There’s a Twitter guy. There’s always a Twitter guy, isn’t there? This Twitter guy buys and “develops” domains. He seems like a nice dude, so I don’t want to come off too skeptical, but most Twitter guys deserve skepticism. Anyway, this Twitter guy talks about using auctions and domain close outs and a bunch of tools to find domains that could be valuable. They might be valuable as something you “develop” or as something you flip. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, by the way.

So this Twitter guy got me interested in domains. I’m a creative tinkerer, so I already buy domains, but the process usually goes like this:

1. Have app idea

2. Build app

3. Shit I need a name

4. Shit shit I need a logo

5. Shit shit shit I need a domain

6. Buy some trash domain that kind of works

I was interested in the idea of finding high-quality .com domains for relatively cheap. What would I do with them? No clue. But I always need domains. One of the Twitter guy’s simplest suggestions was GoDaddy Auctions. This is a paid platform that gives you access to expiring domains, domains at auction, closeouts, and more. The app makes it really easy to filter by domain specifications. Want a .com that’s only a maximum of eight characters and has no numbers? Easy, you can filter for those criteria in seconds.

So I paid up and I started using the app. Here’s the thing with an app like this, it’s unreasonably addictive. There are an endless supply of domains, so it’s hard to peel your eyes away because you might miss the perfect domain to do nothing with for six years until you see a credit card statement with the GoDaddy renewal on it. I was hooked on finding that perfect domain.

After a few weeks of watching and favoriting some auctions and closeouts, I was ready to dive into the deep end. I wouldn’t say it was the perfect domain, but I bought a domain that I thought was interesting. tutorialcontent.com. I had once had a site called Edifying where I tried to sell content as a service, so I could see how tutorialcontent.com might be valuable. I bought it.

Next, I happened across a similarly themed domain called contentplaylist.com. What’s a contentplaylist? I don’t know, but that sounded cool. I’ve had playlists ever since back in the day when I was illegally downloading music on Kazaa Apple launched iTunes. I bought that one too.

Then, I hit the jackpot. The beauty of all beauties. I stumbled across beersradio.com. Would have been better if it was beer and not beers, but we like abundance and who has ever gone into the bar looking for a beer as opposed to many beers? I bought that one too.

$15 all in. One day of purchases, and I was done with GoDaddy Auctions. It served it purpose. I scratched my itch. And I sat on those domains. And I sat. And sat.

Until earlier this week when I got the itch again. A good .com domain is harder than ever to find. I had a legitimate reason to buy another domain this time, too. I swear, it was a great reason. I had an idea that might eventually need a name if I ever built it. So I went hunting for a name in the most logical place: GoDaddy Auctions. In the expiring domains section, I scrolled until my thumb hurt but eventually found sunbuckle.com. I sent it to my wife and she said it gave her mid-2000s mall vibes like PacSun and Buckle had a baby. I HAD to have it after that comment.

I bought it for $5 and casually flipped to my account page on GoDaddy. Hey, look at these other domains I forgot I bought. The domain beersradio.com was popping off the screen. I did a quick check of GoDaddy’s estimated domain value and saw that I wasn’t going to be a multi-thousandaire if I auctioned it, so I figured I should use it. Luckily, I had been looking for a project to tie into a new API feature we launched at my day job, Pinata. I thought it’d be fun to build a craft beer podcast aggregator.

I didn’t want to spin up a bunch of infrastructure for this tiny website that I was building only because I had bought a domain only because it sounded cool only because some Twitter guy convinced me to get into the domain auction business. Fortunately, I could use Pinata for storing and updating the list of RSS feeds for every podcast I chose to aggregate. I spent a less than a day building the app, but I like how it turned out. It’s simple and does exactly what it’s supposed to do.

Check it out, and if you have any podcasts that should be added, send them my way!