I decided to take some of my tweets and write fun articles supporting the ideas around them. This is the first of those. More to come.
Most days in this business, nothing happens.
You go through the expired lists. You watch a few auctions run without you. You send an offer on a name you've wanted for a while and get an answer that's somehow both polite and useless. You pay the renewals on names you still believe in. You answer an inquiry from someone who was never going to buy anything. Six weeks go by like that and you start doing quiet math about whether this is a business or a hobby with an invoice attached.
Then one name lands and the whole year looks different.
That's the part I've never gotten over. The results don't spread out evenly. You can own a thousand domains and have one of them out-earn thirty of your other sales put together, and there's no version of that math that feels normal.
It changes how I hunt.
I'm not out here trying to find a thousand okay names. I'm looking for the one that makes me stop scrolling.
Sometimes it's sitting in an expired auction nobody's watching. Sometimes another investor is quietly selling. Sometimes the keyword is out of fashion right now and everybody's looking somewhere else. And sometimes it's a name you've had on a list for six years and the owner finally answers.
Those are the ones worth the wait.
Have you listed domains on NotRenewing.com? About 80 names sold in the past 5 days.
The mistake is deciding that because you haven't turned one up lately, they've stopped existing.
Every group of domainers eventually says it. All the good ones are gone. People said it in 2006 when I started. They said it in 2016. Somebody's typing it into a forum right now.
Meanwhile good names trade every single day.
What's actually changed is the hunting. The easy hand regs dried up a long time ago. Expired auctions have more money in them. Sellers know what they have, and even the guy who registered something on a whim in 2011 has run it through an appraisal tool and decided it's worth five figures.
That's not opportunity disappearing. That's opportunity getting further from the road.
And the win doesn't have to be a six figure headline. If your normal sale is fifteen hundred or twenty five hundred bucks, one sale at twenty grand rearranges your year. It covers the renewals on everything you own. It buys two or three names you couldn't have justified in March. Mostly it buys patience, which is the thing that's actually hard to come by, because now you're not tempted to take the first lowball offer that shows up on something good.
One sale funds the name that produces the next one. That's the whole engine.
It's also why I try not to spiral during the slow stretches. A portfolio isn't a paycheck. It doesn't pay out in even monthly slices, and expecting it to will drive you out of the business before the math ever gets a chance to work.
None of which is an argument for buying junk and hoping. It's the opposite.
If one name can move the needle that far, then what you're buying matters more, not less. I'd rather spend the time chasing a few names with a real shot than talk myself into another hundred registrations that make my spreadsheet longer and my portfolio worse.
The hunt is the job.
You pass on things. You lose auctions by eleven dollars. You watch somebody else grab a name you scrolled right past. Every so often you buy something and then sit there a week later genuinely unable to reconstruct what you were thinking.
Then one comes along that feels different.
You know who'd want it before you finish reading it. You can see the company that gets built on it. And when you go looking for the twenty substitutes, they're not there.
That's what keeps me doing this after twenty years.
You don't have to find one every day. You just have to still be looking when the next one shows up.