Every time I look at a domain, I end up back at the same question. Who would actually buy this?
Not who could use it. Who'd write the check.
There's a big difference between those two, and I've talked myself out of remembering it more times than I'd like to admit.
It's easy to convince yourself a name has hundreds of buyers. Own something in accounting software and you can pull up a list of accounting firms that runs for pages. Own a construction name and there are more contractors within twenty minutes of my house than I could email in a month. The math looks great right up until you notice that none of it means anybody wants your domain.
That's where I think we fool ourselves. We count possible users and call it demand.
I'd rather own a name with five obvious buyers than one that technically fits five hundred companies.
Picture a domain that exactly matches the name of five growing companies, and not one of them owns the .com. One's sitting on a hyphenated version. One's on a country code. One added "get" to the front because that's all that was left the week they launched.
Those five matter. They already like the word. They're already building something around it. You don't have to sell them on the term, which is usually the hardest part of the whole job. The only open question is whether owning the better address eventually becomes worth real money to one of them.
Now hold that up against the generic two-word domain that five hundred companies could supposedly use.
Sure, all five hundred could use it. Do any of them have a reason to? That's the question nobody wants to sit with, because the honest answer is usually no.
So when I'm sizing up buyers now, I look for signs of actual need instead of category overlap. Is the company already using the word in its own marketing? Did it just raise money, or start spending on ads? Is the domain it's on today awkward enough that somebody inside that building has already complained about it in a meeting? Has it quietly picked up the .net and the .co around the same brand, which tells me somebody there is thinking about this before I ever show up?
Those are real signals. "Operates in the same industry" is not.
You can watch this play out in the reported sales every couple of weeks. In August, Stan.com sold for $750,000 through Lumis. The buyer was Stan, the creator monetization platform that had been running on StanWith.me and then Stan.store before it finally went and bought the matching .com. That isn't a company browsing a marketplace hoping something clever jumps out. That's a company that had already built the brand and got tired of explaining its own URL.
This changes how I think about outbound, too. If I have to build a three hundred row spreadsheet to convince myself there's a market for a name, I'm not doing research. I'm reassuring myself. I've built plenty of those lists. They feel productive on a Sunday afternoon and they almost never turn into anything, because a name that needs three hundred prospects to look viable is a name I already know is thin.
None of which is a guarantee. Five buyers can turn into zero. They rebrand, they get acquired, they decide the URL nobody's ever complained about is fine forever. I've held names with a perfect five and never heard a word from any of them, and I renewed a couple of those longer than I should have out of stubbornness.
But before I spend money on a domain, I want to be able to say out loud who's going to want it and why. If I can't name anybody specific, I don't have a buyer list. I have a category.
Categories don't pay renewal fees.