Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name | Hacker News Reader

Want to build a side business? buy a great domain name

deepsouthventures.com

306 pointswhalesalad217 comments

My mind works exactly the opposite way. If I see a domain like BikeTours.com, I immediately assume that the business is built primarily on the domain name, and the quality of the product or service is inferior. Hence I don’t click it. But I assume the majority of internet users don’t think this way, so it can be a profitable strategy.

Edit: Well, thinking about it, it’s not always true, but at the very least I check out the other options too.

A lot of those super-generically named sites are really just shill advisory/review sites. I have also come to be mistrustful.

Or straight up scam/fraud, depending on the sector.

Same, though I think the BikeTours/GoSojourn thing may just be an imperfect example of a point that is correct.

A better example (for me at least) would be backroads.com vs. something like biketourstoday.info. The former is distinct, trustworthy, memorable, greppable, and just good. I thought a lot about these things in starting my business. While capiche.com doesn't say anything about SaaS, I think it resonates with people more than, say, saasreviews.io or whatever would've.

btw, this post is highly relevant and is one I reference often: http://messymatters.com/nominology/

The link is great, for anyone else who enjoys taking mostly meaningless things way too seriously.

I take issue with greppability. Unnecessary as long as you can use regular expressions to search for whitespace bounded terms.

Right, and "GoSojourn" sounds a) like it couldn't have been auto-registered by a bot going off of keywords, and b) like it carries more whimsy than a spammy developer would likely put forth.

Kind of, but then I do want to buy a garden shed from Sheds.co.uk because i think the selection and focus beats big stores. but i could be wrong - at least i will call them tomorrow and see if i pick up any other signals.

I would say a pretty large part of the internet user doesn't look at the domain when looking for something new in Google (they mainly see your headline, text snippets, logo and only then, maybe your domain).

Sure if your domain name looks erratic or otherwise won't they still notice but as long as your domain name is sane I don't think it did matter anymore at least not to a large degree.

Or at least that is what I think.

One exception are people which where "thought" about domains also got stuck in the way they see the internet. So if you target people between 35-50 it might still matter a bit more I guess).

Agreed, especially what I often see from search engines related to health and fitness. Many blogs with short, descriptive domain names, that are completely over-optimizing in SEO, changing publish dates of articles and offering bad UX in general (invasive ads, popups, trackers, ...)

Maybe it's terrible, but when I hear something like "GoSojourn" I think, Ah, VC money! Let's see how subsidized this is....

And I would without hesitation open both but that is not where the money is. If the point is to exploit the asset you want those customers who don't bother to compare your minimalist expensive trip with cheap well thought out stuff available elsewhere.

OT: For techies winning depends more on technology. It would be more interesting to appeal to the serious and properly organize the trips by distance, days, incline, temperature, weather and price in a sortable way. The more advanced the cyclist the more there has to be actual cycling (think repairs, renting high end bikes, massages, spa etc), they care about statistics and leaderboards, there is a whole eco system worth of technology to explore and tap into. (Could upload your entire offering to https://www.bkool.com/en/cycling-simulator ) much fun to make. At that point, if you call it cocainepizza44.ninja people will find it.

In this case, the article dissmisively advises that you "stop reading and go back to scrolling Facebook". Sick burn from the author!

I agree with you that I'd prefer GoSojourn myself, and that BikeTours sounds spammy. Having now looked at both sites, they both look legit, and at first glance, roughly equivalent in presentation. At this point, I'd base my decision solely on prices, dates available, type of tour, customer service, etc. -- giving no weight to the domain name.

I can accept that buyers would pay more for BikeTours.com than for GoSojourn.com (and that the author would earn more money for brokering such a name), but is there any empirical evidence that customers prefer the simple descriptive name? And by how much? That's a critical question. If the BikeTours name costs $40,000 and GoSojourn costs $200, could the $39,800 difference be put to better use by GoSojourn such that it beats out BikeTours?

His argument is that if you do something decent with biketours and advertise it properly you can easily get your 40 k back or more. GoSojourn wont have ROI.

I laughed out loud at this example, because I run a site with (what I reckon to be) one of the best domain names for exactly that use-case:

https://cycle.travel

Do you think having an unusual TLD (travel) is hurting you at all? If someone told an average person to go to "Cycle.travel", I'm not sure that they would understand that to be a web address.

From my experience, such an effect is generally far to small to be a deciding factor (in the beginning).

If you look at the traffic of most websites, very few visitors come directly to your website by entering the domain into the address bar (because visitors are far too lazy to type out an address). The biggest chunk normally comes from other websites directly linking to you (this includes search engines and social media sites), or paid advertising (if you do that).

As a kid I knew every one of my friends phone numbers. I couldn't tell you my nearest and dearest now because typing this kind of info manually is long gone.

I'm 50 and I can still tell you the phone numbers of all of my friends from growing up. The only number other than mine that I know now is my wife's because it's the number for the grocery store discount card. That stuff sticks because we pounded it in there.

I've had to enter in my wife's phone number for various things enough times I know it better than my own phone number now (Meijer mPerks alone I've done it probably 300 times). But outside of that, my own, and my parent's phone number, which has never changed, I don't know any phone numbers.

Pretty much this. Lots of people get there by Googling for "cycle travel", and that's fine.

I also use an unusual TLD and people don't have a problem with it, but automated systems do. Email input forms in particular are really bad

And it's a damn good useful website with that.

Thanks!

I'm using it regularly, it's great!

Only one thing that has room for improvement: if you download the .GPX, it always has the same name. It would be nice if it would indicate the date or destination.

Date is a great idea - thanks! If you've saved the route it'll use that as a name, and I haven't wanted to complicate the UI by adding a separate name field (understanding the various GPX file formats is complication enough). But I hadn't thought of adding the date. Will do that.

Same, more generally, I trust domain name more when they are the name of a company or a product. Not generic words. If biketours.com is not the website of a company called biketours, I will look elsewhere.

Same thing for gosojourn.com

Also the more generic the name, the more I expect to see a large reputable company. For a company named BikeTours, I expect too see many reviews in internet forums, a professional looking, custom built website, maybe even a few financial news articles. For gosojourn, I expect either an official website (ex: tourism office) or a small shop.

I red flag everything that doesn't match my expectations.

This is why I generally avoid getting food at restaurants that have a great view.

Places like that are a great place to get a couple of drinks with friends and soak up the ambience, but 9 times out of 10 the food is overpriced and middle-of-the-road in quality.

Similar I skeptically check if they aggregators or subcontract the actual work our

The best thing about coming up with and then buying a great domain name for your new business idea is that thinking of one uses so much creative and analytical energy, diverted from considering the business itself, and delivers such a dopamine hit on completing the purchase transaction, that you don't need to proceed any further with developing the idea whatsoever.

I feel attacked.

lol this perfectly explains why I have a collection of domain names. might as well be an idea log where you pay for each entry.

maybe it's synchronicity, the number 23. my favorite number and i thought yeah, 23bay! short and sweet and sounds like ebay.. that has to work.. but then what? ha. i let it expire, and it turned into a casino in china. it felt like i lost a child. eventually got it back and it feels good to just have it back even if it never does anything. a domain collection that aren't really that valuable but more like sentimental, too hard to let go, and it's strange.

It's more like an idea log where each entry is a lottery ticket. There's an abysmally small chance that someone will want the exact same domain name as yours and just happens to be able to offer you tons of money for it. This gets less likely over time as the short names get taken up.

This sadly describes my "workflow" perfectly. Think of names for idea, search for one that's available, buy name, project done...

The advice is to buy descriptive domain names and build a business basing your decision "solely off the domain name" that you're able to find. His About page claims that he himself does this. But does he actually do that?

Of the examples he gave – ComputerCamp.com, ShippingSupply.com, KobeBeef.com, CameraBag.com, Pacifiers.com, ZoysiaGrass.com, SouthernCookbook.com, Ziplines.com, CannedHam.com, SexyBastard.com – every one of them except ShippingSupply is a parked domain, spam site, or fails to resolve. Since the article is from January 2017, it seems like the average price of $5388 that people paid at auction for the 9 unproductive sites has been wasted for the last 3+ years.

As far as I can tell, his business is buying and selling domain names. (ShippingSupply, although it looks real enough, does not belong to the author; he writes "sell shipping supplies [is] exactly what this buyer did".) I can believe that the author has a profitable business doing what he does (buying & selling domains), but the artilce does not convince me that building a business around nice-sounding but arbitary domain names with no expertise in that business is a good idea. It doesn't seem like he's doing that.

author here. I sell onions on the internet. does that qualify? Check out my homepage for other developed domain projects.

Depends if you have the ISellOnions.com website...

Even better... he has vidaliaonions.com.

He has onions.com

Hang on... Does he run that news network channel on YouTube as well?

And damn good onions to boot. I'm a very happy customer.

Just got this year's 10lb box about a week ago or so. He does old school postcard mailers to remind you the upcoming season is arriving. Nice way to cut through the noise. It worked on me.

many many thanks for your business, kovacs. Postcards FTW! -Peter

thanks a ton for the business, Jason.. it means a lot. -Peter

What a shame that the .onion TLD is already being used for some boring nerd thing.

Your domain, deepsouthventures, is definitely memorable :)

Read more of his site. He is legit, builds out domains into great products. DudeRanch.com / VidaliaOnions.com. His onion business blog posts are great, and provide real insight into his approach.

I consider the extra domains he is selling to just be table stakes. You buy the domain, have big ideas, but then realize your time is better spent on another project.

I tried this with a domain. It's related to used beer kegs. The reason is because I was volunteering at a brewery, and one of the hottest commodities for small breweries is used kegs from bigger breweries that are replacing them. Most of the major breweries use keg management services and rent the kegs, which is overkill for smaller breweries, so owning kegs is important starting out.

Kegs are also sought after for the homebrewers market too; you can save a ton of money buying used, and they become available as people fall out of the hobby.

My plan was to either set up a market place or buy and resell kegs for a small profit. Even a bulletin board that just shows announcements for used keg sales would be helpful.

There are a few reasons I haven't pursued this. First, specifically for homebrewers, is gaining momentum from other marketplaces like Facebook, Craigslist, and local homebrew shops. For commercial kegs, these sales are usually announced word of mouth, and I am not well connected enough to be in the loop, and also, there is really no friction selling these kegs that a website could reduce. They "fly off the shelves". There are other issues too with the frequency these sales happen.

My point being, in a long winded way, is that buying a domain name and getting business ideas from it still requires business acumen, networking (which the author does mention), and a innate sense of the problem space and what desire there is for a web based solution. Just like every other way of sourcing business ideas.

> For commercial kegs, these sales are usually announced word of mouth, and I am not well connected enough to be in the loop

I’d have thought if you had to be “in the loop” to know if something’s for sale, it means there’s a possible market for that knowledge, which a website can step in to provide.

I am totally connected enough within the beer industry to make this happen. Shoot me an email, would love to talk.

HN trending expectations: how eBPF works

HN trending reality: How I make a zillion dollars a day with a yet another SEO/web scraping/reselling domains business

I still enjoy reading HN because every once in a while something good comes up. But you're right, most of the time this site is overrun by a lot of SEO types and folks who want a quick buck.

In my opinion, most people see a posting and go directly to the comments to see _what I should feel about this_

Option 1: I don't really care enough about this to read through the story and develop an opinion. I'm certainly never going to domain squat since I'm quite happy in my career anyway.

Option 2: Alright, well I can at least go get a brief overview of the prevailing sentiment through the comments.

There's nothing wrong with letting experts dictate your opinions on subjects you don't have even a minor interest in. Of course, that comes with the caveat that one must judiciously choose which subjects to do this with (thus our current political climate).

The article is not about domain trading. It's about letting yourself be inspired and pushed by a domain name to try some new venture.

It's a bit of a stupid concept though, isn't it? A man bought a domain name called "shippingsupplies.com" so he decided to get into shipping supplies and now he's a zillionaire?

So, assuming, as the article suggests that people buy a catchy domain name first and then build a business round it, which isn't one they're already involved in or know anything about, how does that conversation go?:

----

MAN: Hi. I've decided to get into the shipping supplies business. I need to borrow £250,000 to buy some trucks, containers, a crane and lease a premises down by the harbour

BANK MANAGER: I see. Hmmm. A quarter of a million is quite a lot of money. Have you any experience in shipping supplies?

MAN: Well.. not exactly..

BANK MANAGER: And have you any of your own money or any startup equipment, that you can bring to the business?

MAN: Well... not exactly...

BANK MANAGER: I'm sorry. But, under the circumstances, I really don't think the bank can take the risk...

MAN: But I've registered the domain name "shippingsupplies.com"!

BANK MANAGER: Why didn't you say so? [rolls wheelbarrow full of cash out from behind his desk] Used notes OK?

MAN: Thanks very much [exits stage left]

[Bank Manager's secretary pops her head round the door]

SECRETARY: Your two-thirty, Mr. Jones is here.

MR JONES: [walking in and shaking hands] I've just snapped up the domain name "executive-airline.travel" and I wanted to ask you about a loan...

Like any other bootstrapped business you’d start off small so that you don’t need to ask anyone for a loan. In this case, that might mean partnering with a distributor of shipping supplies and doing drop shipping direct to the customer or something similar.

In college, I worked for four different restaurants. It always blew my mind how perfectly reasonable people would take their entire life savings and invest it into a restaurant at the age of 60, 65, even 70.

They really and truly thought they'd just show up with a checkbook, and then the restaurant would churn out solid returns, year after year.

On top of that, they often placed their children on the staff. Children who had no interest in working in a restaurant, the children of wealthy parents who knew that their parents couldn't compel them to show up to work.

That's apparently what the bobbleheads.com guy did, it's linked in the article: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/warren-royal-bobbleheadscom_n...

This is awesome advice. Taking incremental steps towards what you want to do makes a big difference. If you already have a domain, hosting, and DNS set up, you’ve got something cool and tangible to work with.

I actually trust less descriptive domain names. When I see biketours.com, I more often expect blog spam and ads. When I see GoSojourn.com, I expect an actual business providing bike tours. It’s also peculiar to me when I see local contractors with domains like MyCityElectrician.com putting “Denver Electrician” in big text and hiding their brand name. I recommend a branded domain name and relying on good page titles and descriptions for ads and SEO.

I think this really overstates the importance of domain names.

Owning CameraBag.com isn’t going to do anything for you until you have a competitive product to sell and getting that lined up is what you should be focusing your talents on.

Sure, it might make you look a little more impressive to the discerning consumer who actually reads the URLs. But such users probably also check what the competition offers anyway.

And with modern browsers with search suggestions and modern Google, owning the .com doesn’t bring you many extra visitors, either.

So if you want a side business, create something people will want to pay for. Don’t fret about the domain name, it hardly matters.

I think this is a much better article about this from the same guy: https://www.deepsouthventures.com/i-sell-onions-on-the-inter...

thanks Alex (author here).. that domain article was one of my first, so I was (and still am) trying to find my writing voice. whatever that means.

Don't sweat it. A runaway hit like the onions piece is like catching lightning in a bottle. It's not really something you can plan and, so far, I haven't found a formula where you can reliably recreate it to any degree.

(I've had two posts do about a tenth as well on HN as your onions piece, both on different blogs of mine and that didn't result in follow-up posts on those blogs being similarly successful. So my opinion is somewhat informed by firsthand experience, fwiw.)

thanks.. just enjoy sharing this domain name world as I see so much opportunity there for small builders to compete with big corps.

Feel free to post some of your stuff to r/GigWorks. I'm the mod there and I also run r/ClothingStartups and I am always actively on the lookout for "tipping point" style ideas where a small thing makes a big difference and can be done as a microbusiness, which is smaller than a small business. Small business is typically defined as like 10 to 100 employees and I am looking at tiny teams of more like 1 to 5 people as my target audience.

I was also born and raised in Georgia, so I just loved your onions piece because I'm from the Deep South. For health reasons, I will never again live in the Deep South, so I like nostalgically visitating via internet from time to time.

I may, at some point, post some of your stuff myself on r/GigWorks, but I'm a one woman show here with too many irons in the fire, so lots of stuff either takes me forever to actually get around to or just never happens even though I would like to get to it. Sometimes, life just keeps getting in my way.

for your nostalgia, here's a video that the GA Dept of Ag just produced on our farm.. Aries (farm owner) is in vid (I'm not in this one).. notice the domain at the end : ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0oNolfKfgc

Thanks. It took me a bit to get to it, but I've watched it.

I am something of a fan of onions. They are good lung support, but can be somewhat hard on the gut. Vidalia's have always been my favorite onion because they are so mild, so they are easier on my touchy gut.

It's one of the reasons your article caught my eye.

Best of luck with your endeavors, both online (finding your writing voice) and off (selling onions, or whatever it is you do out in meat space).

HN discussion on that article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19728132

I love this article just because so many commenters hate it. I really like the super niche side-projects -- I ran an analytics site for minor league football, built with a couple of Ruby scripts and a free Netlify plan. Was featured on ESPN, famous NFL twitter accounts, and did a million pageviews in 2 months.

I licensed the data to a fantasy football site and it was starting to make money before the league shut down.

The stakes are so low that it's really worth giving it a go.

author here. It is fun to see the differing opinions on domain names.. very split audience. thanks for sharing.

Yeah I didn't do it "domain-first" but love the idea. Still own the domain: noextrapoints.com, seems good for a football related site.

Just bought "streamerjobs.com" for $13 inspired by your post. Maybe a job board for Twitch/YouTube people to hire video editors.

that's a good jobs domain. nice grab.

I thought “goSojourn.com” was a catchier domain name so I had to go back to browsing Facebook (Hacker News in this case).

Right, I felt a little insulted when he suggested me to go back browsing FB.

You don't need to bid up the price of existing .com domain names. Even in 2020 there are plenty of perfectly good ones that nobody has claimed yet!

All you need are two or three words that satisfy the following criteria:

1. The words, when spoken, should be easy to spell.

2. The words, when read, should be easy to pronounce in any English dialect.

3. The words, when concatenated, should not create any ambiguity (a la expertsexchange.com)

A tool that generates these kinds of domains is available for your convenience at https://startupname.website

The first one I got was:

torquatawhether.com

Possibly the most confusing domain name I’ve ever seen in my life, lol.

When I was hiking in Western Australia I saw a beautiful Eucalyptus tree. But I didn't know whether it was Eucalyptus aquilina or Eucalyptus torquata.

So I went to torquatawhether.com to find out. Sadly, no one had registered that domain yet.

The thinking man's NotHotdog.com

> Even in 2020 there are plenty of perfectly good ones that nobody has claimed yet!

> https://startupname.website

Something seems amiss here...

> https://startupname.website

The best one I got was roofpotato.com

Sell rooftop potato garden kits? I guess that's my life now...

Just got "girlfriendtape.com", can't decide between revenge porn and amateur porn.

I don't even know where to start with "mightbrabancon.com"

Ditto - I got forcesuck.com

While I'm not comfortable with the implications of killpolice.com, I'm also surprised it's not already a thing.

alwaysleg.com

dogdo.com

toiletchildren.com

mousetrapking.com

nevercompletely.com

lol

Funnily enough I am growing rooftop potatoes right now, so I'm in the market.

Alright, I'll let you have it since you're already living the roof potato life.

I got trumpdoctor.com. Seems timely.

I got dialblocker.com, that actually doesn't seem that bad.

First couple I got were asmind.com and secondhomarus.com

Utter trash

so true, still thinking about what to do with fullstackjavascript.com

Your startup name is... chlamydosaurusladybird.com

pretty catchy.

My first two tries were crylady.com and tooflash.com, both of which I can imagine people actually remembering and typing into an address bar.

Not so sure about the next suggestion of completelyvery.com though :D

Ok so I'm the proud owner of orcapunch.com. What now?

Start punching orcas and rake in that sweet sweet dough ray me.

> https://startupname.website

The best one I got was automaticgorilla.com. I don't know much about automation or gorillas, but I'm pretty sure that the intersection is an unfilled niche.

This is an excellent roadmap (or the start of one at least) to build a nice side business with very little effort. People with a tech orientation, like the audience here, are VERY far removed from how most people use technology. So austincitytours.com turns you off? Me too. But the VAST majority of people are not like you. They click on the .COM that has the name/descriptor of what they want.

No, it isn't like it was 10 years ago where people would type the thing in and add ".com" BUt it's not that far off either. A LOT of traffic will gravitate to the trustworthy sounding .com

Additionally, as a guy in the lead gen business I can tell you that every business out there wants more demand. Finding partners to offer fulfillment takes almost no time at all.

The hardest part, perhaps the ONLY hard part of this whole model is getting traffic in the first place. As for me I don't spend any time at all on dropshipping or service fulfillment but rather on simply selling the leads. Leads are worth a LOT more money than many people realize.

I own a bunch of domains but don't really follow the expired market...however the example expired domains in the post seem really expensive for a side project.

If I were looking to invest $5-$15k cash into marketing a random new side business and still needed an idea, it seems like it'd make more sense to follow the post's advice by watching the expired domains come through, then take the inspiration from, say, 'bakedbeans.com', but buy 'stevesbeans.com' for $7.95 and put the remaining cash into performance marketing.

> domains in the post seem really expensive for a side project.

It's probably worth considering that the domain is an asset you can resell. Plus, an auction should, in theory, limit your potential losses to amount you outbid the previous winner by, since they theoretically would buy it. The math is probably a little more complicated but you get the idea.

> It's probably worth considering that the domain is an asset you can resell

Yes this is true. Also, I've met one of the top domainers of all time who got in early and one of the things he told me was that valuations have gone up considerably, in good part, due to the interest by foreign entities who want the .com for its prestige and to be able to tap into the US market, and/or be the sole branded domain for their worldwide presence.

That's the worst advice ever. Domain parking is a business and if you specualte randomly you are probably going to lose money.

typical HN comment. meanwhile the author is doing pretty well for himself doing just that.

A lot of stock market investors are doing pretty well too, but an average person investing as a side business are still probably going to lose money. A lot of MLM/direct sales people make a lot of money but most end up losing money.

It’s not an either/or.

This is a guy who accidentally spent 4 figures on a domain he didn't want. And it was no big deal to him because he knew he'd be able to break even on it due to his expertise

He's an expert domain reseller. Novices would get burned.

I've been in the room with people spending well over $10,000 on domains. It's crazy. I could never guess that actually happened until I saw it myself.

I thought those prices were just absurd fantasy

I've bought 2 at a higher price: someone was squatting on my employer's name and I didn't let them know who I was and I got it for $1500. Another was curecf.com: I have CF (Cystic Fibrosis) and didn't want it to get misused. (I paid $250)

It's just a business expense, right? If you're actually going to be building a business on a domain name, it doesn't necessarily make sense to cheap out, just like any other business expense.

It's not about cheapening out, it's an exorbitant amount without much real customer value. "news.ycombinator.com" apparently works just as well as if this was "techtalk.com" or "bizchat.com" or whatever.

Yahoo isn't about cowboys, Amazon isn't about rainforests, uber isn't a firm from Germany, Google isn't about mathematics... It really doesn't seem to be correlated with business success.

Any made up name will do. Blorpblip, flipturf, dundrill, yepyip, nodnod, whatever. Those only look weird because it's your first time seeing it. Substance comes before brand

The meaning is assigned by the business praxis, not the other way around.

Yeah all this agonizing over domain names makes me think of middle school "bands" I was in where we spent more time riffing on possible names than we did practicing.

Does it though? There's little doubt in my mind that this site would have far greater reach (the actual desirability of that aside) if it were located at hackernews.com. I have no idea what the current owner would want for it but I'm sure it's substantial and rightfully so.

That's only because of naming cadence.

If they really cared they could come up with something. There's countless clones and proxy sites with closer and shorter names but they don't have large audiences because having a 4 (cuil) versus a 10 letter domain (duckdudckgo) doesn't actually matter - only what you put there.

I spent over 100k on a domain. Sometimes there are very few great options that ever come up and if you value the brand name itself and the fact that search traffic on the domain has a financial value (and you're already bidding a lot of $ on those terms for a single click) then it can easily pencil out.

Did you RTFA? He isn't parking the domain, he is picking one and then building something small around that.

To me domain parking is akin to real estate investors just buying up land and hoping some large company suddenly wants it and offers you a ton of money.

Domain parking is a 'business' that isn't adding any value whatsoever.

> Read this story about Warren Royal of Bobbleheads.com

Cool, are there any other stories about lottery winners I should read before I buy my scratch-offs?

Why is Bobbleheads a lottery win? Buy a domain for something people like to buy. Find a supplier to manufacture them. Build a reputation with good product and service. Has to be as far from a lottery winner as exists.

I sort of did this the other day, I've got an idea, I think it's a good one, but it's inchoate. I got a domain name (.live because it was on sale! $6.99!) and spun up a $5/month VM on digital ocean, running Caddy server (https FTW!) to present a bare landing page with a little animated network eyecandy.

The point is, it's so motivating! I feel like a real participant now! I'm on the Internet y'all!

If you sign up for a free Cloudflare account you get HTTPS, and you can point it at a Github Pages page for FREEEEE :-)

Cheers! Thanks for the tip.

They also let you serve a static site over IPFS from your domain with a DNSlink record, also for free. :-)

there's a lot of value for $5 though. many, many things you can do with an ubuntu droplet. digital ocean has excellent tutorials for a lot of them too. it's fun.

Yeah, this. :-)

I didn't read the article before posting above. (ORT: Only Read Title.)

FWIW I think the article is stupid now that I've read it.

"Ignore the bird, follow the river."

Deploying to Heroku for free is ... well ... free.

And as you're opinion also seems to be: Domain names hardly matter (and won't be around forever).

s/you're/your/

Heroku is a sucker machine.

Save $5 as well and host it on a Github repo and attach it to Netlify!

And yet, I still didn't make a single dime from http://butt.ventures

locutusofb.org has not turned out to be a boon for me either.

Yet. Growth mindset.

You still can. You just have to go all in on that sex toy VC investment fund. Though it might end up being a bit of a pain in the ass ;-)

The author of the article would probably scold you because it's not trustworthy. You lack the .com

butt ventures Dot Com

I own failingventures.com, perhaps we should partner.

Just a reminder that the type of person who comments on HN is probably not that representative of the average consumer.

I don't know if the approach outlined in this article is a good one or not, but I wouldn't be even slightly surprised to find out that the way the typical person searches for things, selects results, evaluates credibility, and takes action, bears virtually no resemblance to how many of us here on HN approach the same things. So take all the withering criticism of this article and approach with a huge grain of salt. I've made many hundreds of thousands of dollars online with methods that would never work with many HN users.

I don't think I would have started rsync.net if the domain rsync.net had not been available.

It sounds ridiculous - a completely artificial stumbling block that would be easily hurdled ... and yet ... the entire basis of the business was a cloud storage platform that was so basic you could understand exactly how it worked just by seeing the domain name.

As an aside, I asked for, and received, explicit permission from the maintainers of the 'rsync' tool before launching and using the domain name ...

So many domain names I bought and never used. Haha the idea seems so great at the time. I suppose you just have to go about trying different things until you start to have some traction. it's just important to recognize that it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking something is going to be super simple, and then starting to execute without any sort of detailed plan. The result ... Wasted time and money

Yeah, but it's a relatively low investment and you often just need one idea that works to pay for all the crappy ones

Or just keep telling yourself that

found the VC

> You chose BikeTours.com didn’t you? You better have.

If in a hurry, I am basing my decision on search engine rich snippet. If there is a lump sum in the game - I'll check both sites.

> If you didn’t, you can close this browser tab

Thank you for saving my time :)

Bit of a tangential rant ahead...

> Shhhhh shhhh. It’s ok. Sure, some domains were. And the buyers aren’t scumbags. If someone buys real estate dirt and won’t sell to you for pennies 10 years later, do you suck thumb and whine? Nah. Same deal here. While you were binge watching Walker, Texas Ranger in 1995, these folks were spending hours faxing through domain name orders & risking their own cash on a new thing called the Internet. They’re just investors, and smart ones at that.

Every asshole has a way to rationalize his or her behavior. Scalpers, thieves, scammers, et. al. justify their toxic behavior exactly the same way. Being a saavy business person doesn't make you not a piece of shit. I see real estate and come to the exact opposite conclusion of what's written above. It is shitty that you get to bleed money from me just because you showed up 50 years earlier with $30k before I was even born. How the fuck is that business accumen? It's profiting off of your position against people who never had the same opportunity. I would call it predatory.

Isn't the same true of Bitcoin or much of everything else?

I guess it applies to almost anything where arriving first gives you a significant advantage over those arriving later, and you use that advantage to extract value from those who have little or no choice but to follow you.

"That’s what I’m trying to introduce – that domains can be viewed as a trustworthy asset."

Totally agree with this, back in print days great typography featuring ample white-space was a signal to the consumer of a high end / luxury brand. Perhaps the unstated logic is we make so much money that we can spend much of it on empty space ina fancy magazine. That is a kind of gravitas in design which implies success which implies authority / social confirmation. A more desirable domain name can be seen in the same light, "ohh they must have spent a lot for that name well can't be some fly-by night operation." Cost limits creating exclusions serve as signals of authority / reliability / success etc. all over the place, think of the country club, it's got a very high membership fee, if you're there you must be wealthy and important, and imagine the networking. That is the logic anyway.

What is a great domain name? Decades ago it was essential to have an e in your name (eBay et al), then it was cute to replace that e with i, but the whole while the golden rule was to definitely whatever you do, do not use a name out of the dictionary, to make it easier for consumers to identify your product and to save you legal headaches.

Nowadays, companies seem to love having a real dictionary name. Lemonade: refers to the drink, the renters insurance startup, and a chain restaurant in my town, and google couldn't tell you which one I want at a particular time, because Lemonade is a terrible name for your company. Pretty much any piece of software or company with an English word for a name is immediately forgettable in my mind, and impossible to follow up with due to piss poor SEO on the 2020 internet.

>Decades ago it was essential to have an e in your name

howabout turbobiking2000.com

2000 is the most futuristic number, as we know.

>Decades ago it was essential to have an e in your name

Then, for a while, it was de rigueur to drop the 'e' out of your name; flickr, tumblr, grindr... etc.

And then there was a time with a my... prefix like myspace

Something24 was also popular

And of course ending with dot com

dot io is pretty hot now, and some others seem to be (i love my dot cloud domain), and maybe some will be cooler than dot com as time goes on. i think the trends of tld popularity/trust will be a pretty interesting thing to watch.

All I can say is that I wouldn't go into this business today without either lots of automation (someone a while back had a script that flagged single-dictionary-word dot-coms as they expired) or some statistics-backed way of identifying keywords likely to pay off down the road.

For anyone interested, or likes looking at recently deleted/expired domains, Pool.com has an interface to find these: https://www.pool.com/deletingdomains.aspx?ia=DomainsDeleting...

I'm not in the business, but occasionally browse to see if any "local" domains pique my interest. You'd be surprised how many people "let" their domains expire - if I was a less than ethical hacker, I'd be able to hold many local organizations and businesses hostage (without infringing on trademarks).

What a shitty thing to suggest doing—especially at this time.

The author acknowledges that it is unethical.

Comment author here: Yeah I don't get it either, I clearly said it was unethical. Oh well.

If you want to snag it before it gets returned to the registrars then it's a good option.

Just because someone lets something expire doesn't mean they can't afford the registration during a crisis. They have a redemption period anyway before you can snag it with Pool or SnapNames. An annual domain name registration is not expensive.

I've looked at that pool.com site a few times, out of idle curiosity. Every time I do so, I never fail to be amazed at the absolute mountain of complete junk domains that <someone> <somewhere> has registered.

They seem to fall into two categories; the "my cat walked over the keyboard" + <dot>com ones, like 342yfgtg.com and the "maybe if I add another word, I'll find a combo that's not been already registered" + <crappy new TLD> ones, like "topgoodholidaybargainsales.info"

It's all very well the author of the article coming up with a "buy great domain name > profit" get rich quick scheme. But it's a bit like those "how to make money online" articles which advise you to "start a blog about something lots of people will want to read". If having a good idea was all that was involved in getting rich quick, most of us would be millionaires.

Personally, I think the most of the new TLDs are complete junk. I did snap up a 4-letter<dot>bid one, when they first came out, purely because there was some stupid offer on where you got something like ten years for a few quid. But I only use it for testing random web stuff on. I don't think I'll ever do anything serious with it.

I am lucky enough however to have a 5-letter-real-word<dot>net one that I registered back in the 1990s which I use for my business site and my IRL name is unusual enough that I was also able to snap up myfirstname<dot>net and mysurname<dot>net a few years back as well. I tend to prefer <dot>net for my domains as I think it rolls off the tongue nicer than <dot>com.

Speculation-wise, I've registered a handful of domains over the years, in the vague hope I'd some day be able to sell them on when their 'subject matter' became popular, but nothing ever came of any of them and I ended up just letting them lapse as I'm too poor to keep renewing domains I don't use, on the off-chance.

I can barely remember what any of them were now. Apart from one which sticks in my mind; "genet-X.com" which I registered back when genetic engineering was just starting to get talked about in the news. I had high hopes that some thrusting new biotech company might spring up with that name and offer me untold riches for the domain. But no-one ever came a-knocking, bearing sacks of cash and I let that domain expire with all the rest and my dreams of riches!

Yeah. There are tons of bad domain names on those drop lists. I wonder what the deal is with that too.

The new TLDs aren't that bad IMO, especially if you want something short and memorable for a quick site. Last year I wanted a non-SSL site to help out with captive portal redirection and I was able to register wifi.help rather than some crazy long name on an ogTLD.

Not all the new TLDs are terrible. A few of the short ones like <dot>me [for a personal site], or <dot>info for a reference site are OK. But I think a lot of the other ones do sound really dodgy. If I saw a link to a company website with a domain name like <dot>bargains, <dot>blackfirday, <dot>creditcard, <dot>discount... [to pick just 4 at random near the top of a very long alphabetical list] I'd avoid them like the plague.

They just set off alarm bells in my head that, at best, I'd be venturing on to some godawful spammy site, loaded down with a dozen hacky-tracky javascripts and, at worst, I'd be opening up my computer to god knows what insecure data processing.

Funny how the <dot>xyz domain [which, to be fair, wasn't one of the worst of the new ones] attained a measure of respectability when adopted by Google, in their Alphabet guise.

For those who have bought domains but haven't had much time to develop them (like me..)

https://www.newsy.co

It's something I've been working on to scratch my own itch.

thanks for the link. it looks great and is inspiring. i have a domain that seems right for this and will try it.

Isn't that mostly copyright infringement? From what I understand, it does automated copying of articles and images from other blogs?

I run a ramen profitable SaaS and did this. I don't really have a comparable but I think it helped my product gain traction.

The problem is, the sexy keyword I used was an OSS product (my product is a wrapper over it) that was discontinued over the years. My domain+brand still references this product though I have moved over to the "modern" equivalent OSS version.

So now, I think my domain name is a liability, implying out of date/obsolete technology.

I do also own the equivalent domain name for the new OSS software, will use it for a v2. So if it's an industry you care about, keep up to date :)

While everyone in here seems to disagree, I believe that a good domain name can be worth a lot of money, if it comes with links and traffic.

For example, purchasing a domain to market my audio app which has 100+ inbound links and 500+ unique visitors per day from various blogs for relevant keywords.

If you convert 10% at $9.99, that traffic is worth roughly $15k monthly to you. But it might have been worth significantly less to the previous owner, who only used adwords and didn't sell his own product.

Can you really convert 10% of that sort of traffic though? I would have thought 1% would be ambitious. Quite prepared to be wrong though - I suppose if the relevant keywords are really strong then maybe it would perform higher.

It's a niche product and people who search for those keywords usually already know what it is and that they need it.

That's the beauty of organic search traffic.

When I did paid ads, in the other hand, the best I remember was 2% click rate, then 20% trial download, then 10% purchase. At those percentages, a $2 cpm will cost me $5 per acquisition for a $9.99 app, so I have little wriggle room before it becomes cash flow negative.

Interesting! How did you find a relevant domain with backlinks that were going to work for you? This is something I've looked into in the past, but discounted as I thought it wouldn't work, so would love to know more about how you did it...

What name? Is it like appname.com or audio.app or audio-app.com ? Perhaps it is best to purchase them all?

Reminded me of the recent corp.com story that Microsoft eventually ended up paying for to a well known domain gatherer. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/02/dangerous-domain-corp-co...

I tried to register a really cool name. Suddenly it was registered after all. Funny how that goes... Thought me to never trust a domain name registrar again. Could I have sued them? Perhaps, but at the time that was way too economically risky a prospect for me to undertake, while most likely having to pay court costs even if I won.

Yeah, happened to me once and got the same suspicion as you. I let it go and moved on as well

> I tried to register a really cool name. Suddenly it was registered after all. Funny how that goes... Thought me to never trust a domain name registrar again.

Let me guess… GoDaddy?

Yes, don't search for domains at GoDaddy unless you are going to buy it right away if available.

No, some other local site. Was a real bummer, and pretty sad business practise if you ask me.

Don't remember what this practice is called but these scummy businesses buy it for a limited time (to hold it for a few weeks) in hope that _you_ who search for that name would buy it for premium price.

"That’s what I’m trying to introduce – that domains can be viewed as a trustworthy asset."

To this point: My name is Josh and I'm from Minnesota (abbreviated MN in the states), and I have josh.mn. People seem to think I'm a big deal.

I'm not.

On the one hand it is harder and harder to find a decent dot com domain name, on the other hand I see some crazy prices that make absolutely no sense. Even if you choose to buy a name on the second market why pay these ridiculous prices?

https://www.healthinsurance.com sold for over 8M bucks, is the difference between this name and something like https://insurancemavens.com (for sale @ $395) worth 8 million?

It comes with the expectation that the average user is dumb enough to think that by going on a "premium domain name" that it, therefor, makes the product better and marketability even more attractive.

It's stupid.

Yet it works, because someone's grandma will always type healthinsurance.com and get phished before they find the actual website for medicaid.

It depends on the marketing budget. If you're spending $100+ million / year on advertising, paying a few million dollars for a domain may make sense if you're plastering it all over other print and digital media.

You have to think of it in the context of how much money some companies spend. DigiCert sells a "Secure Site Wildcard" (non-EV) SSL certificate for $2k / year. If companies are willing to pay $2k / year for something that advertises their stupidity...

Healthinsurance.com sounds super fishy to me and I would be hesitant to do business with a company that hides who they are. My expectation is that a company's domain is the name. So unless it is "Health Inusrance, Inc.", this seems shady.

This article is from 2017.

After seeing the prices that these "premium" domain fetch auctions for a side project it reminds me of a quote: If you want to become rich in the music business, sell instruments.

Domain squatters are making a killing by selling generic "premium" domains to startups that odds are will not get off the ground. And then the process starts all over again with the domains cycling back through the expiration -> squatter -> auction process.

This seem smart but I have a bad feeling about the success rate. The article seem to imply a lot of survivorship bias by only talking about success.

There's something gross about DNS land grabs.

Something that came up with our team the other day, somewhat related. How do you guys feel about .net when the .com is unavailable?

tbh this is far from the reality, not everyone is capable of selecting industries at random and making turning it into a profitable online storefront, in fact ide go so far as to say that a physical storefront is easier these days. Have read the vidalia onion story, its great but the fact of the matter is without an immense amount of knowledge on things like web marketing and SEO, you are going nowhere. I use to own the domain name fixmyfreecreditreport.com, we were piggy backing off of myfreecreditreport.com, driving traffic was still a massive undertaking, and then trying to get those visitors to convert into customers for lead generation, yikes. Shortly after that owned groomzter.com, still own this but shut it down after 6 months for the same reason, driving traffic. Want to rank for that common of a keyword? You had better be a fucking ninja at SEO, or have someone working for you that is.

if this idea has merit (ironically enough) it means that ideas themselves are even weaker than one might expect in terms of startup outcomes.

however, i'm skeptical. i think there is a need for some early initial conditions for startup idea conceptualization that matter other than drawing a name out of a hat. perhaps its just a multiplier and pure execution wizardry can get you through anything by just doing lean startup methods. but i can't get past the idea that the best companies grow out of a seed that originates in deep domain knowledge, but then lets go of assumptions from that point and iterates with users from there. you're not gonna get that seed by just picking up a domain randomly. it feels to me like this is a worthy concept though for taking the idea of lean startups to its logical extent - if nothing else, respect the 'purity' of it conceptually.

Reminds me of when people say 'you don't need fancy equipment to make music'. Sure, you don't _need_ it, but a new fancy synthesizer or guitar is investing in your own ability to make art. More than the instrument itself, knowing I made an investment in myself helps motivate me I think.

A tool is a tool, domain name can be a marketing tool, if you can establish a trademark that is

I think that you are at least 20 years late for building a real domain business. I have been into in that game for more than 15 years and yes, it is fun, but it's not a (profitable) business. And if you want to make it profitable, it's not even close to a sidebusiness.

This feels like the domainers fallacy.

If this was true, then search.com would be more important than google.com right?

We've gotten a lot of flack over our domain name, from everyone except our customers. https://terusama.com.

Has anybody ever experimented with how company names relate to clicks in email campaigns?

Haha, it's a good point about customers not caring about that stuff.

Side note though, the stock video at the bottom of your homepage made me irrationally upset at how pointless it was.

My problem is that I go through spree’s which I was fine so you’re later when Go Daddy tries to hit me with a $500 bill.

That’s how I lost: Porcelain.com Getreviewed.com Helpmebreathe.com And a few others well hundreds of others but the stand out

Reminds me of the infamous milk.com squatter

dishing out the fu while waiting for the fu money:

http://milk.com/value/

Also, pick a value prop that you enjoy fulfilling. You'll do better at it. My current project has "Fast" in the name. Building fast software is always fun.

This article is very cultural-contextual. Indians are more likely to click on .in because it's more likely to have Indian languages supported, etc.

What about for non dot com domains, any advice?

Am I the only one who tried to click all the underlined sentences, which look very much like a link?

author here.. I need to fix that.. working on it.

I don’t expect much from bland domain names like keyword.com

Which one would you visit? search.com Or google.com

I'm the owner of BitHub.com. Who wants to help to make a side-business out of it? :)

I could send you some bits

Feel free to reach out, would love to chat.

Not sure what is the real business? If you want to start a new business, you got an idea and then try to find a domain name. Or random like the b head story, find a name and start a business. Or ... initially that is what I thought, buy some domain name and then re-sell it once success (but seems odd, it is very old squatter hat).

What is it?

Sounds like a solution in search of a problem

I hear jet.com might soon be available.

I think I might start an airplane brokerage.

I feel attacked! I was scrolling HN, not Facebook!

dongtales.land

Isn't this the basis of domain squatting? Buy up great domain names and sell it.

This article sucks. I think author is brain damaged.

Alright y'all I bought cum.pizza where's my million dollars

There is something about this guy's writing that really irritates me. He writes like he is condescending to millenials by emulating their stereotypical speech patterns. It's hyper-conversational.

Domain name is one of the "trends" where being early literally pays (the other ones are crypto and making fart apps for iOS).

(Un)fortunately, what's left are ridiculouslylongnames.com that somehow still sells for a few hundred a pop. The long tail.

I'm not a fan of that. Instead, when .id was open for public, I immediately acquired generic names such as every.id, awesome.id, printed.id, even ultimate.id (notice a pattern?).

I own a few hundred in total—managing them is a headache. I've lost a handful of really good names because I forgot to renew (last-minute renewals due to limited budget and procrastination). Also, sometimes I wonder about the performance of my assets, and whether I'm profitable.

I'm building an app, Axtiva, to help manage domain names. It's not a unicorn idea, but I'm scratching my own itch. If you're in a similar situation, take a lot at https://s.id/axtiva-android-test or just put your email in https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/axtiva so I can update you when it's launched in iOS (it's a Flutter app).

Domain squatters are the worst

Reply on news.ycombinator.com