Sean Walker

2021-04-26

I have to stop buying domains

I bought three domains over the last two weeks:

1. seans dot cloud
2. isatiny dot app
3. isatiny dot com

The first one is weird mostly because my name is not phonetic so as I soon as I bought it for $4 I knew it sucked, but it was already too late.

Hopefully the last two will be the last two I will ever buy because I own about 40 domains and I let most of the them expire every year becuase I don’t want to pay the $8/year to keep them around.

This is the cycle that I’m sure someone reading this particular blog is familiar with:

• Live your life: take a walk, workout, do chores, take a shower, whatever
• Get a brilliant flash of insight about a problem you may have had while doing a thing
• Get pumped on this new idea
• Check for available domain names related to this idea
• Go through extensive lists of synonyms and variations: random prefixes or suffixes
• Find one or two
• Buy domain
• Start coding immediately
• Days, weeks or months go by
• Burn out on the idea, could be doubts creeping in, could be a realization that user/customer acquisition is still difficult
• Step away from the computer
• Repeat

I’m not quite sure how to break out of this cycle. One idea I had was to just do nothing when I get some stupid flash of insight on a “problem” that I have. I’ve resisted buying a ton of domains over the last few years because if I just let the idea go I usually go through the whole cycle and reach the “burn out” point without even writing a single line of code.

There are larger concerns here around what it means to be a “maker” or a “doer” in a world that is highly automated and requires very little labor to meet our basic needs and even more complicated needs. That could be a whole other post.

The point is, when I feel the urge to buy a domain and start another stupid project I’m going to just slap a subdomain on “isatiny.app” when I go to deploy some code instead of wasting time with naming I can just use the most straightforward name possible.

Oh also I’m currently in the “Start coding immediately” phase of my latest project: ping.isatiny.app

Send help.