Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Yes, I went to a stem college. I don’t understand this.
Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)
Yes, that part I knew.
I sell onions on the Internet (2019)
61–70 of 180 posts
Re: I sell onions on the Internet (2019)
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been doing some version of this since college. ...holy shit that's almost 20 years. It started as a bit of a joke on the "That's a good band name" line. It became "That's a good domain name". Yes, I went to a stem college. Anyway, i've started 4 pretty decent businesses based entirely off that bit. My friends and I would be riffing out behind the pizza place/bar we frequented, someone would say something and the…
> Yes, I went to a stem college. I don’t understand this.
My guess is that he took a meme for normal people ("that would make a good band name") and twisted it into a more nerdy version ("that would make a good domain name").
Re: I sell onions on the Internet (2019)
#63author here : ) happy to answer questions if you have any. We also have a twitter account here if you want to follow along: https://x.com/vidaliaonions
Is anyone really getting into trouble growing Vidalia onions not in Georgia? Like if I plant some in my yard and start selling them online or at the local farmers market, what is anyone really going to do? Seems kinda weird they have a government granted monopoly on them.
If you grow them in the Vidalia region (20 counties around Vidalia, GA), you're aok... but if you grow them outside of that area, and call them a Vidalia, you'll get into hot water. The law mainly came into existence cause Texas farmers began growing regular yellow onions and slapping the 'Vidalia' name on it, and customers would get pissed. So all the Vidalia farmers got together and got a Federal law passed that says you can only call an onion a 'Vidalia' if it's grown in our special region down here where we have sandy, loamy soil that contributes to the mild, sweet taste.
Re: I sell onions on the Internet (2019)
#64The internet was originally promised as a way to disintermediate these kinds of supply chains, yet we often ignore these "boring" businesses for hype trains. The fact that he added a phone number and it sometimes out-sells the website is the cherry on top.
I've found more and more often the last few years that a lot of the long time businesses I use still do most of their ordering by phone. Or some version that involves talking to actual person. The restaurants I go to still generally do phone ordering because they care about the quality of their ingredients. They want to discuss and talk about it with someone before placing an order. The engineering and consulting fir…
can you elaborate on the phone basis with engineers? I can’t really imagine how that wouldn’t be much more hassle discussing details without written documents, so I’m intrigued
Re: I sell onions on the Internet (2019)
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
What mainly caused it: I kept getting laid off, and that nonsense infuriated me. So I was actively trying to find ways to save myself. Great domains, via the expiry marketplace, slowly became an unfair advantage I could lean into and compete with larger companies, just because I owned this unique .com domain. Hope that makes sense. I've written a few essays on my experience being laid off, if you're bored and wanna r…
oop, didn't see your 2nd question... yes, I still monitor expiring domain names... it's a very sticky habit, and ruthlessly fun... it's sortof like my morning paper.
Where do you go to buy expired domains? Also, are there that few domains expiring on a given day that you can actually go through them?
Re: I sell onions on the Internet (2019)
#66author here : ) happy to answer questions if you have any. We also have a twitter account here if you want to follow along: https://x.com/vidaliaonions
How would you market such a business in 2026? I am from an Italian region where farmer grow many special coltures, and I was always a bit surprised why they don’t try selling on the internet. I ended up convincing myself it is not a viable business model.
I live in Sweden, and almost every year I discover someone I work with or have friends in common with, who has a friend or relative in Italy, or Greece who farms oranges/olives/cheese or what have you. And this friend in Sweden is selling their produce by word of mouth.
So once a year at harvest, the relative has someone drives a truck full of olive oil 2000 kilometers north, and dozens of Swedes turn up at an appointed time on a Tuesday afternoon in a parking lot to pick up their order of six bottles of oil. The prices are no better than in the supermarket, but ostensibly you’d get a high quality product.
It’s a funny way to do business in 2025, completely without Internet infrastructure. Somehow, I don’t think it would work as a web shop.
Re: I sell onions on the Internet (2019)
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hey good to see here! I have a quick question if I may ask but your whole journey and even the article starts with the "I’M ADDICTED TO DOMAIN NAMES" / Addiction to domain names. So I am wondering was there anything specific that caused this "addiction" (in a good way?) perhaps and has the addiction stopped after www.vidaliaonions.com/ or is it still continuing?
What mainly caused it: I kept getting laid off, and that nonsense infuriated me. So I was actively trying to find ways to save myself. Great domains, via the expiry marketplace, slowly became an unfair advantage I could lean into and compete with larger companies, just because I owned this unique .com domain. Hope that makes sense. I've written a few essays on my experience being laid off, if you're bored and wanna r…
Thank you for your response :)
I had seen your comment 5 minutes after you sent it but decided to read both of the articles and think about it
You are one of the few people who can say that they declined the offer at google and I am sad that you didn't get the bean bag :Now on a serious note, I feel like there are some immense similarities between your story which happened 20 years ago and what's happening now with the AI hype
> It was a gut punch face slap. My replacement, who’d only been there a few months, avoided the hatchet (cheaper salary, I presume). I would have stayed and worked for free if they would have asked. They didn’t.
I am also like you, perhaps the thing which interests me is that for me coding/tinkering with homelabs/servers are just things which I want to do even as independence or even for free :)
Shame that the company didn't work out. In retrospect, its all good now but that does feel like an action of mismanagement from the company's part because you clearly loved the company and who knows what might happen with the person you trained for months and how much they loved the company or benefitted the company ykwim
You write really clearly and I really appreciate it a lot and I feel like this sense of flow guiding us to where we are is definitely true :)
I recently spent a quick chunk of my month or two thinking about a problem that I solved for myself but it felt like that it could have abuses to the point that maybe most large cloud providers/providers might shut things down or would be an hassle. So I thought of an cloud provider which can understand the idea of things similar to the fact that there are different instances and dont shut down the servers due to complaints or anything
I wanted to build a cloud where saas providers wouldn't have to worry about servers. The servers can be deployed for the people themselves and have hourly pricing for what they use instead of how most saas stuff work nowadays of fixed pricing.
I am not sure but this idea required me to build my own cloud of sorts or build on another and I am just a 17 year old guy so I thought that most major cloud providers are really kind of no go so I looked at more hidden cloud providers like upcloud and scaleway and so so many others and I think OVH could be good for that idea or upcloud is good too but the thing is that upcloud has some nicer features like auto-scaling in vps's/a really good support system that I liked.
Well I still didn't have a credit card but since I wanted to buy vps's or similar. I started looking at lowendtalk and black friday and started talking to vps providers on lowendtalk and here and I think that its a very resource/cost intensive process and I just didn't feel right about reselling
Then I started feeling like how to build my own cloud. I found WHMCS + virtualizor and they were paid and so I started tinkering even more and just today found incus and started to self host incus and I bought myself some domain name and some cheap netcup server to play with things.
All while I was preparing for one of the toughest exams (JEE) so that definitely took a hit but talking to vps providers about finances and etc. makes me feel like right now is just not the time about it and the best thing I can do is to familiarize myself more with hardware stuff and buy cheap laptops and create homelabs with incus and play with hardwares too and get a job at IT/any related perhaps. Lets hope that any company looking to hire can take hackernews points into account too :)
I am still in school and I feel like coding is something that I can do too (Although vibe-coding hell is real so I am probably gonna learn it and give it time) and then contribute to real projects along the way
Honestly I still don't know what I want to do with my life but I feel like working at such providers or any similar things where I can do things like this, maybe perhaps even working at any massive hyperscaler perhaps if I "grind" extremely hard from here on out for career opportunities.
This is also the reason why I got interested in your story of domains because the vps providers usually provide domains too and I wanted to know the finances of it and why you got addicted and other things so once again thanks for telling me about it
Its funny but I used to be a coding -> finance -> started using linux ..... -> extremely coding oriented (both software and even appreciation of hardware nowadays)
I find your story really inspiring because one of the issues I felt is that I will always be judged by the degree I have and things like these don't really matter but your story is something that I resonate with a lot in my own way and I am super happy that you are now doing things which you are satisfied with. I wish to do something like this in my own way. I just want "enough" and I don't know if it would be jobs/business which would be the key to that (I hope jobs personally) but I am keeping an open mind on the whole situation and sorry for the long message
But your articles are something which have just resonated with me unlike none other right now. I am going to join the newsletter and have a merry christmas and a new year from here on out. Wishing the best for you, your family and your business and have a nice day Peter!!
I think I might take a drop year perhaps just to study JEE again to focus to get into a good college since the competition here is immense if things don't work out but from here on out, I do wish to keep these ambitions in check as they impact my studies but I study so that one day these ambitions/hobbies can be my job :)
Although I love the idea of a business and I might start one from my extra funds of jobs perhaps but the thing is I just want a job one day of things which I enjoy doing because I thought about it from sides of finance in the sense that retirement/financial independence would just mean doing things I like and I can have something like this in the IT/CS industry and I am young enough that I am still in school and even right now I can spend 1 year again to just prepare to get a good college which can play a massive role in my country atleast to get a job.
I wish the job market was less of a fear mongering pester right now where I feel like I need a degree for which I need to study things like chemistry (No offense chem, but you just don't tinkle me the same way containers do) and the immense competition and everything makes me feel like odds are definitely stacked against me but we don't know how it pans out but hopefully I can carve a niche for doing the things I enjoy as a job one day and get highlighted from this "passion" that other people name so. My mother says that I should stop doing these things and focus on my studies and she's probably right but man oh man I can't really explain it to anybody how I feel sometimes but its something that I am gonna have to figure out I suppose. Probably gonna go back to studying. Took a one hour long break :) writing it and thinking about it but well worth it.
Once again have a nice day peter!
Re: I sell onions on the Internet (2019)
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is anyone really getting into trouble growing Vidalia onions not in Georgia? Like if I plant some in my yard and start selling them online or at the local farmers market, what is anyone really going to do? Seems kinda weird they have a government granted monopoly on them.
There are a lot of food and drink items with official legal definitions that include the region of origin. The most famous one is champagne, which can only be called champagne if it comes from a specific region. You can think of the name as being inclusive of the region, not simply descriptive of the variety. So if someone made a sparkling wine in a different region and sold it as champagne then they would be committ…
> You can think of the name as being inclusive of the region, not simply descriptive of the variety.
The term of art is terroir [1], which is the "character" of the environment the plants are grown in. It's often that a region will have some special characteristic due to geology that allows a unique flavor profile to grow so these trade names are the equivalent of a terroir brand.
Some designations are more strict than others, though. IIRC in the case of Vidalia onions the soil is low in sulfur so the biochemical pathways in onions that produce astringent compounds are nutrient starved. As far as I know most sweet onion varieties nowadays are grown in similar soil, but they're not legally allowed to call them Vidalias.
Re: I sell onions on the Internet (2019)
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've found more and more often the last few years that a lot of the long time businesses I use still do most of their ordering by phone. Or some version that involves talking to actual person. The restaurants I go to still generally do phone ordering because they care about the quality of their ingredients. They want to discuss and talk about it with someone before placing an order. The engineering and consulting fir…
can you elaborate on the phone basis with engineers? I can’t really imagine how that wouldn’t be much more hassle discussing details without written documents, so I’m intrigued
A picture paints a thousand words
Re: I sell onions on the Internet (2019)
#70author here : ) happy to answer questions if you have any. We also have a twitter account here if you want to follow along: https://x.com/vidaliaonions
Is anyone really getting into trouble growing Vidalia onions not in Georgia? Like if I plant some in my yard and start selling them online or at the local farmers market, what is anyone really going to do? Seems kinda weird they have a government granted monopoly on them.
It's similar to French wines and cheese. News to me that we have this in the US but it totally makes sense. We have a few of these in the PNW, like Hermiston melons and Walla Walla onions.