I launched 17 side projects. Result? I'm rich in expired domains

Anything you want to do differently next time? Like find a representative user and build until you solve that problem?

Keep pushing.

We've all been there. I lost track of the domains I registered for a great business idea and then let them expire.

This is timely, as I've got a domain expiring in the next week. It's a .bingo TLD, so at $50+, I'm going to just let it expire.

"Vibe coding" has actually been a boon for me on this front. Fewer than 10% of my side projects are serious and 95% of it are static pages, so there's no big security concerns to worry about. Most of them are joke pages anyway, which I've started calling "Sht Coding," as in Vibe Coding + Sht Posting.

been there

I have now reached the point where I won’t buy the domain name until I get a prototype ready.

I’ve only bought one domain name since then and got the project out!

I think the domain name is your reward for finishing your minimum viable product.

I'll say as long as you’re not repeating the same mistakes and each project teaches you something, you’re getting closer to the exit of the maze.

Ha, I wrote this the other day:

> I think it’s part of the procrastination cycle; buying a domain name feels like progress towards the goal, but is incredibly low effort, and thus feeling like I’m making progress I wander off and get attracted to the next shiny thing.

So, yup, except that it sounds like you typically make more progress than me!

Edit: Context is https://paperstack.com/hntags/

[dead]

We should start a club with the amount of us in the same boat... what should our domain be?

Sometime it's funny to look at the packages list of your domain provider and realize for example, that at some point in the past I was indeed convinced "thewienerway.com" would one day be the go to merch shop for everything around wiener dogs :-).

Okay, there were some beers involved...

i feel this when i get porkbun emails w expirations nearly every month.

i have a lot of cool ones i tried to give away or at least start the conversation w a few relevant sites but i guess that seems weird to randomly get

Yep https://dare.fail/ but also at least finish the things

We are on the same boat

RIP

I have my own graveyard here moralestapia.com

It's a hobby, like any other.

Of course. I had like 50 domains at one point. There's nothing worse than an auto-renewal hitting your bank account on a project you gave up on.

In 2025, with new vibe-coding projects being pushed every second, I think it's not even worth the time unless you have $$$ upfront for marketing (and/or a massive audience). Otherwise, you're wasting your time.

Man I built an app a while back called Kanji Plus. The idea was to build a small side project to generate an income, then use that to fund my magnum opus, Phrasing [1]

I built the prototype in a weekend. I spent the next 8 months turning it into a product people cared about. As soon as people started using it, I realized I was going to spend the next 10 years beating around the bush on a product with a very low ceiling.

I eventually decided to build Phrasing [1]… and kanji plus just kind of disappeared. Dependencies updated, subscriptions expired, service providers went offline. I feel bad because I sold some lifetime memberships - genuinely expecting to just leave it on the internet forever - but man, apparently websites don’t do that out of the box anymore.

Luckily the entire product of kanji plus will fit nicely as a feature in Phrasing, and it’s written with the same front end tech so it should be a very simple copy paste. 2 weeks of work max (famous last words).

Still, I feel really bad that people paid me money and the service just went offline. I didn’t know I was being so naive just expecting things to work for more than 6 months unattended.

If any old kanji plus subscribers are reading this, please feel free to get in touch. I’m planning to give all my old supporters a free lifetime membership to phrasing once it’s ready to go! (a membership tier that will not be available to the general public)

[1]: https://phrasing.app/

12 years into my graveyard of side projects and making a modest income, nothing has ever "taken off", but I have survived. I yearn to be "pulled" by the market inextricably, but that is unlikely. The reality is almost every business (and I mean almost every one) is "pushed" up the hill, interminably, like Sisyphus. Even my most successful clients never feel "ahead". Something always breaks in the business model, given enough time.

I created a rule almost ten years ago that I won't buy the domain until I actually have something to host, and it's done me reasonably well.

I however have a similar but more expensive problem, I develop side projects to an MVP and leave them up for literal decades with no one but myself using them, paying for the domain and hosting. I can't let things go.

I rewrote a number of things in Go recently so they could scale down to zero on Fly.io and save me some money.

For example though I have been developing a note keeping SaaS for fifteen years. It fits my own needs perfectly and I use it every day, but everyone I have ever had try it has bounced in a couple minutes. I literally removed the sign up after GDPR scared me in 2018 and never put it back. I should put it back, everything is client side encrypted and I don't keep any PII.

I have an ad free emojipedia-esq tool, a tool for making API controlled README badges, a tool for converting MIDIs into print outs of colored sheet music for children's keyboards, a joke API, so much more.

I did accidentally let the domain expire for my Wordle knockoff where you guess the soup based on the ingredients. It never worked very well anyway.

I once owned both cakefax.com, and faxcake.com. I was going to corner the market.

I recently went and killed off ~10 domains :). Current project: something like eww[1], only using lua and a UI idea that I think may actually be ergonomic in Rust (immediate/imgui style and actors). Maybe I'll finish it this time.

One the other hand, I have a great idea for CI and it's an itch I am currently suffering...

[1]: https://github.com/elkowar/eww

> I buy a domain name → I code for 3 all-nighters → I lose interest → I start again.

At least you're actually doing the "I code for 3 all-nighters" step!

I've stopped too many projects at the "I buy a domain name" stage, and added an intermediate "I create a Trello board" step between that and starting to write code. No need to pull all-nighters, which are hard to do with family and a full-time job, if all I need to do is add a card to a feature wishlist. Maybe prototype a few key functions to see how they work, wireframe a unique piece of UI, or follow the tutorial to create "hello world" in a new framework, but it turns out that those steps are also optional.

The problem seems to be that my brain gives me a dopamine buzz for merely _imagining_ accomplishing the project, whether or not I eventually implement, publish, and get users for the it. I can give myself a similar cognitive reward for simply reading on HN about other people completing projects, and even (at my lowest) passively watching YouTube videos of other people building cool stuff. It's all the mental rewards of participating in a group project where the tribe accomplished something great, except I'm barely in a parasocial relationship with a dude on Patreon or Discord a thousand miles away who actually performed 100% of the work. Maybe he likes my comment "Nice work! I really liked how you did [thing], have you considered [alternative strategy]?". Maybe he even comments back. Bang! Neurotransmitter pump engaged, dopamine boost received.

It's a scary thing to realize that you're doing this, and very, very hard to train yourself out of those bad habits. I find it's important to write down and consciously review my daily/weekly/monthly/yearly goals, my productive and unproductive activity towards those goals, and my actual accomplishments. It's too easy to get addicted to fake reward loops, whether because they're engineered by social media companies who make money off my attention span or because brains are just vulnerable to low-effort high-reward stimuli. What did I do in July? X hours of Reddit, Y hours of HN, Z hours of Youtube... and a half dozen things I'm actually proud of.

(Note to self: Don't get too excited about upvotes or replies to this comment, acquiring HN or Reddit fake Internet points are not part of my actual goals and should not be considered real accomplishments.)

Adderall?

> My Google Domains look like a graveyard of unfinished dreams.

So does my github or the 5 rack servers in my homelab lol. At least the servers aren't running and consuming power 24/7

Why buy a domain at all these days? Can't you simply use github?