
Park.io – automating tasks to make $125k per month - csallen
https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/park-io-1
======
20years
I don't understand some of the negative comments here. This guy built a
million dollar business in a year providing a service that people want to pay
for. He did it all on his own with no other co-founders or employees. I say
"Congrats!"

~~~
victor9000
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.

~~~
nojvek
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.

~~~
jomamaxx
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.

~~~
joelrunyon
Right now, a .io domain is ~$30/year which is $2.5/month. Doubling that
wouldn't be _that_ much more of a deterrent.

~~~
jomamaxx
Good point.

Maybe they could set a 'holding price' that is a function of the likely value
of the domain name. I'll bet at $30 a month - a huge basket of names become
completely untenable to 'sit on' whereas it would mean little to the business
owner, possibly.

This is an age old problem concerning how to deal with public goods. Real
estate is the prototypical problem ... we don't consider those buying and
selling land - and not using it - to be a problem to the system, whereas we
could make the argument they are. In Vancouver and London, they've introduced
a tax on housing spaces that are empty, i.e. if you don't live in it, you have
to rent it or get hit with a tax.

------
jondot
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 <brandname>.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 clever price manipulation. Detect when someone wants something, let it
sit, and when they're ready - triple the price. Maybe that's a hint for how he
made so much money? In any way we'll just do the get<brandname>.io or
something like this, as a compromise. Thanks for being a douche, park.io!

And then, magically, this is now on HN :)

~~~
z3t4
If you buy a domain from a squatter, you encourage domain squatting. Domains
are not that important as most browsers send the url to a search engine. So
just register brand-name.com instead of brandname.com. Or pick another TLD.

~~~
Mattasher
This reads like: If you buy good real estate from someone who has a parking
lot, you are encouraging people to buy good real estate. Better to buy a swamp
an hour out of town and build your business there.

~~~
z3t4
More like someone occupying lots of parking spots outside the mall, then
charging many times the price for you to park there. Or take up many seats in
public transportation, then charge people extra to sit, or hold seats until
their friends come aboard.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Buys up deeds from people who missed paying their mortgage by a day, evicts
the owners, offers to sell it to them - or anyone - at triple the price.

~~~
csallen
More like renting an apartment after someone neglected to pay their rent, and
then continued to not pay day-after-day for the next 75 days. And afterwards,
creating a fair bidding process to allow interested parties an actual chance
to get that apartment for themselves without having to own sophisticated
technology to be the first person there.

------
poorman
NIC.IO now has backordering. In order for park.io to continue being successful
with landing and selling premium domains, he must be appraising the value of
the domain and his chance of selling it in one of his auctions. Then weighing
that against the NIC.io backorder price of 60EUR (67.35USD) + 60EUR
registration fee and finally backordering it himself far enough in advance
before someone else does (because only 1 backorder can be placed on NIC.IO).

Interview here: [http://www.domainsherpa.com/mike-carson-parkio-
interview/](http://www.domainsherpa.com/mike-carson-parkio-interview/)

------
throwawaysept
Mike Carson has put park.io up for sale. Asking price is $1.5M.

[https://feinternational.com/buy-a-website/8340-platform-
doma...](https://feinternational.com/buy-a-website/8340-platform-domain-
sales-42k-net-mo)

~~~
mikkom
Yearly revenue is $818,600 profit round $500k which is _very_ nice but if
"makes" in the title means "makes profit" as I assumed then the numbers are
not correct.

Profit of 500k / 12 = 41.7k per month, not 125k.

~~~
ca98am79
It is growing fast - avg of last 3 months is $125k. Yes it is revenue, not
profit

~~~
shostack
Might I ask why you are trying to cash out so quickly? Do you not feel the
business is sustainable?

~~~
giarc
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.

~~~
nugget
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 premium domains they were able to drop
catch early, which seems to be what he is doing also (& kudos to him for what
seems to be excellent tactical execution) - but the drop catching service
itself has steadily less value over time and of course, even in the absence of
competition from peers, is wholly dependent on the .io registrar's particular
rules regarding drop catching which can change at any time.

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

~~~
joelrunyon
3x profit is a pretty standard multiple.

~~~
edoceo
If you have a moat and growth. Not the case here.

------
cjhanks
I find it shocking that you would post on HN; "Hey guys, I make $125k/mo
making other peoples lives harder".

Given the way your current infrastructure is configured (vulnerabilities and
all)... somebody could probably cost you ~$30-70k/mo in AWS resource
utilization at a cost of ~$600/mo. The moment you park on the domain of
someone who shares your internet ethics, that will be an interesting day for
you.

~~~
csallen
How is it unethical to provide a platform that allows people get domains that
they'd otherwise have almost no chance of getting?

~~~
pimlottc
If park.io hadn't bought it, someone else would have. So how does the park.io
client deserve it any more than that person?

~~~
csallen
Depends on your definition of "deserve". With domain names, the system is
pretty clearly first-come, first-served. If Park.io didn't get domain name X,
then the next fastest person would get it, and so forth. Many other systems
are similar: renting apartments, claiming land, patents, trademarks, etc.

Obviously, first-come, first-served doesn't ensure that a resource goes to the
people who would use it "best". But what system does?

Park.io gives the average person an actual chance to win the race for a .io
domain -- a chance they otherwise probably wouldn't have -- so I'd rather live
in a world with Park.io than without it.

------
simple10
I'm getting S3 access denied errors.

Here's the cached version if you need it:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:F0QdH3...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:F0QdH3O7YG0J:https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/park-
io+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

------
fixxer
This couldn't be more click baity if the title involved "this one weird
trick".

------
chatmasta
This thread is a great example of why not to publicize your revenue or
internal systems.

At best, you'll get hate and resentment. At worst, you'll get hate,
resentment, and a new competitor.

~~~
csallen
I disagree. Lots of the founders behind companies who've shared on Indie
Hackers have reached out to me with good stories about getting more users,
positive feedback, relationships, etc. And I know a few people personally
who've given Park.io their business in the past few days, too.

Every community is different. Park.io received nothing but love on Twitter
earlier this weekend
([https://twitter.com/IndieHackers/status/779330003829944320](https://twitter.com/IndieHackers/status/779330003829944320)).
The HN crowd is particularly cynical and prone to outrage/judgment in the
comment section.

I got a similar response when I launched Indie Hackers itself in August. But
despite some negative comments, most visitors loved it and 99% of the feedback
I've gotten since then has been positive.

------
obisw4n
Doh.. this guy recently came to me and swooped an up .io I owned. I gave it to
him for what I paid for it thinking it was just an individual, should of asked
for more lol.

/me facepalms

~~~
Tech1
He paid me $500 for a two letter .io I owned. I hope you got market value!

------
intrasight
He gives some good advice for indie developers if you manage to get over the
"self-promotional" aspects of the article and read to the end.

~~~
afterburner
Ehn, his advice is pretty generic and survivor-bias-y. "Do what you like",
"adapt", etc.

------
Tinyyy
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?

~~~
pbreit
If you think such a thing that easy, you should do it. But it aint.

~~~
Tinyyy
I'm not trying to be dismissive of his impressive project, but from my
perspective, or from a business point of view, it doesn't make sense. While I
have no doubts that this was nontrivial to create, history has shown that raw
technology alone is rarely enough. Isn't trying to gain some form of lock-in
an oft repeated point on HN?

Also, could you elaborate? I do wish to understand why, if I was wrong.

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
What kind of lock-in do you get from starting a convenience store? A repair
shop? A McDonald's franchise? Those can all be quite profitable and provide an
excellent living.

Simply because competing with him may be "easy," doesn't make the business
model any less valid.

------
dba7dba
Reading this article reminds me of a story that got me on the path of Linux,
open source and away from Windows career path years ago. I was starting out my
IT career as a Windows tech at a company. One guy that was obviously smart,
Linux literate, and given a lot of responsibility at the company mentioned
that he had scripted a tool to check constantly if a domain that he wanted
became available or not. He wanted to make sure he grabbed it as soon as it
became available.

It was the first example I saw of someone automating something with some
scripting. Coming from Windows side, I was like what~~? Scripting can do that?

This was when Yahoo was the king. (I'm not THAT old).

The thing is this kind of scripting is NOT new. It was done before by others.
But with proper execution, park.io is able to generate a million dollar a
year. Good for him.

------
z3t4
this guy has found the secret recepy for making money: make a service for
something where users direcly earn money or spend money. Then automate it in
order to scale.

------
bambax
Slightlyy OT and probably naïve: what is the attractiveness of the .io TLD? If
the .com isn't available, why is .io more desirable than any other? Is there a
hard reason or is .io just fashionable?

~~~
vram22
Guessing here, but I think it's just fashionable. Has been for a few years,
from what I've been seeing. zato.io was one of the first I noticed - a Python
ESB (Enterprise Service Bus), got to know the founder, chatted a bit. That was
a few years ago. Geek chic, so to speak. Probably because of the term I/O
(Input/Output) being a tech term - a signalling mechanism to other geeks,
maybe - as in: I am a geek, come do biz with me. Playing psychologist here,
but hey, it's fun to ...

------
roflchoppa
lmao, man i liked when the term "hacker" was directed toward blackhats. This
whole "im a hacker" gig is hilarious.

~~~
AsyncAwait
> lmao, man i liked when the term "hacker" was directed toward blackhats.

Well, that usage was incorrect, but I agree that nowadays everyone's calling
themselves a hacker of some sort.

~~~
apgwoz
Enlighten us with the proper usage of the word hacker?

~~~
atsaloli
[http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html](http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/H/hacker.html)

------
white-flame
His main advice is to just "flow" on your own natural interests and success
will come.

The problem is that many people's interests have zero business potential. As
technical people, we tend to have pipe dreams about what computers could
achieve. Lone wolf AI directions, weird functional programming styles,
utilities based on incredibly niche processing, continuing retro computing
interests, custom OSes, etc.

Sure, some people have interests that happen to align with a commercially
exploitable audience, but "pursue your interest" is not a globally applicable
direction to recommend starting a business venture. Flexibility within your
interest will not help you swing a profit if your interest isn't widely
shared.

~~~
6DM
I still think it's a great starting point. You may find that it's hard to get
info about custom OSes and after a year decide to sell a book with all the
information you found.

The point is keep an eye out for problems you run into, instead of making one
up. Usually if you find it interesting, someone else will too. Plus it makes
it easier to justify spending the hours necessary turning it into a product.

------
thinkMOAR
"so I wrote a script that checked the domain every second and sent me an email
if it was available."

Whats the use of checking it _every second_ if you still need to manually act
upon your email?

~~~
pearjuice
That's what he thought, so he build park.io. Did you finish reading the
article?

~~~
thinkMOAR
Yes and it quickly sidetracks to other things that the parts that are actually
of interest, company goals etc. Not so much about automating tasks as the
title would suggest.

------
rrtwo
The interview mentions parked domains as the major lead generator... are those
domain names owned by park.io or by its clients?

~~~
ca98am79
Mostly clients

------
Quanttek
Just to clarify: Why does he call it "backordering"? I mean the domains didn't
expire yet or does he park them?

------
econner
Why the .io domains for everything?

------
mbenson2147
For some reason the URL doesn't work unless I remove the '-1' at the end.

------
mef
His hn profile:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ca98am79](https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=ca98am79)

Other projects, including what appears to be an initiative to start a new
religion? ([http://consciousness.io/](http://consciousness.io/))

[http://humb.ly/projects.html](http://humb.ly/projects.html)

~~~
ca98am79
Haha yes - that's my new religion based on consciousness. I thought there
needed to be more innovation in religion, so I started one

~~~
proksoup
As far as religions go it doesn't seem too bad at first glance.

I like it.

My current favorite quote about religion is from the pianist Seymour Bernstein
(in the latest Documentary about him, from Ethan Hawke, titled "Seymour: An
Introduction):

"I don't call it god, I call it a spiritual reservoir. Most people don't tap
that resource of the god within. What upsets me about religion is that the
answers always seem to be apart from us, in the form of a deity and we depend
on the deity for salvation, but I firmly believe it is within us."

The externality, taking someone's individuality and telling them that it's
something apart from them, that they don't control it, is also my largest
concern with religion and the thing that needs to innovated on. I _think_ your
conciousness.io fits that bill ... Would be curious to hear if my assessment
is incorrect though.

~~~
blowski
GK Chesterton:

> That Jones shall worship the god within him turns out ultimately to mean
> that Jones shall worship Jones.

~~~
proksoup
Yes, this is not good? Better than the alternative?

~~~
proksoup
I can see why a reasonable person would downvote my reply, it's short and adds
no value.

I don't know what else to say until I know where you're coming from though,
I'm honestly asking what do you mean by that quote?

~~~
alphapapa
I don't understand what is hard to understand about the Chesterton quote. If
someone thinks the answers to life and meaning and purpose lie within himself,
he effectively becomes his own god, and therefore effectively worships
himself.

Then he dies. What of his meaning and purpose then? If meaning and purpose lie
within ourselves, then when we die, meaning and purpose die as well. But that
would mean that there is no meaning and no purpose, for how can a being create
itself before it has created itself?

Therefore, if we have purpose, if life has meaning, it must come from without,
not from within. This is not to say that we don't possess "seeds" of truth and
meaning and purpose within us--but they exist only to point us toward the
truth, to motivate us to seek answers.

A search for truth that only looks within ourselves is doomed to failure, for
we cannot provide answers that we do not have. And if we had the answers, we
wouldn't need to search for them. Those who claim that the answers lie within
ourselves are deceiving themselves and others with vague platitudes, merely
taking a detour on the journey toward the truth--but how tragic a detour if
time runs out along the way.

~~~
proksoup
You think there are answers?

The search for meaning is a poorly formed question.

42.

~~~
alphapapa
> You think there are answers?

Yes.

> The search for meaning is a poorly formed question.

"Why are we here? What are we meant to do? Where are we going next?" These are
not poorly formed or useless questions.

~~~
proksoup
"Why are we here" and "where are we going" are vastly better questions than
"what are we meant to do".

Do you see the difference?

"why are we here" can mean "how did we get here, how did we come to be here"
... but if it means "for what purpose are we here" than it turns problematic
again, no?

~~~
proksoup
The search for purpose and meaning assumes there is one. It's hard to
understand how one can ask that question with presupposing that there is some
thing as an "objective meaning and purpose" and it's just really confusing to
me. If you don't see how the pasting of that quote is confusing, that's what I
meant by confusing.

The search for reasons and hows and what happened and what's next seems a lot
more interesting of questions, to me personally.

~~~
alphapapa
Well, whether "for what purpose are we here" is useful depends on the answer
to "by what means did we get here" or "what caused us to be here". If we are
here merely because of chance occurrences, then of course there is no
objective meaning or purpose. But if we are here because something or someone
put us here, then it's a good question to ask why we were put here and for
what purpose.

~~~
proksoup
Yes that's perhaps our disagreement as well, the odds of a being being
involved.

------
csallen
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...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:F0QdH3O7YG0J:https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses/park-
io+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

Or if you refresh a few times, it should come up.

~~~
blaisio
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...

~~~
wyager
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.

~~~
mitchty
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 and just bumping up the ephemeral range has been enough for
my needs.

I tend to run out of socket FD's or just FD issues a lot quicker than ports.

Just a thought, but 50-100requests/second doesn't sound like too big of a
deal. I did a quick bench of what i have setup and I get this:

    
    
        # wrk --latency -c 128 -t6 http://10.0.2.15:8080/foo/bar/
        Running 10s test @ http://10.0.2.15:8080/foo/bar/
          6 threads and 128 connections
          Thread Stats   Avg      Stdev     Max   +/- Stdev
            Latency     3.46ms    5.25ms 137.42ms   90.23%
            Req/Sec     9.84k     2.13k   19.67k    69.50%
          Latency Distribution
             50%    1.65ms
             75%    4.40ms
             90%    8.59ms
             99%   22.17ms
          589624 requests in 10.07s, 476.28MB read
        Requests/sec:  58560.86
        Transfer/sec:     47.30MB
    

Note, this is a static end point so take all these figures with blocks of
salt. But by tuning what I said I can have wrk do 2048 concurrent connections
reasonably with just a fair increase in overall latency. YMMV

~~~
pushrax
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...](https://vincent.bernat.im/en/blog/2014-tcp-time-wait-state-
linux.html)

~~~
mitchty
True enough, but its hard to diagnose what people are having problems with
with such vague wording. Some apps might have to open connections to a
backend, or not, etc...

But you're quite right on recycle for outgoing. To be honest I tend to shy
away from adjusting either unless I really need to.

------
mankash666
Remember when ticketmaster and their ilk bought, ahem bot, tickets within
seconds of release, and then sold it to you at inflated prices. all while
marketing it as a service to humanity?

Well, nothing different in this business plan either. Automating price gouging
and domain squatting might be commercially viable and legal, but it isn't the
right thing to do!

------
imaginenore
Mirror: [http://archive.is/BngRx](http://archive.is/BngRx)

------
asdfologist
Jealousy and cognitive dissonance. This guy is more successful than them, so
clearly he's done something bad.

Welcome to HN: home of the insecure narcissists who like to argue over
programming languages, humblebrag about their gifted childhoods, and prove
that they're superior to anyone more successful than them.

~~~
dang
I agree with you on the prevalence of envy in human nature (the real "hn" at
work here), but using this community to diss the rest of the community is
reliably a marker of a bad comment on Hacker News. Picking "humblebragging"
and "prove that they're superior" as the points of dissage seems extra ironic.

We detached this comment from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12576182](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12576182)
and marked it off-topic.

~~~
asdfologist
So your solution to these problems that I raised is to sweep them under the
rug.

~~~
dang
You didn't raise any problems; you postured above others. I don't know if the
bottom of the thread counts as 'under the rug', but it's a reasonable place
for that sort of comment, since it's so off-topic, common, and generic. (I'm
talking about just the second paragraph btw.) Snark is also deprecated.

I understand how frustrating HN can sometimes be, and how easy it is to get
stuck on a picture of the community as a super-annoying arch-enemy, but it's
incongruent to use HN to comment that way, since if you're commenting here,
you're as much a part of the community as anyone else is.

------
hmans
Domain squatting as a service.

~~~
aab0
Technically, it's called 'domain drop catching':
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_drop_catching](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_drop_catching)
Common service, so I wonder how park.io is so successful.

------
countryqt30
congratulations :)

~~~
paulpauper
it also drops considering his 'business' is selling a ridiculously expensive
domain back ordering service

~~~
Shank
Park.io isn't indiehackers.com, and it's currently up.

------
asdfologist
FYI dang censored my comment about how HNers react to these stories with a
jealous and insecure attitude:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12576210](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12576210)

~~~
abofh
Re-read your post - do you _really_ think that's why you were downvoted?

~~~
asdfologist
I said censored, not downvoted. My original post was at 47 points when it was
censored. If it was so bad, then why did so many people agree?

~~~
Stratoscope
No one censored your comment. It is right here on the page for anyone to read.
Dan merely moved it down on the page, and it's far from the bottom.

He even took the time to write two very polite and friendly explanations of
the action, even in the face of your hostile attitude toward him.

------
EGreg
So this guy is a domain squatter?

And all you need to do to become one is add a script? I always assumed there
was special access to top tier domain snatchers or they had some sort of high-
speed trading thing with a fast uplink.

~~~
Shank
No, a squatter buys domains and holds them. Park.io lets you buy a domain
that's going to expire before it expires and transfer it to you and charge you
if and only if it registers it before it gets sold.

Some of these domains
([https://app.park.io/domains/view/algorithmic.ly](https://app.park.io/domains/view/algorithmic.ly))
actually look pretty neat, and I could totally see this being a good market to
be in.

~~~
cwilkes
So it mostly services domain squatters.

~~~
jfoster
Isn't it the opposite? Rather than buying from the squatters, it encourages
people to "wait out" the squatters using Park.io. To me, it seems that damages
the squatting business model.

~~~
hueving
No, the gp was saying it's a perfect tool for squatters to use.

------
paulpauper
_You backorder the domain. If we get it and you are the only bidder, you pay
$99 and the domain is yours._

lol then why bother paying $99. just pick it up from any registrar for $9
after it drops

~~~
junto
I think the point is that he picks it up before anyone else does in your
behalf.

He's doing the equivalent of standing in line for you outside the Apple store
on iPhone 7 release day and then charging you a premium for his services.

~~~
paulpauper
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 domain drop unnoticed, unlike years ago
before this industry took off. Either you pay too much for a worthless domain
in or you pay the full price in auction.

~~~
20years
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 sexier.

~~~
vuyani
well said

