The dude that built DudeRanch.com
deepsouthventures.com
deepsouthventures.com
Heads up-- something on duderanch.com is putting a max-width on rows making the site unreadble in desktop:
<section class="row row-3" style="width: 100%; max-width: 328px;">...</section>
Thanks for stating the obvious though. Nevermind the other comments saying the exact same thing about the site being broken for them too. Just trying to help not have the site be broken for a portion of visitors.
1. The ability to write software is an asset and the DSV type projects are more software adjacent. Software has such great margins that it's much easier to create a profitable business than anything that involves shipping or physical goods (MicroSAAS, Dev Books/Courses, Themes, etc.)
2. It's sort of left unsaid that much of the purpose of buying these "domains you can make a business around" is to optimize SEO. And my honest feeling is: well done, that's a huge leg up in ranking.
But there have been some changes to SEO (Google weighting factors and more navigational searches) that have reduced the value of them.
Also, I think there's a strong argument to be made that if you're just starting out today and have $20,000 you'd be better off today with:
duderanchjourney.com ($14 to register) + $19,986 in content, advertising, etc.
vs
duderanch.com ($20,000 to buy) + a blank page.
Well, I've actually studied this a lot... and it's not that Google reduced the value of them (Exact Match Domains EMDs). It's just that Google stopped giving them more weight. So now all domains are given the same potential ranking weight--even the new gTLD domains.
Bing, on the other hand, still gives more value to EMDs.
Is there a more up to date source?
The example that "[one would] always go to biketours.com" is literally invalid for all my friends today - we'd immediately think of it as a link farm with content of limited or no value - and maybe even dangerous. In fact, it's their very proposed business model, that has conditioned us to mentally de-rank such generic domains.
As a consumer, I'll mentally avoid "weddingphotographer.com" and maybe even "TorontoPhotography.com" in rankings (no clue if those are working domains, assume so, no ill will to the operators:) but would scroll to e.g. "BobDoesPictures.ca" or "MichaelDavidsonPhotography.ca" or something more specific and similar like that. One sounds a generic link farm, one sounds a specific potentially useful site. So I'd definitelly use GoSojourn.com over BikeTours.com.
Mind you, from perspective of a pragmatic business, my friends and I may well represent an insignificant minority :(
That is Firefox by the way. I suppose it looks differently in whatever browser it was tested at the time? Or maybe it is my adblock blacklisting wpengine.com by default?
He could have hired a web designer/coder for a fraction of that price.
Edit:
Turns out it is uBlock.
Don't use styles/JS from domains used for serving ads I suppose. That's analogous to sending legitimate mail from servers that also tend to send out a lot of spam.
You'll have spam filters/adblockers ruining your day.
I love the narrative. I'd love it even more if we had a glimpse of whether this ultimately settled in as predicted ($25k/year) or turned out to be a whole lot more rewarding.
Even though, in the same result, they report the comparables:
duderanch.com $17,949 heroesranch.com $7,500 urbanranch.com $7,000
Great story.
In addition to the constraint of the domain name itself, the author also spent $17,949 (taking 6-9 months to repay) which would help constrain them to focus on just this one idea over that time.
edit: i enjoyed this piece too.