PostProduction
Established Member
- Impact
- 51
Hello fellow Namepros members!
I am new to this forum and new to the domain business as well. Thought I’d say hello and also start sharing the very few experiences that I already made.
Well, I actually started to read about domain investment a couple of years ago. Can’t remember exactly how it got my attention, but it must have been around the time that the .shop extension was announced for a future release.
I do remember that my first enthusiasm was quickly drying up after I did some research, I think mostly here in this forum. Of course I also found encouraging posts and information, but mainly I understood that this industry is not at all the ‘get rich easily’ business that it looked like to be in the very first moment.
This and very often reading ‘the best names are gone anyway’ made me decide that this was not the right business for me. The variety and sheer amount of knowledge and hard work necessary to succeed just felt overwhelming.
I did however think that it wouldn’t cost me anything to pre-reserve (not sure if this was the right term) some .shop names and see if I was up for it when the .shop extension would go live - which I understood would be at least a year if not more into the future.
I almost forgot about my pre-reservations for a while and got woken up by the emails of the registrar asking me to bindingly pre-ordering the names. That was the time when I did have to start doing more research and finally decide how much money I was willing to invest and in what names exactly.
Doing research basically meant reading in this forum
While doing so I got carried away and more and more interested in this business in general. I wanted to invest in some names right away (the .shop extension starting was still a couple of month away). But I didn’t know where to start at all. The comments and warnings like ‘all good names in .com already taken’, ‘newbies, stop hand registering names’ and ‘do not invest into ngTLD’ (at least not without any experience) made my options of starting look very limited.
I was glad to find a couple of recommendations (and by far not as much warnings as in most other discussions) to invest into Indian ccTLD extension names. There would still be valuable names available for hand registration, keywords, geo and so on, also what I was reading about the growth of economy and internet in India sounded very promising.
So I did what a newbie can’t be stopped from doing: I hand registered 200-300 names, mostly .in names. I was aware that it could well be that I wouldn’t see any of this money ever again. I also knew that these would be rather long term investments and that I would need to invest about twice that amount every year if I wanted to keep holding the names (hand reg was about half the renewal price at uniregistry). I also already knew that I couldn’t tell for sure if I would be able to invest that amount every year. But I thought I’d rather sit on the names first and see how it was going later.
For about 8 months I didn’t do anything about domains, not even reading this forum. This year my income from my freelance day job (post production) most likely won’t be as good as last year so I realised that I have to do something about my domains - hopefully selling a few, more likely dropping a lot. First thing of course would be to read, read, read this forum - which I am doing every spare minute since about 6 weeks.
There don’t seem to be much discussions going on about .in domains these days. As I said I did know .in domains would be long term investments, but still seeing hardly any sales this year is a little disappointing.
Also the huge amount of dropping .in domains (names that I would certainly like to register if I could afford it) makes me realise that most likely nobody will want any of my .in domains any time soon because you can still get good names for reg fees or drop catch fees.
It is not that I would like to start over, more like I would like to be able to pay renewal for the names that I still like. Although I am also kind of glad that I found a bit more than 100 names in my portfolio that I can easily let go this year
Going through my names I do have quite a lot that I would register again and that I would find hard to just let them go. I might have to say goodbye to some of them, but I will save money wherever I can to renew and keep most of them.
So my short term goal would be to not loose too many of my domains in the first two years - for which I think I would need to sell something in the next 6-12 months. My long term goal would be to get more money out of this than I did put in - even not considering my time I would call ‘breaking even’ a success, because I most likely would have spent the money somewhere else with nothing left of it.
Even after reading here nonstop for weeks I just know that I don’t know anything. So I will be back with lots of questions in the beginners section soon.
I hope you don’t mind this 1000th ‘newbie can’t pay for renewals thread’. A few days ago somebody was writing here that ‘cashflow is everything in this business’. This seems to sum it up nicely and I thought that my case might be another good example of why it cannot be stated often enough.
On a side note: I was and I am still impressed how helpful people are to each other - in this industry, but especially in this forum. This is something that I would like to be part of!
Finally let me already thank you for the tons of useful, interesting and inspiring discussions that I had the pleasure of finding here. Thank you and hope to see you around!
I am new to this forum and new to the domain business as well. Thought I’d say hello and also start sharing the very few experiences that I already made.
Well, I actually started to read about domain investment a couple of years ago. Can’t remember exactly how it got my attention, but it must have been around the time that the .shop extension was announced for a future release.
I do remember that my first enthusiasm was quickly drying up after I did some research, I think mostly here in this forum. Of course I also found encouraging posts and information, but mainly I understood that this industry is not at all the ‘get rich easily’ business that it looked like to be in the very first moment.
This and very often reading ‘the best names are gone anyway’ made me decide that this was not the right business for me. The variety and sheer amount of knowledge and hard work necessary to succeed just felt overwhelming.
I did however think that it wouldn’t cost me anything to pre-reserve (not sure if this was the right term) some .shop names and see if I was up for it when the .shop extension would go live - which I understood would be at least a year if not more into the future.
I almost forgot about my pre-reservations for a while and got woken up by the emails of the registrar asking me to bindingly pre-ordering the names. That was the time when I did have to start doing more research and finally decide how much money I was willing to invest and in what names exactly.
Doing research basically meant reading in this forum
While doing so I got carried away and more and more interested in this business in general. I wanted to invest in some names right away (the .shop extension starting was still a couple of month away). But I didn’t know where to start at all. The comments and warnings like ‘all good names in .com already taken’, ‘newbies, stop hand registering names’ and ‘do not invest into ngTLD’ (at least not without any experience) made my options of starting look very limited.
I was glad to find a couple of recommendations (and by far not as much warnings as in most other discussions) to invest into Indian ccTLD extension names. There would still be valuable names available for hand registration, keywords, geo and so on, also what I was reading about the growth of economy and internet in India sounded very promising.
So I did what a newbie can’t be stopped from doing: I hand registered 200-300 names, mostly .in names. I was aware that it could well be that I wouldn’t see any of this money ever again. I also knew that these would be rather long term investments and that I would need to invest about twice that amount every year if I wanted to keep holding the names (hand reg was about half the renewal price at uniregistry). I also already knew that I couldn’t tell for sure if I would be able to invest that amount every year. But I thought I’d rather sit on the names first and see how it was going later.
For about 8 months I didn’t do anything about domains, not even reading this forum. This year my income from my freelance day job (post production) most likely won’t be as good as last year so I realised that I have to do something about my domains - hopefully selling a few, more likely dropping a lot. First thing of course would be to read, read, read this forum - which I am doing every spare minute since about 6 weeks.
There don’t seem to be much discussions going on about .in domains these days. As I said I did know .in domains would be long term investments, but still seeing hardly any sales this year is a little disappointing.
Also the huge amount of dropping .in domains (names that I would certainly like to register if I could afford it) makes me realise that most likely nobody will want any of my .in domains any time soon because you can still get good names for reg fees or drop catch fees.
It is not that I would like to start over, more like I would like to be able to pay renewal for the names that I still like. Although I am also kind of glad that I found a bit more than 100 names in my portfolio that I can easily let go this year
Going through my names I do have quite a lot that I would register again and that I would find hard to just let them go. I might have to say goodbye to some of them, but I will save money wherever I can to renew and keep most of them.
So my short term goal would be to not loose too many of my domains in the first two years - for which I think I would need to sell something in the next 6-12 months. My long term goal would be to get more money out of this than I did put in - even not considering my time I would call ‘breaking even’ a success, because I most likely would have spent the money somewhere else with nothing left of it.
Even after reading here nonstop for weeks I just know that I don’t know anything. So I will be back with lots of questions in the beginners section soon.
I hope you don’t mind this 1000th ‘newbie can’t pay for renewals thread’. A few days ago somebody was writing here that ‘cashflow is everything in this business’. This seems to sum it up nicely and I thought that my case might be another good example of why it cannot be stated often enough.
On a side note: I was and I am still impressed how helpful people are to each other - in this industry, but especially in this forum. This is something that I would like to be part of!
Finally let me already thank you for the tons of useful, interesting and inspiring discussions that I had the pleasure of finding here. Thank you and hope to see you around!
