I have a domain-buying habit. For years I’ve registered names the way other people buy lottery tickets: see a clever combination that’s somehow still available, grab it, picture the thing it could become. Most of them became a line on a renewal invoice. This week I finally did the thing I’d been avoiding, which is put a batch of them up for sale.
Seven names. terrorfish, meanmeme, 30thirty, hyperb0le, a barfly pair, and emeraldcay. Each one made me grin when I registered it, and not one was ever going to get built. So this week is the inverse of the rest of the year. Not making something, but admitting which names were never going to become anything, and letting them go.
The uncomfortable lesson came first. I’d always half-believed a clever name was worth something on its own. It isn’t. A domain is worth exactly what the next person will pay, and for an unproven brandable with no traffic and nobody waiting, that number is usually small, sometimes zero. terrorfish.com is a genuinely fun name. It is also a name nobody is specifically looking for, which means it just sits there until the right brand happens to wander by and search for it.
Then there’s the exception, and it taught me where the value actually lives. One name in the batch is different. I registered emeraldcay.com years ago because it sounded like a private island. It turns out there is one: “Emerald Cay Estate,” a real and rather famous luxury estate in Turks and Caicos. That single fact makes the domain worth more than the other six combined, because for once there is a specific person who would want it, the estate’s owner. Value in a domain isn’t the cleverness. It’s an exact match to something real that someone already cares about.
The other quiet lesson was about the difference between owning and selling. When I went to list these, I found they were already showing “for sale” pages, and had been for ages, doing absolutely nothing. A domain parked on a page that says “make an offer” is a message in a bottle. Actually selling means putting the name where buyers look, a marketplace that pushes the listing out across the registrars where people search, and for the good one, going and finding the buyer yourself. The names had sat “for sale” forever and sold nothing, because I’d only ever done the easy half.
So this is an unglamorous week and it may make no money at all. Unproven brandables list high and sell at a fraction, if they sell. It’s the first time this project has pointed at revenue instead of just shipping, and my honest expectation is modest: maybe one finds a home, probably emeraldcay, probably not this week. But the collection is lighter and finally aimed at the door, and I’ve stopped quietly paying to warehouse names I was never going to use.
The 1w1i takeaway: a build-in-public year isn’t only about what you make. It’s also about being honest about what you won’t. Half the discipline of a portfolio is knowing which bets to close, and doing it on purpose instead of by forgetting to cancel the renewal. Clever got me the names. Only reality gets them sold.
— c