#1: Your pricing is at the worst possible point on the curve. You charge ten times more than what the inveterate cheapskates want to pay. You charge ten times less what a middling domain name is worth. You are opting to do business with a lot of "pathological clients" this way -- they will want the moon and stars because you cost TEN TIMES MORE than GoDaddy. (There will be, inevitably, comments in this thread to that effect. Do you want to wake up to a mailbox of them every day?)

#2: Let's talk inventory. It will cost you, for the sake of argument, $10 to hold a domain for a year. That means, to break even, you need to sell one out of every ten you register. Since you're going to be dealing in 3 word domains primarily, that is going to be a bit of a stretch. Let's say you branch into bingo for a day and start thinking up domains -- you can count to 500 just by starting with Xbingocards.com and filling in topics for X. Are you going to be able to unload 50+ of those?

#3: You need to do a heck of a lot of manual gruntwork here. Presumably you'll automate the actual purchasing, but you'll have to think up hundreds or thousands of domains and then sift down to the ones which are actually salable.

(If you doubt this, I will give you a list of 500 Xbingocards.com domains and you can time how long it takes you to winnow it down to as narrow a field as you think is winnowable. My guess is just the filtering would take most SEOs I know upwards of two to four hours to do if they did it systematically. And then, of the 46 or so you end up with, will you actually be able to sell them?)

Do this poorly and you'll be out money. You'll find that you're eventually spending a lot of money and effort to buy yourself a retail job, if that.

Firstly you would need some cracking names to be able to achieve a $99 asking price.

Secondly your purchase vs sale ratio would probably be bad. As your not pitching super popular domain names you have to buy a LARGE pool of "good" domain names to stand a chance of selling some.

And finally your target market is one which might well browse your catalogue for inspiration then make their own (far cheaper) choice [this is what I would do]. So unless you nail all of the cool short domains then your unlikely to sell to anyone but those who "must have" a specific domain.

I get your idea - I dont think the economics works unless you have a fairly large initial investment to make (and have sucess predicting the domains people want).

This sounds like plain old domain squatting. Think of it from the "customers" point of view. I think that prettypinksnowflake.com is just the domain that I could use for my project only to find you have already registered it with no intention of going anything with it but squatting on it until a buyer comes along.

So you are planning to be a domain squatter and all this talk of "value" is just so much BS. However domain squatting isn't illegal (as such) and some people seem to be making a living at it so a viable business model.

So forget the "value" you think that you are adding and start to work on the economics of domain squatting. How much will you be buying the domains for? How many of those will you sell, what is break even?

And remember that this is already a crowded market, there aren't many good, correctly spelt, English domain names just lying around and guessing which style of misspelling will become popular could be expensive. Perhaps you should look into non English language squatting?

Well I'm aware that it is a thin line between sqatting and my idea (maybe it is sqatting after all, thats why I asked). The difference would be, that the majority of buyers would not think of a domain name and then discover that I registered just that name. Instead they would enter the "shop" and look around for some name they like (and hadn't thought of themselves). Of course there is no way to prevent that the first thing happens (and so it would make me a de facto sqatter everytime that happens).

And I will now see how long it takes for prettypinksnowflake.com to become registered :)

What are you really selling -- your originality, or your monopoly on the domain name?

If you were really selling your originality, why not let people fill in a form, you do the brainstorming, and then find a domain name that suits the buyer's needs. Then you'd contribute real value.

But in the scenario you're describing you don't give people a choice to take advantage of your creativity, you force them to pay you a premium, even if they thought of the domain name themselves. That makes you a squatter.

If I just tell them a free name after they filled the form, how would I get paid? If I register the domain I have an assurance that someone actually pays for the "idea".

that's the risk factor: if you then offer them to purchase the domain from you at a reasonable price then you will likely get a sale :) this is a standard marketing technique.

Buying the domains in advance (as pointed out many times over here) is an increased risk factor. I dont think you've considered this idea fully if you think that this approach is more financially risk (for you) than the one you originally pitched :)

better idea: create a marketplace where people can resell their domains for $99. sort of like a fixed-price version of sedo.

I like this idea beter:

# It solves the inventory conversion problem outlined below.

# It solves the creativity doesn't scale well problem outlined below.

# It allows people like you, who think that they can sell creativity, to have a go.

# This is compatible with your current idea. No reason not to seed a marketplace site with your own idea of your own creative domains & continue selling your own domains so long as it's profitable. If it fails to become a marketplace, you still have a shot at making your original idea work within it. Almost a free option.

I'll be one of your resellers. I have many stories to tell but often I'm creating just the domain name, no time to finish.

And it is fun to think an idea, brand it then sell it to someone _who_ is the guy to develop it.

The package would be: the story, the domain name + additionally a visual id.

THat has the added bonus of pulling the theme of the marketplace into an "ideas" market rather than a domain market (which might have slight negative connotations).

The domain name gives the idea intrinsic value and the idea adds value to the domain purchasing experience. Win win.

I like your suggestion a lot. I came up with this idea because I have some domains from unstarted projects (already with corresponding ideas). So I might as well try to sell the idea along. It would be an experiment, rather then a business I guess, but lets see.

Think of this - a great domain name comes into my mind, I go to checkout if its available, and I see that your service is selling it for $99, how pissed off would I be, thinking "one moron spends his 24 hrs buying all the goody domains and selling back for $99, I have to pay $89 extra for all the creative thinking I did."

I might give $500 then to mediadefender or russian botnet lenders to bring down your service as my revenge for a short while.

So, Yes you would be a dirty domain squatter. And if competitor services grow around your model, it would be worse for all of us.

Well, I am aware that this kind of work is _cheap_ so why don't you sell a good domain for $12 or $15 instead of $99, it doesn't take $89 to think of a good name does it ?

Creating a demand for something by taking it away from the reach of people is generally bad in my PoV.

I don't think it's domain squatting, because I can see the service you're selling is coming up with a good name, something I've struggled to do myself. Not everyone will see it that way, but that's ok because some will, as long as the website emphasises the creative aspect, searching by topic, etc. It's like paying a graphics artist to make graphics for your game instead of doing them yourself as they would have done in the old days.

But your payment structure makes it difficult. As much as I can agree it's something worth paying for, I would still want to get it for free if I could. Like ErrantX I would probably be tempted to just find a name on your site that I liked and use it as inspiration for another name that is still available.

How about calling yourself domainsquattr.com (still available!)?

I wish good domains did coast $99--then there wouldn't be so many squatters. I don't think you're providing much value, and I do think you'd make much money at it, but I wouldn't be terribly offended if I found you had registered a domain I wanted. Having recently spent hours and hours trying to find a domain in a very competitive space, $100 sounds just fine compared to $1000's or not available at all. OTOH, I was pretty exhaustive. If you did go for domains in my field, you might not find any worth $100.

There's already a service called Picky Domains at http://www.pickydomains.com/ where you pay a deposit in exchange for suggestions for names from their contributors.

If you see a name you like, you register it yourself and the site pockets half the fee, with the other half going to the contributor.

You would be just another dirty domain squatter, yes. (And as such, I would wish the universe to burn fire upon you and your distasteful little enterprise. I am not alone in this.)

I will never give a squatter a dime. If you squatted a name I thought to buy, I would just choose another name. In reality, you'd just go bankrupt before I ever heard of you, because there is no way you're gonna flip 1/10 of what you squat. That's why real squatters charge the big bucks.

Suck it and see. The cost to you is pretty low financially. Buy up 10 domains, perhaps in a related field, do your magic on them and see if you can sell any ... when you sell one buy 10 more. Rinse, repeat.

... and with that business model, you'll lose $1 on every sale. :)

godaddy says $1.99 for new .com domains, .us are 4.99, etc.. It was a rough example:

"Buy as many domains as your profit will allow until you have amassed a reasonable quantity and are selling domains quickly enough to make a business out of it" was the intention.

what makes domain picking and selling so interesting and popular? quite a few startup ideas/implementations pass through the hacker news front page, which is why i'm wondering.

Maybe because it sounds like a business that is easy to get into. I first heard this sort of idea in the late 80's.

In the 80s? Really? You heard about domain squatting back then? Why didn't you do it? You could have had sex.com, microsoft.com, sony.com, ...

We were in a different business and I thought that would be a distraction. And it just didn't seem right to me, but I am just a simple country boy.

When I first came in contact with the 'net ('94) I didn't imagine that you could just choose a domain name and register it. I imagined that you needed lots of infrastructure to host a site. I reckon anyone who knew that you could just register sex.com and had used the internet would realise that this would probably be near the top of the most visited domain names of all time.

Were domains expensive back then?

Oh, when you say "not right" do you mean not ethical?

Right, not ethical.

Make up 10 domain names, buy them and sell them on ebay or various sites. If you sell more then 3, it's worth a shot.

I think its Domain Squatting 2.0