January was a good reminder of why writing publicly forces clarity. Not because the answers suddenly become obvious, but because weak assumptions get exposed fast when other domain investors push back, nod along, or go quiet.
This month’s four NamePros articles all circled the same underlying theme from different angles: most domain mistakes are not technical. They’re emotional, structural, and learned from the wrong feedback loops.
Here’s a quick recap of what I explored, and what the conversations around them revealed.
What Expiring Domains Teach Us
Expiring domains are usually framed as failure. Someone didn’t value the name. Someone mispriced it. Someone ran out of patience. That framing misses the point.
The real lesson of expiring domains is selection pressure.
Every name that drops teaches you something about what did not clear the market, even after years of optionality. That doesn’t mean the domain was bad. It means demand was either weaker than assumed, misaligned with pricing, or dependent on a buyer that never materialized.
The response to this piece was telling. A lot of investors admitted they rarely study their own drops. They just let them go and move on. That’s a mistake. Expiring inventory is one of the few honest datasets in domaining because it reflects what the market refused to support long term.
If you want to sharpen your buying instincts, spend less time celebrating sales and more time dissecting why certain names quietly died.
If I Had to Cut My Portfolio in Half Tomorrow
This article struck a nerve, which usually means it landed somewhere uncomfortable.
The premise was simple. If I had to cut my portfolio in half overnight, I would not start with tools, comps, or formulas. I would start with honesty. Which names am I defending because they are actually strong, and which ones am I defending because I do not want to admit I was wrong?
Domaining culture loves optimization. Spreadsheets feel productive. Dashboards feel safe. But no tool can tell you whether you are emotionally attached to a domain that should have been dropped two years ago.
The strongest responses came from investors who admitted they had never run a forced liquidation thought experiment on their own portfolio. Doing so exposes a brutal truth. Many portfolios look diversified but are really just collections of unresolved decisions.
Cutting inventory is not about pessimism. It is about making room for better judgment going forward.
Finding Real End Users Is the Hardest Skill in Domaining
This piece addressed something I see misinterpreted constantly. Finding end users is not about scraping emails or blasting outreach. It is about understanding who actually buys domains when no one is watching.
Real end users are rarely the loudest voices. They are not posting on forums. They are not debating valuation theories. They are building quietly and solving problems.
The conversation around this article highlighted a gap that keeps widening. Domainers often learn from other domainers, then wonder why their outbound efforts feel disconnected from reality. You cannot reverse engineer buyer behavior from seller-only conversations.
If you want to find real end users, you have to leave domainer spaces occasionally. Read founder forums. Look at small business sites. Study how people name things when no one is trying to impress an audience.
That skill compounds far more than any outreach script.
You Are Learning From the Wrong People
This was the most direct article of the month, and probably the easiest to misunderstand.
It was not an attack on newcomers or educators. It was a warning about incentive alignment. Many of the loudest voices in domaining are not actively selling domains. They are selling courses, tools, attention, or certainty.
Learning from people who are no longer exposed to market risk leads to outdated playbooks. Advice that worked in 2015 can quietly poison decision making in 2026.
The healthiest responses came from investors who admitted they had never checked whether the advice they followed was coming from active operators or commentators. That distinction matters more than reputation.
Markets evolve. Tactics decay. If the person teaching you is not adapting in real time, you are learning history, not strategy.
January’s articles all pointed to the same conclusion. Progress in domaining rarely comes from better data alone. It comes from better judgment about what to listen to, what to hold, and what to let go.
The market is not cruel, but it is indifferent. It rewards clarity, liquidity, and adaptation. Everything else is optional.
February will build on this theme, with more focus on decision making under constraint rather than theory under ideal conditions.
As always, the best feedback comes from disagreement. If something in these pieces made you uncomfortable, it probably deserves another look.