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

deepsouthventures.com

191–200 of 225 posts

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

#192
post #164

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.

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.

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

#193
post #79
post #23

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).

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

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#195
post #57

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: ref…

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.

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

#196

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.

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

#198
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.

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

#199

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 significan…

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.

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

#200
post #18

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…

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

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.

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