How I saved $39,420 by not buying a domain without a prototype | Hacker News Reader

How I saved $39,420 by not buying a domain without a prototype

adamduvander.com

22 pointsturoczy36 comments

Why, just this morning I saved myself 360 million dollars by not buying a Boeing-747!

http://www.boeing.com/boeing/commercial/prices/

It warms my heart that Boeing has pricing information available, even if it's just average prices. I hate that "Call Us" where the price should be and needing to go through excruciating pitching by sales droid to get further, I'll ask them how their product is more special than a 747 next time....

Without providing an easy way to pay they are losing lots of potential customers. If they just added a simple Stripe form, their conversions would double overnight.

Not unless they offer a large discount -- Stripe can't process transactions for a million dollars or more: https://support.stripe.com/questions/what-is-the-maximum-amo...

Fee = $360,000,000 x 0.029 + $.30 = $10,440,000.30

They could really reduce that fee if they started accepting payments in Bitcoin!

How much does a phone line, a bank account, and a sales-person costs on average?

It is tempting to go with this line of reasoning :-) Although the more salient point is getting a better handle on predicting the return on an investment. I'll admit that I've bought a third party accessory that I was "pretty sure" would work with something, only to find out that it would not, and then being unable to return the accessory. That really was money down the drain. My wife, being much more frugal than I, has pretty much trained me out of that habit. And of course it is especially dangerous in business.

i saved 15% or more by switching to geiko

I actually made $500 by buying a domain without a prototype. Back in college I started working on a personal project I decided to call "Silicon Brain". As soon as I had my first 5 lines of JavaScript I bought the domain name "sibrain.com". Fast forward a few months... I've lost interest in the project. Someone contacts me looking to buy the domain, I accept, payment is made within a week, and I am $500 richer.

[EDIT: Thanks joelrunyon for the cached copy.]

I'd like to make a counterargument: that if you think of a domain name that's relatively pronouncable and not extremely limited in scope (e.g. "joes-art-supply.com" would be pretty specific, but "joeworld.com" doesn't limit you as much) nab it. Granted, you don't want to be doing this every day, but remember, "google" was once a nonsense word (okay, it was a misspelling of a number that was rarely used outside of certain contexts).

The guy who bought the domain from you could have saved himself $500 had he not bought the domain before prototype (the site is dead).

Good point. I'm probably only justifying my "habit" here...

and now its just a parked 'for sale' godaddy domain. The early web pioneers thought domains would help produce more websites. Instead they're abused as investment vehicles while we keep stripping away vowels to find one that isn't taken.

Are you arguing that domains haven't helped produce more websites?

His numbers seem a bit off & inflated to make the point.

For example - why does he have to buy 3 domains per idea he thinks up? Getting the .com alone would be sufficient until he actually does have a prototype. Similarly, why is he bound to hold on to them for 3 years a piece?

A good alternative would be the "1 year rule" or buy a domain & commit to not renewing if you don't have a prototype finished by the first year.

All of a sudden - instead of risking $40k, you've got that by a factor of 10 (and that's if you're actually buying a domain every single day). At that point - the domain buying either needs to be a part-time job or is a really bad exercise in procrastination & distraction.

Alternative Numbers

> 1 Year - 365 Ideas

> Domain - $10.50

> 1 Year = $3,650

Yeah, my numbers were inflated, but even with your numbers the point is the same: work on your idea first and only buy its home when you're ready to launch. Thanks for reading.

and make a more than a mental note to cancel the domain name if you don't use it in a year's time. It's the re-occuring domain charges that really get you in the end. (no pun intended).

Site is down.

Mirror here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

Thanks. I didn't expect you guys to find me. :)

The reasoning here is a little silly; even those who pursue ideas without prototypes or validation probably don't buy up three domains every single day, so of course it's not a matter of saving forty thousand dollars.

However, this does bring to mind two good points:

* Consider validating an idea, or at least making a paper prototype, before spending lot of time or money chasing it.

* Getting the perfect domain name for an idea is not crucial to its success. Look at Dropbox, they used getdropbox.com early on, presumably until they were big enough to buy dropbox.com.

The truth of Dropbox's acquisition of dropbox.com is a little murkier than them just buying it - it appears that they initiated this by suing the previous owner, who had owned the domain since 1995:

http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/californ...

However, the case was later dismissed, so I guess they came to some other agreement after all:

http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/californ...

No details on whether the initial owner had to give up the domain or was fairly compensated.

> 1 Year - 365 Ideas.

I don't believe someone can buy domains for a spur-of-the-moment idea back-to-back even 3 days before he'll realize he has a problem. I would think that you can at least remember than you bought a domain yesterday and try to work on it a little.

> Just about every day I have at least one new idea.

Jeez, and here I am having trouble coming up with just one.

The best way to overcome this is to keep a running list of any business or project you think of that's even remotely worthwhile. Continually groom and sort this list. It's like how comedians and writers come up with material, a lot of them carry around a notebook. Your brain gets used to having this background thread that is coming up with ideas and seeing all your ideas laid out in writing spurs new ones.

I think the main problem (for me) is that I live in a vacuum. I work in a tech company that engineers products for engineers. I've surrounded myself with so much tech savvy people, and places that I don't have inspiration for problems I am capable of solving. My desire is to create a product for "normal people"... but i don't know what "normal people" have issues with.

Are you not a normal person yourself? Do you not have problems? Go scratch your own itch!

Just yesterday I chewed through a (pretty good) idea for a modern review-oriented site for gear-centric hobbies. As a guitarist and photographer, I read a lot of gear reviews, and the sites that provide them are often horrible to use - 2002-vintage antiques, or ugly and unnavigable, or both. But the hobbyists have well-used forums (awful ones), enough to make a living for some small time businesses.

So the other night, I was researching Japanese kitchen knives, as I'm planning to get my daughter some for Christmas, and butted into the same problem. And I thought, "Wouldn't it be great if someone built a really modern review app and built hobby gear review sites with it?"

I spent a couple of hours poring over the financial model for such a business, and decided it was a bad idea. Running on ad support and waiting for the content to build would be a slow, painful time with a fairly low income ceiling.

But hey, want an idea? There's one. Run with it!

Maybe take some time to live a little. Move cities and try working remotely from a small town. Or work abroad. Work with a consulting company servicing a variety of industries. Get a job teaching at a community college. Or vary your reading and start focusing on news from an industry outside of the Internet-centric world. And if you're in SF even moving to LA might give you a very fresh perspective. Also, I do think it's important to unplug and do absolutely nothing on a screen sometimes to give your brain a chance to come up with totally new ideas--try daydreaming.

Unfortunately, this is the shared reality of many in the Valley. And that's not to say you should feel any less or more guilty than others faced with this dilemma.

The challenges that exist with developing products for "everyone else" are nothing short of daunting. For one, anything that comes with high cost and high functionality will most likely intimidate the average consumer.

Much easier to develop for those who are more savvy than your average Joe blow who doesn't wish invest the time nor money while adopting a new product. Even with all that being said, I do believe there needs to be more of push to cater to those who aren't as sophisticated.

Figuring out which problems should be solved is a pretty hard problem in itself. Maybe you could ease that pain point somehow?

I probably didn't save as much as the OP, but I saved a good $1000 of my domains. You see, domain registration becomes addictive, when you get an idea, you are so convinced that it would work and it will make you rich (probably) over night. I've fallen for this trap too, I registered some top notch domains in a span of 2 years, amounting to a total of ~50+ domains because of that sudden impulsive urge - "Oh, it's available! I should register it ASAP!"

Contrary to popular belief, there is (in my personal experience) not much (monetary) value for domains as the registrars and the others might want you to believe. I registered some really short, cool names that were estimated by 'domain experts'/appraisals estimating some of my so called premium domains for $1000's of dollars, yet in the end, I had to pay money to domain marketplaces (like GoDaddy) to list my domain for sale, only to discover that the demand isn't just there at all. A few scammers contacted me about their domain appraisal and brokerage services and that was just it. And unless you have a really really valuable domain that has some actual traffic in it, this is not worth investing your money in.

So, I just let the domains expire one by one. At first it was kind of painful, but after two painful years and after losing $1000+ dollars, I can tell you that when you have the actual product ready, the domain will be the least of your problems.

> When the domain version of the name is available

When did that ever happen?

For every prototype I have build, I (or we in some cases) spend days looking for good name-domain combinations.

In my experience it is a real pain to find a domain worth buying for a specific idea, let alone 3 per day.

Overall point is good, but while I could believe someone could come up with a reasonable idea every day of the year, coming up with a good enough name for each one that's worth registering seems unrealistic. If you can do that, you could have a mind blowing career in branding ;-)

If you buy a domain for x and can't resell it for some approximation of x, then you paid too much.

How I'm gonna save time by not clicking on linkbait.

403 I Didn't Buy a Domain

site's down, perhaps a sign from the domain gods??

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