Buying Domain Names

I do not know Nick Huber, but I see he has a large following on Twitter and frequently offers advice to startup founders and entrepreneurs. Over the weekend, Nick shared some advice about domain names:

If you’re looking for an available domain to start a business, you’re doing it wrong.

You need to buy a premium domain and drop a little coin.

People build big companies behind pretty crappy web domains and it holds them back in a major way.

If you’re confident go buy a $2-10k…

— Nick Huber (@sweatystartup) September 23, 2023

While the “premium” term is highly subjective for domain names, particularly given the numbers he shares, I think he is offering good advice. Either start with a good domain name or upgrade when the business has enough profits to enable the acquisition.

For a domain investor, buying a domain name is second nature. Investors hand register domain names, purchase domain names via expiry and private auctions, and acquire domain names owned by others via private acquisitions. For people who aren’t in the domain name business, acquiring a domain name can be confusing, frustrating, and challenging.

When I want to buy a domain name owned by someone else when the landing page or website doesn’t provide information, the first thing I look at is the Whois record. Among other information, public Whois data provides the domain registrant’s name, location, email address, and phone number. Domain registrars like GoDaddy have Whois lookup tools, as do third party services like DomainTools. Oftentimes, the registrar where the domain name is registered offers the most detailed information.

This afternoon while doing some acquisition research and due diligence, I came across a domain name that is for sale. The “for sale” landing page looks somewhat dated, as if it was created quite a long time ago. Within the messaging was the asking price of the domain name along with some other (unappealing) domain names that the registrant also seems to own and wants to sell.

I then visited the Internet Archive – Archive.org – to get an idea of the domain name’s history, time on the market, and asking price history. Archive.org shows how different websites looked over the years. You can enter in a particular domain name, and you can see many entries from past days, weeks, months, and years.