The fastest way I know to lose money in this business is to fall in love with a niche before I understand it.
It usually goes like this. You read one article. You see one sale screenshot. Something starts bubbling on X. A week later you've hand-regged 25 names in a space you couldn't explain to a stranger at a party.
The niche isn't always the problem. Sometimes the niche is fine. What got skipped is the boring part.
Research.
Here's what I actually want to know before I register anything. Who's spending money in this space? What words do they use when they spend it? Are there real businesses operating here, or just a lot of talk? And is the thing actually growing, or is it only loud?
🔥 Check out NotRenewing.com
All names $99. No auctions, no negotiations.
That last one gets me every time. Domainer excitement is not buyer demand. I have to keep reminding myself of that, usually right as I'm reaching for the cart.
Take "AI note taking." On paper it's a layup. AI is everywhere, everybody hates taking notes, meetings never stop. Feels like free money.
So before I reg a thing, I go look like a buyer instead of a domainer.
I search the stuff a real customer would type. "AI meeting notes." "AI note taker." "Meeting transcription software." And I look at the ads first, before the regular results. If companies are paying to show up there, money is moving. That doesn't make my domain worth anything. It just tells me I'm not standing in an empty room.
Then I look at who's ranking on their own. What are they called? Did they get the .com, or settle for .ai or .io? Descriptive, or brandable?
You start seeing the same words over and over. Notes. Recap. Summary. Assistant. Calls. Transcript. That's not me guessing. That's the market handing me its own vocabulary for free.
This is where a lot of domainers go sideways. The topic is hot, so the move becomes bolting "AI" onto random words and calling it a strategy. But if the buyers are all saying "meeting notes" and you're registering names built on words nobody in the space uses, you're not building inventory for end users. You're building it for the next domainer who's about to do the same thing.
After that I check for density. Product Hunt, G2, Capterra, Reddit, LinkedIn. One or two companies is noise. Twenty companies all chewing on the same problem is a category.
Then sales history. Not "have AI names sold," because of course they have. I want names in this exact lane. Meetings, notes, calls, transcripts. I don't need a perfect comp. I just want some proof that somebody, somewhere, paid real money for this flavor of name.
Now the part that actually matters.
What would a company in this niche upgrade to?
MeetingNotes.com? In a heartbeat. CallNotes.com? Maybe. RecapAI.com? I could see it. MeetingNotez.com? Come on. AITranscriptHub.com? Maybe a hand-reg you flip for coffee money, but nobody's wiring you four figures for it.
That's the filter. And here's the part nobody likes hearing: a niche can be strong and still not rescue a weak name. The category being hot does not bail out a clunky domain. It never has.
Let me use one that's less obvious. Mobile IV therapy.
Different animal. This is a service, not software. People search for it locally. Businesses advertise hard in certain cities. Health, convenience, repeat customers, all baked in.
Same drill. Search "mobile IV therapy," "IV hydration near me," "IV drip service." Read the ads. Look at the local shops. You'll see words like drip, hydrate, revive, boost, nurse, mobile.
Now hold that up next to what you were about to register. HydrationClinic.com, fine. MobileIVCare.com, fine. DripWellness.com, sure. UltraVitaminHydrationPros.com? That's a domainer talking, not a business owner. It describes the service and not one human being would ever build on it.
And in a service niche, geography changes the whole bet. ChicagoIV.com is not the same play as a clean national brandable. One's for a local operator or a lead gen site. The other's for somebody trying to raise a round. Same niche. But if you don't know which buyer you're chasing, you'll buy the wrong names with total confidence and feel smart doing it.
That's basically the whole thing. Figure out who the buyer is before you fall for the name.
When I'm honest with myself, my "process" is just a handful of gut checks. Are there real businesses here. Are they making money or raising it. Are they advertising. Is the vocabulary obvious, or am I inventing it. Do the better companies in the space even care about their names. Has anything in this lane ever sold.
And then the one I keep circling back to. Can I picture the actual person who buys this, and why this name beats whatever they're already using.
Not "could somebody buy it." You can say that about any string of letters. The real question is who, and why now, and why this instead of what they've got.
If I can't answer that, the name sits in the cart and I close the tab.
None of this is about talking yourself out of everything. Good research makes you more confident, not less. Once you actually know the language and the buyers and how the serious companies name things, the gap between a real shot and a reg binge gets pretty loud.
There's always another trend. Another extension somebody swears is the one this time. The cart is right there and it never closes.
The names worth owning don't go anywhere while you do the boring part. That's sort of the point of the boring part.
Anyway. Go read the ads before you reg.