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Park.io – automating tasks to make $125k per month

indiehackers.com

111–120 of 210 posts

Re: Park.io – automating tasks to make $125k per month

#111
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it has more to do with the fact that we've all wasted countless hours cycling through domain names only to encounter landing pages from squatters like park.io.

Squatters are the ultimate douchebags of the Internet era. I there should be some sort of tax for squatting a domain name. I.e first 10 domains names are cheap then they get expensive.

If ICANN charged $5 a month for all domains perhaps it would not be so lucrative to sit on domains.

Though it would still be profitable for some domains.

The money could pay for ICANN or whatever.

Re: Park.io – automating tasks to make $125k per month

#112
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it has more to do with the fact that we've all wasted countless hours cycling through domain names only to encounter landing pages from squatters like park.io.

Squatters are the ultimate douchebags of the Internet era. I there should be some sort of tax for squatting a domain name. I.e first 10 domains names are cheap then they get expensive.

There is a tax: it is the domain renewal fee.

Re: Park.io – automating tasks to make $125k per month

#113
post #64

I might get downvoted for this, but here's a story. We just finished picking a brand name, after 2-3 months of intensive work. Being fond of .io's I naivly googled my .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 clev…

That's how ticket scalping works.

Re: Park.io – automating tasks to make $125k per month

#114
post #92
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This guy built a million dollar business in a year providing a service that people want to pay for... I say "Congrats!" 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 f…

Don't hate the player, hate the game.

Hate both.

Re: Park.io – automating tasks to make $125k per month

#115
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah but this can be done for much less and if the domain is actually worth anything (it has backlinks, age, and traffic) you will pay for more than $99 since you will be competing with many other bidders. This is a huge industry and you're competing with Russians , eastern Europeans and others who scan for domains thousands of times a minute and check them for rankings and other factors...Very seldom does a good dom…

I suppose that is why he is making $125,000/month running this business and you aren't. You see no business model here but he obviously did and is benefiting from it. 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 sexi…

"I suppose that is why he is making $125,000/month running this business and you aren't."

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.

Re: Park.io – automating tasks to make $125k per month

#116
post #4
post #2

For those getting a 502, I'm working on the server, Elastic Beanstalk didn't scale fast enough >. Cached version here: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:F0QdH3... Or if you refresh a few times, it should come up.

Yeah you usually need to warm it up if you're about to expect a lot of traffic because it can't really deal with that. That really shouldn't be an issue for a site like this though, because you can just host it on a CDN...

How exactly does one go about warming Elastic Beanstalk?

I thought part of the value add was Beanstalk making it so you don't have to think about these things for bursts.

Re: Park.io – automating tasks to make $125k per month

#117
post #34

I don't understand how this can survive in the long run - what's stopping someone else from setting up an identical service at lower prices? There is literally no lock in because users can sign up for multiple services and potentially pay a lower price (depends on which one snags the domain). Or is the technology behind that unique?

Does it really matter how long it lasts in the long run if he's making $125,000 a month by himself? 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…

Yes only 1 million. It might just be worth him getting put of bed.

Re: Park.io – automating tasks to make $125k per month

#118
post #100
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone's motivations are different, but seeing as though domains are always going to become available, it seems like a cash cow that requires minimal upkeep.

He cloned a business model known as drop catching that has been around for a long time with other TLDs most notably for .com domains. If you look at how those markets evolved, there is an initial burst of profitability and then intense competition which leads to commodification and margin compression, which is what I predict will happen here as well. The smartest operators made most of their money by selling off the…

Exactly, which is why the asking multiple is too high. Fragile model with declining future revenue

Re: Park.io – automating tasks to make $125k per month

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks like cybersquatting and may be illegal. 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.

Yeah this guy (park.io) is getting free PR and manipulating everyone here. It's obvious that he is marketing himself in this thread and calls himself a hacker. The funny part is he has very little hacker credibility if he hasn't been able to get his server up all day. 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 ma…

These kinds of uninformed incendiary comments make HN so much less pleasant. Firstly, you're criticizing the founder of Park.io's hacker cred because a completely unrelated website (IndieHackers.com) that he doesn't control is down, having done absolutely zero research to find out that that's the case. If you're going to be critical, find out the facts first.

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.

Re: Park.io – automating tasks to make $125k per month

#120
post #79
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top of HN traffic peaks at maybe 50-100 visitors per second. Unless you're serving a bunch of data, it really shouldn't be an issue. One problem I've run into is (I suspect) running out of sockets because they weren't getting recycled fast enough. This went away when I switched to Snap or Happstack. I used to have to "fix" this by killing and restarting my server every five minutes.

Do you see a lot of connections in TIME_WAIT? If so I'd just bump up the ephemeral port range via: /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_local_port_range (or sysctl -w) 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 a…

tcp_tw_recycle is not what you want. It is only applicable to outgoing connections (i.e. not people connecting to your server), and even in that case provides little benefit over tcp_tw_reuse.

I like pointing people here for the explanation: https://vincent.bernat.im/en/blog/2014-tcp-time-wait-state-l...

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