Last night I attended a small domainer dinner get-together. It was organized by Elliot Silver of Top Notch Domains, whose domaining blog I really recommend for anyone interested in this space.

Over the last 4 months or so I have went from just my personal and business domains to purchasing about 150. Many were as cheap as $5, others as expensive as many thousands. I hope some day really soon I’ll get to talk about the most expensive ones here when I am ready. The point will be to share my logic and ideas behind it.

Obviously I got a bit more experience now compared to when I just started. As anyone I made some mistakes at buying names which aren’t ideal, or the same money could have been used to buy better or more names. You only learn through mistakes though. Every time you want to learn a new industry, decided for yourself how much money you’re willing to loose in order to learn. Sometimes it’s a little, sometimes you get burned. Luckily though I feel the mistakes I made were on relatively cheap names and does not impact my allotted capital for testing this market.

It was interesting to meet other people in the business, there were about 10-12 other very cool guys. I think a quarter of them were lawyers, I found that also interesting. Also surprising to me that there weren’t as many people with a background similar to mine - that is being a programmer or web developer back in the day before I started managing. But clearly everyone has their own edge, be it cash, the time when they started this earlier, marketing hunches, or sheer work ethic and persistence.

Personally, I have been waiting for a proof of concept that buying interesting names has value in the aftermarket, and actually results in a sale. By proof of concept I mean having a name of mine sell for considerably more, without taking up a lot of time.

As fate would have it, the morning after I wake up after the domainer dinner I get an offerfor one of my names. The sale has been agreed upon through Sedo. It’s nothing crazy, but still about 20 times more than what I have paid for the name just weeks ago. Once it goes through, assuming the buyer doesn’t go back on this, I will post the details here.

And once it does go through, my proof of concept will be nearly complete, allowing me to expand on the idea and scale it further. That’s just the way I work and minimize risks.