

Ask HN: What do think of this idea? - growt

A website that sells a few nice domain names for a reasonable price (I'm thinking of 99 dollars).
To clarify it: It would be no market place where anyone could offer their domain names. All the domains that would be sold, would be registered and sold by myself.
The "value" to the customer would be, that I would do the "creative thinking" and come up with nice, short (domain)names that they could use for their projects.<p>So what, dear HN crowd, is your opinion on this: Would I be just another dirty domain sqatter or would you consider to use such a service if you'd be in need of a name for your next project?
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patio11
#1: Your pricing is at the worst possible point on the curve. You charge ten
times more than what the inveterate cheapskates want to pay. You charge ten
times less what a _middling_ domain name is worth. You are opting to do
business with a lot of "pathological clients" this way -- they will want the
moon and stars because you cost TEN TIMES MORE than GoDaddy. (There will be,
inevitably, comments in this thread to that effect. Do you want to wake up to
a mailbox of them every day?)

#2: Let's talk inventory. It will cost you, for the sake of argument, $10 to
hold a domain for a year. That means, to break even, you need to sell one out
of every ten you register. Since you're going to be dealing in 3 word domains
primarily, that is going to be a bit of a stretch. Let's say you branch into
bingo for a day and start thinking up domains -- you can count to 500 just by
starting with Xbingocards.com and filling in topics for X. Are you going to be
able to unload 50+ of those?

#3: You need to do a heck of a lot of manual gruntwork here. Presumably you'll
automate the actual purchasing, but you'll have to think up hundreds or
thousands of domains and then sift down to the ones which are actually
salable.

(If you doubt this, I will give you a list of 500 Xbingocards.com domains and
you can time how long it takes you to winnow it down to as narrow a field as
you think is winnowable. My guess is just the filtering would take most SEOs I
know upwards of two to four hours to do if they did it systematically. And
then, of the 46 or so you end up with, will you actually be able to sell
them?)

Do this poorly and you'll be out money. You'll find that you're eventually
spending a lot of money and effort to buy yourself a retail job, if that.

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ErrantX
Firstly you would need some cracking names to be able to achieve a $99 asking
price.

Secondly your purchase vs sale ratio would probably be bad. As your not
pitching super popular domain names you have to buy a LARGE pool of "good"
domain names to stand a chance of selling some.

And finally your target market is one which might well browse your catalogue
for inspiration then make their own (far cheaper) choice [this is what I would
do]. So unless you nail all of the cool short domains then your unlikely to
sell to anyone but those who "must have" a specific domain.

I get your idea - I dont think the economics works unless you have a fairly
large initial investment to make (and have sucess predicting the domains
people want).

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peterhi
This sounds like plain old domain squatting. Think of it from the "customers"
point of view. I think that prettypinksnowflake.com is just the domain that I
could use for my project only to find you have already registered it with no
intention of going anything with it but squatting on it until a buyer comes
along.

So you are planning to be a domain squatter and all this talk of "value" is
just so much BS. However domain squatting isn't illegal (as such) and some
people seem to be making a living at it so a viable business model.

So forget the "value" you think that you are adding and start to work on the
economics of domain squatting. How much will you be buying the domains for?
How many of those will you sell, what is break even?

And remember that this is already a crowded market, there aren't many good,
correctly spelt, English domain names just lying around and guessing which
style of misspelling will become popular could be expensive. Perhaps you
should look into non English language squatting?

~~~
growt
Well I'm aware that it is a thin line between sqatting and my idea (maybe it
is sqatting after all, thats why I asked). The difference would be, that the
majority of buyers would not think of a domain name and then discover that I
registered just that name. Instead they would enter the "shop" and look around
for some name they like (and hadn't thought of themselves). Of course there is
no way to prevent that the first thing happens (and so it would make me a de
facto sqatter everytime that happens).

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gizmo
What are you really selling -- your originality, or your monopoly on the
domain name?

If you were really selling your originality, why not let people fill in a
form, you do the brainstorming, and then find a domain name that suits the
buyer's needs. Then you'd contribute real value.

But in the scenario you're describing you don't give people a choice to take
advantage of your creativity, you force them to pay you a premium, even if
they thought of the domain name themselves. That makes you a squatter.

~~~
growt
If I just tell them a free name after they filled the form, how would I get
paid? If I register the domain I have an assurance that someone actually pays
for the "idea".

~~~
ErrantX
that's the risk factor: if you then offer them to purchase the domain from you
at a reasonable price then you will likely get a sale :) this is a standard
marketing technique.

Buying the domains in advance (as pointed out many times over here) is an
increased risk factor. I dont think you've considered this idea fully if you
think that this approach is _more_ financially risk (for you) than the one you
originally pitched :)

------
chaosmachine
better idea: create a marketplace where people can resell their domains for
$99. sort of like a fixed-price version of sedo.

~~~
csbartus
I'll be one of your resellers. I have many stories to tell but often I'm
creating just the domain name, no time to finish.

And it is fun to think an idea, brand it then sell it to someone _who_ is the
guy to develop it.

The package would be: the story, the domain name + additionally a visual id.

~~~
ErrantX
THat has the added bonus of pulling the theme of the marketplace into an
"ideas" market rather than a domain market (which might have slight negative
connotations).

The domain name gives the idea intrinsic value and the idea adds value to the
domain purchasing experience. Win win.

~~~
growt
I like your suggestion a lot. I came up with this idea because I have some
domains from unstarted projects (already with corresponding ideas). So I might
as well try to sell the idea along. It would be an experiment, rather then a
business I guess, but lets see.

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ideamonk
Think of this - a great domain name comes into my mind, I go to checkout if
its available, and I see that your service is selling it for $99, how pissed
off would I be, thinking "one moron spends his 24 hrs buying all the goody
domains and selling back for $99, I have to pay $89 extra for all the creative
thinking I did."

I might give $500 then to mediadefender or russian botnet lenders to bring
down your service as my revenge for a short while.

So, Yes you would be a dirty domain squatter. And if competitor services grow
around your model, it would be worse for all of us.

Well, I am aware that this kind of work is _cheap_ so why don't you sell a
good domain for $12 or $15 instead of $99, it doesn't take $89 to think of a
good name does it ?

Creating a demand for something by taking it away from the reach of people is
generally bad in my PoV.

------
sos
I don't think it's domain squatting, because I can see the service you're
selling is coming up with a good name, something I've struggled to do myself.
Not everyone will see it that way, but that's ok because some will, as long as
the website emphasises the creative aspect, searching by topic, etc. It's like
paying a graphics artist to make graphics for your game instead of doing them
yourself as they would have done in the old days.

But your payment structure makes it difficult. As much as I can agree it's
something worth paying for, I would still want to get it for free if I could.
Like ErrantX I would probably be tempted to just find a name on your site that
I liked and use it as inspiration for another name that is still available.

------
satyajit
How about calling yourself domainsquattr.com (still available!)?

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midnightmonster
I wish good domains did coast $99--then there wouldn't be so many squatters. I
don't think you're providing much value, and I do think you'd make much money
at it, but I wouldn't be terribly offended if I found you had registered a
domain I wanted. Having recently spent hours and hours trying to find a domain
in a very competitive space, $100 sounds just fine compared to $1000's or not
available at all. OTOH, I was pretty exhaustive. If you did go for domains in
my field, you might not find any worth $100.

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Gibbon
There's already a service called Picky Domains at
<http://www.pickydomains.com/> where you pay a deposit in exchange for
suggestions for names from their contributors.

If you see a name you like, you register it yourself and the site pockets half
the fee, with the other half going to the contributor.

------
gamache
You would be just another dirty domain squatter, yes. (And as such, I would
wish the universe to burn fire upon you and your distasteful little
enterprise. I am not alone in this.)

I will never give a squatter a dime. If you squatted a name I thought to buy,
I would just choose another name. In reality, you'd just go bankrupt before I
ever heard of you, because there is no way you're gonna flip 1/10 of what you
squat. That's why real squatters charge the big bucks.

------
pbhjpbhj
Suck it and see. The cost to you is pretty low financially. Buy up 10 domains,
perhaps in a related field, do your magic on them and see if you can sell any
... when you sell one buy 10 more. Rinse, repeat.

~~~
synnik
... and with that business model, you'll lose $1 on every sale. :)

~~~
pbhjpbhj
godaddy says $1.99 for new .com domains, .us are 4.99, etc.. It was a rough
example:

"Buy as many domains as your profit will allow until you have amassed a
reasonable quantity and are selling domains quickly enough to make a business
out of it" was the intention.

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diN0bot
what makes domain picking and selling so interesting and popular? quite a few
startup ideas/implementations pass through the hacker news front page, which
is why i'm wondering.

~~~
wglb
Maybe because it sounds like a business that is easy to get into. I first
heard this sort of idea in the late 80's.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
In the 80s? Really? You heard about domain squatting back then? Why didn't you
do it? You could have had sex.com, microsoft.com, sony.com, ...

~~~
wglb
We were in a different business and I thought that would be a distraction. And
it just didn't seem right to me, but I am just a simple country boy.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
When I first came in contact with the 'net ('94) I didn't imagine that you
could just choose a domain name and register it. I imagined that you needed
lots of infrastructure to host a site. I reckon anyone who knew that you could
just register sex.com and had used the internet would realise that this would
probably be near the top of the most visited domain names of all time.

Were domains expensive back then?

Oh, when you say "not right" do you mean not ethical?

~~~
wglb
Right, not ethical.

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radu_floricica
Make up 10 domain names, buy them and sell them on ebay or various sites. If
you sell more then 3, it's worth a shot.

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ideamonk
I think its Domain Squatting 2.0

