Your domain journey. Share your successes and failures.

[domainseller200]

Back in the mid/late 00s I used to do a bit of web design for family and friends. Around 2012, I'm not entirely sure what sparked the interest, but I thought it'd be fun to look into building affiliate websites for myself to earn a bit on the side. That ultimately led to me searching for "exact match domains", which in turn led me on to domaining in general. I started with just booking at public drop-catchers, earnt enough to register for my own TAG and sign up with DropSystem, then earnt enough through that (insolvency .co.uk at £10k helped!) to develop my own script which is where I am now.

My biggest success now is a domain sale this year for £50k, I was all ready to go bleating off to DNJournal when the buyer slapped an NDA on me. The domain was forming part of a larger portfolio of his that he intended to sell on, and did not want potential buyers to know how much he paid for the main asset. Along with that and insolvency, I've had a good stream of £xxxx sales over the past few years. I'm currently negotiating with three potential buyers on a domain that was only recently caught at a public catcher, I think it will end up in £xx,xxx territory.

Failures.... in the early days, Warrior Forum saw me coming a mile off. I wasted so much money on abysmal PDF guides, software, backlink packages etc. I've tried to erase that from my memory! On a domaining level, I definitely used to jump the gun too quick. One of my first big sales was a domain I emailed out to potential end users with an asking price of £8k, a guy got back literally within minutes offering £6.5k which I accepted and invoiced for, only for someone else to come back within the hour and offer the £8k. £1.5k "lost" through noob excitement. I also made schoolboy mistakes with a few early auctions, for example tripods .co.uk went for peanuts. Someone here then posted in the sold thread that selling during school holidays is generally not a good idea... bloody obvious when you think about it. I also auctoned tennisrackets .co.uk which only fetched a couple of hundred, only to see it then sell on Sedo just a few months later for £2k.

Domaining has been very kind to me over the past few years, it has earnt me more money than my "proper" work in education. I think my portfolio might be creeping in to £xxx,xxx value (I appreciate that means nothing until it's realised). My goal is to pay off our mortgage within 5 years, which will make life very comfortable for my little family. Onwards and upwards!

Well done! My favourite post I have read on here in all of 2016

 

[Murray]

This is a part 2 from my earlier post, covering special drops

So 2013 I started a year with dropsystem, in April 13 I was looking over a list of domains and I noticed "coherence" was suspended but nowhere near it's expiry date, I actually asked about it here

I came to learn that domains registered to dissolved companies became suspended and had a different drop sequence - Nominet would contact the owners to tell them to update the info, 30 days later they would suspend the domain, if no contact back roughly 30 days later they would drop the domain.

So I built a list of domains and owners, got it down to just good domains owned by limited companies, looked for dissolved ones, then reported them to Nominet and kept an eye on them

Later on I got someone to make me a script to go through a list of company names and check their status

Through this method I managed to catch domains like coherence, unite, jolt, hail, tournament, item, border etc

I switched to DaveP's catching script in 2014, can't remember which domains were caught on which

Anywho, there were also other people watching the domains I had reported (not as many as you would think though, barely any honestly), so I missed out on names like learn, warm, reality etc but I caught more than I lost out on so I can't complain

A good while ago now Nominet changed their policy and if a domain is registered to a dissolved company is just suspended and drops as it would normally; obviously that's the only reason I'm talking about it

Really I should have got more domains than I did, should have had a better system earlier to find such domains, so all though it made me good money I feel I left a lot on the table.

Also towards the end Denys picked up an interest and this was around the time he was catching everything, so finding names for him to catch made me a lot less motivated; I actually switched to trying to find longer 2-3 word and more obscure names that would still have value that he might not be watching

I've had luck with domains no doubt but I feel I put myself in the position to be lucky.

 

[timter51]

Wow... never knew about that! So if you didn't know exactly the day the domain would drop, did you have to chase across days you thought it might?

 

[Murray]

Wow... never knew about that! So if you didn't know exactly the day the domain would drop, did you have to chase across days you thought it might?

Not many people did, and those that did didn't seem to be doing it actively or must be on bad scripts

There's some postings online about it before I started doing it, even on the domainlores blog
http://blog.domainlore.uk/tag/expired-domains

Yeah you didn't know exactly, just roughly 30 days and it had to be a working day because they were put into the dropcycle by the person handling the dissolved case (so didn't have to chase after them weekends)

Usually it would drop within 5 days of when it was suppose to, but other times you would be chasing for 2/3 weeks

It was a bit annoying sometimes because you would be missing out on chasing good standard drops

I remember chasing 3d for a month and finally they fixed their details instead of it dropping, that was a bummer

I also remember one occasion, probably because I got my math wrong, where cottage dropped a day before I thought it would, I checked in the evening and saw it was FTR and thought oh s%^! lol hand regged that

 

[ian]

Anywho, there were also other people watching the domains I had reported (not as many as you would think though, barely any honestly), so I missed out on names like learn, warm, reality etc but I caught more than I lost out on so I can't complain.

Ah good times, I picked up on this immediately when entering this game; I remember questioning it on a thread and Murray immediately telling me to shut up haha (in a nice way). I believe at the time, only myself and Murray were actively looking and reporting domains (some didn't agree with us doing this). Did very well from it, but equally, we made a lot of money for a handful of other catches who simply let us do the work, and reap the rewards; the nature of the process.

PS - Nominet must have hated us (they did!).

 

[aZooZa]

Interesting trip down memory lane:

http://www.acorndomains.co.uk/threads/who-introduced-drop-catching-at-nominet.110209/

 

[TallBloke]

+1 for the Domain Game book by David Kesmodel as mentioned by Edward.

Richard Kershaw (@QualityNonsense) mentioned it a long while back and I bought a copy on ebay for a couple of quid the other month.

Fascinating read for the most part and a good history of the early days of (.com) domaining.

Makes me think that there's a "next big thing" out there somewhere that a handful of people are currently plugging away at. Not sure that it's all the new gtld extensions... but maybe it is?