people.
People want things for a whole variety of reasons.
.dance and .party have been fun lately