Biggest Mistake MADE

[JamesDavid]

I thought it would be informative if some people wanted to share the biggest mistake they MADE. NOT the biggest mistake they didn't do. People wont learn from your mistake "I thought of facebook but never developed it".

What will be informative is if people just say a mistake they MADE.

I will go first..


I can say the biggest mistake I have MADE would be buying into the gTLD hype and registering 5 .asia domains.. I want to say that at the time I pre-ordered them they were like almost $200 a piece..

I secured 5... and let the 5 drop after the first 2 years...

It was a costly mistake as the $1000 could have been used elsewhere..

I will NEVER buy into the gTLD hype again..

 

[seven]

.Mobi - This hype happened at the exact wrong time for me (just beginning) and I bought into some reg fees that cost me about $350. Most domains were dropped.

.WS - Made my own hype on this one. Regged a bunch of decent 1 worders but still almost all dropped. About $400-$500 here.

Late night registrations - Do yourself a favor. Unless you 100% without a doubt know the domain is awesome, wait until morning. I've registered names and then woke up wondering what the hell I was thinking.

Someone mentioned the Godaddy auto-renew. I haven't gotten burned by this except for maybe 1-2 domains at full renew but EVERYONE should be very careful with this - especially if your CC has a large limit. Godaddy auto-renew will claim a lot of victims so be careful. If anything, just use a CC with a limit of $500 to be extra careful.

Let some names drop I shouldn't have. Just didn't stop to think about why they could be valuable and they ended up being valuable. This will probably be at least a mid $x,xxx mistake.

Should have been more selective with my names.

Not thinking about domain names or at least starting a website in the late 90s. I was on the Internet back then and I should have realized the potential a lot sooner. Again, just wasn't thinking.

-------------

I'll go ahead and disagree with two things said to be mistakes.

One is .tv. .TV is actually being used by many people and has worked out well for video sites. If you have a name that fits the extension, it can still be valuable.

Second is sell a domain any time you get a good profit. There's a fine line here between maxing out a domain's value and selling it to fast. There are plenty examples of someone making a nice flip and then watching that flip look like chump change later on.

 

[Archangel]

They're a great service until you wanna DO something with your domain, like transfer it out

what's wrong with 1and1?
is it a bad service?
got a few names myself.

 

[ninjadomain]

Sold a domain for very cheap only to get a call a few days later from someone offering me over 10x more than I sold.

 

[Archangel]

A lot could be learned from reading this. Reps added for it

.Mobi - This hype happened at the exact wrong time for me (just beginning) and I bought into some reg fees that cost me about $350. Most domains were dropped.

.WS - Made my own hype on this one. Regged a bunch of decent 1 worders but still almost all dropped. About $400-$500 here.

Late night registrations - Do yourself a favor. Unless you 100% without a doubt know the domain is awesome, wait until morning. I've registered names and then woke up wondering what the hell I was thinking.

Someone mentioned the Godaddy auto-renew. I haven't gotten burned by this except for maybe 1-2 domains at full renew but EVERYONE should be very careful with this - especially if your CC has a large limit. Godaddy auto-renew will claim a lot of victims so be careful. If anything, just use a CC with a limit of $500 to be extra careful.

Let some names drop I shouldn't have. Just didn't stop to think about why they could be valuable and they ended up being valuable. This will probably be at least a mid $x,xxx mistake.

Should have been more selective with my names.

Not thinking about domain names or at least starting a website in the late 90s. I was on the Internet back then and I should have realized the potential a lot sooner. Again, just wasn't thinking.

 

[dna]

I didn't buy botany.us.
It was just after the dot us lottery
and botany was still unregistered.

 

[labrocca]

I try not to be upset and regret domains I sold for what I know now are worth $xxx,xxx. I had a few. I did sell them in $x,xxx ranges though and was happy at the time. I sort of don't count them as mistakes but instead I view them as lessons.

I think my biggest mistake was a massive PSP site I owned which was making good money and was #1 in the field. I made some ambitious moves in a short period of time including domain change, seo, and forum software. Ultimately I ruined the site. This was another lesson of course but one where I really felt I took a hit. The good news is that now I have a forum that's Alexa 3000 and making great money. It's bigger than NP and DNF combined and has more activity than DP.

Reality is that none of us would have success without failures.

 

[steveteva]

reg fee a domain name 2 years ago, put for sale fixed price here for $120, no buyer, I lower everyday up to $25.00 : ZERO buyer
Then I contact many professionals related to that domain: No answer

One day a member here contacted me and ask for $99 I was like happy as no one were interested even for $25.00, it's a premium domain but in a non dot com. So I ask him more $150, he accept.

1 year later I see on DNjournal sold on sedo for $1750

Listen learned:
1: Wait for your luck to come
2: Never sell low when someone comes to you

 

[domainbartender]

My biggest mistake was purchasing a website without asking about hosting first. I was planning to transfer it to my cPanel, but apparently it was set up on a Plesk server with a lot of customizations and would not work there. The server would cost me $110 per month, I wasn't ready to spend it. Loss of $260.

 

[GF]

Registering numerous .mobi when I first started domaining, then turning down $100-200 offers on some of them. Ended up dropping them all.

Also registered a TON of LLLL.net after seeing what happened with LLLL.com. I let all of them drop.

 

[bulkdomainz]

Not having found this site as a newbie domainer!

 

[GF]

Another mistake I have made - drinking and registering domains.

That was the inspiration for this comic strip by Chef Patrick:

 

[dungdenvn]

wow you guys have a lot of bad experience, consider me still lucky

 

[theSun]

i failed to snap a name which was later sold at 15x the purchase price.

 

[Bannen]

No huge mistakes, but a few medium and small ones:

- letting DrawstringSweatpants.com drop. Actually I regged it in a shared account that I had with a person I was doing a minisite project with, we had a lot of names. I just assumed he'd renew it again until I could get around to the minisite (I was too busy for a long time). It dropped last summer - of course, the expiry warnings went to his email - and in the fall I'm 'Okay, let's do that one', and he's 'It's long gone'. I could have shot something. Huge exact monthly searches, stellar minisite name. It was scooped up by a dropcatch, now it's an Epik site.

- regging a bunch of terrible names early on, simply not knowing they were terrible. You know how we newbie domainers were so excited by crap names back then, thinking we'd get a million bucks from each one

- letting drop a bunch of names that actually WERE great names, but I didn't know it once the original attraction wore off. Man, if I could only go back and cherry-pick from the lists of names I let expire. I just want a dozen of them or so. Please let me take them back.

- putting off regging names I KNEW were very good, simply because I figured I'd think on them for a little longer. Like, a month or a year. Ah, inlinking.com, dateViolence.com, rollingLaptopCase.com, Fiyt.com (great fight brandable), and about 300 more names like that... sorry I put you off for so long. Au revoir.

- regging a dozen names at 1and1, another handful of names at Yahoo registrar. Newbie fool, newbie fool. Thankfully I figured out how to let them expire. Caught a couple of them with a new better registrar.

- buying a few good LLLL at the height of the LLLL spike, then selling all of them for a third or a quarter of what I paid, a year later. Ouch. But then, I don't feel as bad as some LLL owners; there was a time when you couldn't buy an LLL for less than $6500... and a lot of the 'crappier' ones are now selling in the 3000 - 4000 range.

I think that's about all. Oh, and registering a few typos and TM names back in the day. I haven't had any of those for a few years now though.

Actually, it's my domain partner that made the big ones. She paid $6K for that stupid StoresOnline fiasco, this company sent reps all over US and Canada, revving up people at seminars/talks, selling huge and vastly expensive courses. Total schlock and it took in a lot of people. She didn't tell me she had done the thing until it was over. I wasn't angry, just wish I had known; man, if she'd taken that 6K and bought up every ccc.com for sale at the time for $50 (which is what ccc.com's were going for then), we'd have made 5 - 6 times our money back by now.

- she also fell for an appraisal scam, paid out $60 before we figured out it was a scam.

 

[louddrums]

It was 1997. I was at work, it was payday and I was buying my first domain name while sitting at the computer. I had both Whatever.com and MakeSeriousCash.com in the shopping cart at Network solutions. At $70 per name I could only afford one name at the time. I had picked MakeSeriousCash.com instead of Whatever.com...

 

[Archangel]

SEDO and places like dnsalesprice.com are to blame here IMO. "Domain.com is listed for $100,000 on SEDO! I should expect a domain like ADifferentDomain.cc to sell for at least $10,000!" "Wow, that one sold for half a million! I'll hang-reg one with the same words but with 2 others added to it & in a different extension and swell it for $10,000 or more!"

We've all been there :p

You know how we newbie domainers were so excited by crap names back then, thinking we'd get a million bucks from each one

 

[gemstar]

Failed to reg names in 1993.:td:
a,b,c,d,e,f,g, and so on .com

 

[JamesDavid]

One mistake I HAVE MADE and am now correcting is not reviewing my portfolio more often..

I just went through my list of 300.. Found 75 I will drop for sure. and another 50 I am still deciding about...

 

[DomainTalker]

yeah - i did not clean my order in my pool account and they capture them when they dropped and i got them all back again ...

Awww, that's awful!!...To make a mistake, drop the domains - and, then - get them all back again!!...I feel for you on that one...


I went through .mobi....Then, .asia...a bit of .Tel.... (sigh).


...I finally got it....and, now basically only invest in .com - the best quality I can find & afford (apart from the odd very special brandables, such as Phone.Me, or Movie.info).


Also, I WAS online in the late 1980's, and 1990's....and (like so many) just didn't focus on the potential value of domains until MUCH later...(Sigh, again).

.

 

[steveteva]

Not the biggest but today I reg a misspelling domain, my eyes are tired and I need glasses. After reg done, I type url and was showing another site
Then check domain account and URRRRRRRRR! have see a l rather than a i...
Lucky it was reg fee but still not worth, so I delete instantly, don't want to see that name in my account. And man this is the 2nd time in 1 less than 72 hours and in my entire domainer life. I might stop for a while but can't like all you here.