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rinas
rinas

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Buying a new domain is not the way to start your side project

πŸ’‘ When an idea strikes, the very next thing to do is buy a domain πŸ˜…

I do this a lot and started to slow down recently.

  • You take a shower and the idea generator puts an awesome idea in your head
  • It would be the most incredible idea you have ever come across.
  • Rush to laptop see if that perfect domain name is available and boom πŸ’₯
  • What did just happen? You got a dopamine effect of achieving something. Feels like the project is half done right? Nope. Wrong.
  • In reality, you did nothing. You just paid some few $$
  • Now you have 1 year to work on the project before it expires.

Guess what? You will probably let it expire or worse, renew it for one more year assuming some miracle is gonna happen this year. Nope, you are wrong again.

I started keeping aside at least an hour for side projects starting March and obviously, I ended up buying few domains - nonolist.me, shipit.club, myfailedstartups.com

Wanna know the current status of these projects? MVP is not ready yet.

Meanwhile, I started thinking about this domain hoarding problem and hit the aha shower moment again πŸ’‘

Let's build a website to find out how many domains people own πŸ˜‚

For some miraculous reason, I didn't buy a domain for this 😹

πŸ“ I created a form using typeform and tweeted the link asking how many domains people own.

😱 oh boy, many owned hundreds of domain names

πŸ‘¨β€πŸ’» Ok, now I hit that rush to buy a domain to build a website for this.

🐣 HIGHSCORE.domains is born. A fun leaderboard to find out who owns more domains.

πŸ€” I know you are reading this and thinking "oh wait, how many domains do I own actually?" 🀣

😎 HIGHSCORE.domains is the project I bought the domain after seeing people are responding to it and might have some potential.
Guess what? this is the only project which is live and not yet another "Sign up for early access" page.

πŸ™‹ Do you face this problem as well - ie, ended up buying domains and not use them? Is there any tricks/realization you had recently which helped to overcome this?

Top comments (15)

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rinas profile image
rinas

Found this post by @madza about using sub domains. That's probably the best way to do it.

ie, start working subdomain in your main domain and then move to a separate if/when it demands
dev.to/madza/do-you-use-subdomains...

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mike_hasarms profile image
Mike Healy

I bought a general purpose domain for this reason recently.
Smaller projects can just use a free subdomain on that one now.

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rinas profile image
rinas

nice trick! may I know the domain name?

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mike_hasarms profile image
Mike Healy

Sure. It's bytebox.dev
Went for something generic and techy

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jmfayard profile image
Jean-Michel πŸ•΅πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ Fayard • Edited

You are not alone at buying domain names prematurely.

The answer to that trap is that we need to develop planning skills.

I found this article from @siddharthshyniben very helpful

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rinas profile image
rinas

Just notied @siddharthshyniben is from same town as I am!

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siddharthshyniben profile image
Siddharth • Edited

Really?

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rinas profile image
rinas

Yup, Kannur!

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rinas profile image
rinas

Good read, saved πŸ‘Œ

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yoursunny profile image
Junxiao Shi

I put everything on subdomains.
People find my content via search, then bookmark it.
Which domain it's on doesn't matter.

I do have 4 top level domains, to provide a level of separation.

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rinas profile image
rinas • Edited

This is right way to go I think. Is it always on the subdomain or later moved to a separate one?

I should also write more to get results from SEO πŸ˜… I don't get much traffic from there like you do.

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yoursunny profile image
Junxiao Shi

I keep websites on subdomains, so that I never pay for increasing number of domain renewals.

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amrelmohamady profile image
Amr Elmohamady

Unfortunately, for me, I build the project but I still can't buy a domain name as I can't afford it (as I am a high school student) I rely on free hosting subdomains like netlify, heroku, vercel, etc.. As I recently published my open source project software environment concepts project on free vercel subdomain =>
softwareconcepts.vercel.app

GitHub logo Amr2812 / software-environment-concepts

Static Site Generated Progressive Web App Glossary eBook for software concepts.

Software Environment Concepts

Understand Software Concepts powered by vercel

About

If you are new to software engineering or you are working in a software company (Manager, HR, Product Manager, etc..) and you want to understand what the engineers are talking about and lead them or you are Busines man/woman and you want to build a software product but you don't have experience in the field of software engineering then you should read this book. This eBook is like a glossary for software expressions or concepts where you can carry everywhere offline and online.

Software Environment Concepts App was built using:

  • Vue.js
  • Nuxt.js
  • TailwindCSS

Contributions

Software Environment Concepts is open to contributions, but first go to the discusions and let me know what you are working on first that way we don't overwrite each other.

What can you do to help:

  • Reporting an issue or a misleading concept

  • Fix an issue or a misleading…

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rinas profile image
rinas

That's a great way to start and build projects

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zawhtutwin profile image
Zaw Htut Win

Side projects means creating project in Heroku or AWS free tier. And creating a repo in Github of course. Domain name can come later.