HN Explorer

Ask HN: Domain names you bought for a start-up that never happened

35 points by samwillis ↗ HN
We all do it (I assume), buy a domain name for the latest and greatest idea you have but never quite deliver, the domain ends up sitting there doing nothing.

What are yours and what was it you were thinking of doing with them?

I will start below...

81 comments

[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] thread
samwillis
swapsend.com:

This was going to be a file sharing service for businesses like design consultancies, it would enable them to Swap files with their clients and Send files to others.

designdown.com:

This has been planned for many things, a blog about design and UX, the over arching name of a group of other websites, a web design and development consultancy.

projectaur.com:

This was going to be a project management tool for engineering and design firms, using the idea of issue trackers from software development and applying it to physical product development.

flutterbox.com:

This is the project I have gotten furthest with, it was back in about 2007 I think, it was a social news aggregator along the same sort of lines a friendfeed.com. I actually launched this one but never attracted many users. I think I finally shut it down in about 2010.

cloudjs.co.uk (I thought I had the dot com but don’t seem to any more):

This was going to be what we now call a “platform as a service “, it never got further than me buying the domain name and researching SpiderMonkey (this was before V8).

If you are interested in any of them let me know, email is in my profile.

itsprofitbaron
I actually remember coming across flutterbox & seeing it as a "track what your friends are up to" type service.

IIRC it was built in Django & supported about 10-11 services inc. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Digg etc

samwillis
Wow, so few people ever used it im suppressed you remember it. You are correct, it was built with Django and did support about 10 services.

The mejor flaw with the service was that you needed to get all you friends signed up to it as well in order to get them to enter all their accounts.

It was fun to make and I lernt allot building it...

yashchandra
www.ekfolio.com

I have always wanted to build this where people can create interactive resumes and not just old style boring word document resume. Got some ideas but never formalized so far. I still own the domain though :)

[deleted]
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cfinke
pieinterest.com:

Pinterest for pies. (Just kidding. I don't remember why I bought it, but I did.)

jcfrei
hehe - you could branch out into offering different computations of π
maxer
yrecruit.com - replacing recruitment consultants with one click candidate sourcing

betzap.com - crowdsourced betting tips

dudurocha
buzy.co A place that will have meny services for business (and buzy) people. Like a summary of books, of daily news, personal assistants, reservation and booking services.
kenneth_reitz
placehub.com: local news platform/aggregator service.
hackNightly
Kapsl.com - This has been everything from a todo list, ticket tracker, and team planner down to an analytics package. I believe this domain name is cursed because I can't seem to finish any of the projects I start with it.
sradu
tinyact.com: an ad network where advertisers would pay for micro actions performed by users on their site (like downloding a pdf, staying on the site for a period of time, coming back a number of times, etc);

graffly.com: a Groupon for affiliate marketing offers;

crosscookie.com: a service where SaaS could exchange cookie information about their paying members and use that information to target display advertising on ad exchanges;

peeknpoke.com: a service where you could write an essay/blogpost and ask friends to review it;

Most of these are offline now.

jcfrei
dronedelivery.com - a bit futuristic and never intended to be developed by myself.
jayniz
fatbattle.me

Weight loss contests using withings scales and their apis

padobson
Futuretoob.com

I was going to build TV apps to get in on the coming disruption of television. Still waiting to see where TV goes.

Droplounge.com

A content aggregator for stuff in you Dropbox. Basically a way for digital creatives to share their work.

Algapi.com

An algorithm API marketplace. Programmers expose algorithms and other programmers pay per request to use them in their apps.

If any of these excite you, drop me a line.

jaxn
purplelynx.us: monitoring social streams and prioritizing the links that your network is sharing (purple = visited). Built a proof of concept and it is a neat feature, but not the experience I was hoping for.

howiuse.it: Was going to build a site for sharing tips on how to use software. i.e. how I use evernote for a paperless office, etc.

jeremymcanally
* invoices.io - Simpler, cheaper Harvest.

* hippo.io - Reminders that actually worked with you instead of beating you over the head.

* fubar.io - An error tracking service that didn't suck.

* sharing.io - Sharing buttons as a service. We maintain them for you so you don't have to worry about having a MySpace button on your site in 2012.

* keys.io - Hosted software key authentication.

* tele.io - Hosted, simple phone trees for small businesses.

I actually have a lot of code for hippo, fubar, and tele. Sad I never pushed them through.

Willing to sell any of these domains, btw. Don't need them now. E-mail's in my profile.

drewjoh
Those must be expensive to hold on to. Usually .io goes for $99/year.
jeremymcanally
Yeah they're like $80 from the registrar I use. :( Going to let some of them go after this year.
jcc80
blurre.com: photo related site

vendorvote.com: angie's list for b2b

mansworstenemy.com: dictators & oil spills

xabi
* ga.am - URL shortener (easy typing in t9 phone keyboards)

* lectur.as - News aggregator

* visteme.com - dressings

* betterlater.com - read it later url bookmarking

adora
failchat.com / chatfail.com

yet another humor site.

dlytle
faevor.com/net/org. A site for establishing and trading promises and favors between friends. (Inspired by the whole "favor trading" schtick the fae tend to have in mythology.)
davewasthere
* dejunk.co.uk - for getting rid of my crap (hated freecycle and still think there's a better way)

* badnewsbunny.com - delivering bad news for people through a hand-puppet. Still think this one would be a laugh, but a lot of bad things happened around the time I started it, so don't want to touch it.

horsehead
>>* badnewsbunny.com - delivering bad news for people through a hand-puppet. Still think this one would be a laugh, but a lot of bad things happened around the time I started it, so don't want to touch it.

One of the most ironic things I think I've heard on this site.

mlntn
brewmasterapp.com - A mobile/online homebrewing (beer) app. Lots of data, but never finished building it.
adamlindsay
notifybyphone.com - Phone alert system using Twilio storesapp.com - eCommerce platform, had launched in beta and customers, eventually closed. sitesapp.com - CMS sister service to storesapp.com fingerlakeswineregion.org - Free app listing wineries and attractions.

Willing to sell domains as well, I have finally found focus. :)

johnnyg
breastpump.com - Breast Pump and Nursing supplies for mothers. Medela is currently getting sued for anti-competitive pricing and supplier behavior. If they get forced to behave by the courts and I can get supplied, game on!
mikejarema
Wow this name alone is easily worth tens of thousands, probably more!
mikejarema
digitalinfo.com - reg'd in 1998 hoping to sell information products, still holding onto it!

brandvocates.com - brand + advocates = brandvocates :) great for a social media agency, again didn't get past idea stage

productapi.com - self-explanatory, was going to be somewhat of a amazon-style API of products, but with a "ship" function, grabbed this when I was working with drop-shippers and thought that there had to be a better way

affiliateapi.com - wanted to make a skimlinks-style platform, ended up (recently) with a open-sourced JS-library for GoDaddy affiliate links

giftify.com - send a virtual gift through FB, and the real one arrives at the recipient's door (launched shortly after the FB platform became available, shipped approx 20 orders)

dealreel.com - curate your own list of daily deals from Groupon, etc. and publish it for your friends and followers, wanted to address the fact most deals are crap and there are a select few power users that do look at every deal, wanted to put them to work to find worthwhile deals for the masses, Yipit is doing something cool w.r.t this idea based on normalized sales data: http://blog.yipit.com/2011/08/05/introducing-trending-daily-...

dnsrecipes.com - central wiki w/API listing all the cloud services out there and the DNS settings required to make them work, essentially helping non-techies tie their Google Apps, Tumblr, UServoice, etc. services to their domain in a consistent and visual way, still want to do this at some point as my buddies bug me all the time to do this shit work

logocaster.com - auto-generates an infinite canvas of logo variations (much like the entries page on 99designs) and let's a user refine their logo design based on parameters like color, font-face, emotion, etc.

autowatermark.com - automatically watermark images uploaded to social networks, sadly this is not possible via FB's API or others :(

I'm probably as guilty as any fellow HN'ers of being trigger happy on domain registration when struck by a moment of inspiration. I am happy to see some of the great & fun domains & ideas popping up in this post.

pavlov
* slated.to - bought this before the iPad came out, thinking that it could be an app site for tablets. For example: slated.to/ipad, slated.to/android, slated.to/windows8

* see.io - some kind of visual sharing site, maybe? Or a dating site for CIOs ;)

* join.as - no idea even when I bought it...

I'd sell any of these if someone's interested.

jkeel
whisperYELL.com The idea is similar to Klout but instead of measuring online influence it was to be geared toward online privacy. People would be able to measure how much of their information is out there and depending if they want to be noticed (Yell) or go primarily unnoticed (whisper) the site would track their rating on a scale and provide suggestions to move in either direction.

I stopped right before I began development because I decided to partner with a friend on another idea called felpme.com

jtweeded
SteamCorps.com - fancied a Steampunk based RPG for iOS. About 5years into reg fees now :)