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How to Find Opportunities Hidden in Plain Sight
Giving Birth to a Whole New World of Opportunities
Kevin Ham
June 06, 2024
Recap from last week
You have been working on your 6-step Entrepreneurial Blueprint:
1. You have been working towards your first target to make at least as much as your current job for the last 7 days.
2. You haven’t missed more than one day.
3. You have continued to scope down your idea to something you can accomplish by your target date.
4. You have re-read the first four steps of the blueprint everyday.
5. You are getting support from your significant other(s).
Opportunities and success are not something you go after necessarily but something you attract by becoming an attractive person.
As sponsorship requests started to come in for HostGlobal, one person asked if he could put a link, 'Free Domain Registration,' at the top. I thought little of it since it was just a link and asked for $100 a month. Little did I know that these three little words would change my life for the next 25 years.
I had a call with him, and he was so pleased with the link's performance. He told me he was making $1500 with no work at all. I was curious. I clicked the link, and it went to a domain registration page. I estimated that he was making $3-$5 per domain registration in commission. That meant 300-500 domain registrations per month.
And just like that, I knew my next "Yellow Pages" category. Domain names!
I did some research and decided to build a network of websites instead of just one. So, I registered the domain name DNSIndex.com and signed up as an affiliate partner of a domain name registrar called Domain Bank. I created my new site and promoted it via HostGlobal.
The Domain Kings
In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
HostGlobal was doing well, and I wanted to replicate that success with DNSIndex. So, I started an Expired Domain List and created a paid newsletter at $49/year. In it, I sent out a list of expired domains and a link for people to register them via DNSIndex.
Soon, a handful of people started registering everything on my Expired Domain List. Rick Schwartz, the Domain King; Slavik Viner, domain extraordinaire; Anthony Peppler, who would teach me a lot about domain names and the list of subscribers grew each week. The more names I added to the list, the more domain registrations I received. I would eventually make up to $10,000 USD a month. It was almost like printing money.
Then, I wondered why these domainers were registering so many domain names. I only owned a few names that I used for my businesses. What were they doing with them?
So, I got on the phone again, this time with Anthony Peppler. I wanted to know why he was registering so many domains. He wanted to know how I found my list of expired domains. I didn't think I was doing anything revolutionary. I would simply go to whois.net and query their database of any domain name that used to be registered but was now available.
He revealed that he knew that domain names expire at a particular time and that there was a process for re-registering them as soon as they became available, but he didn't know how. The great names got picked up immediately by people who knew the secret process. Now, I was curious.
He had met a younger kid, Ross, who knew the process but didn't have the money to pay the registration fees for the hundreds of domains expiring every day. Ross liked three-letter domains. He got around paying the registration fees upfront by sending in email registrations and then he'd try to flip the names before he had to pay for them. The problem was that he had to keep trying to re-register them because he didn't have enough money. Anthony offered to partner with him and pay the registration fees, $70 for two years for each of them.
I asked him to sell me one of their premium three-letter domains. ZEJ.com was my first three-letter domain. Thanks, Anthony!
Front Page News
Let everyone sweep in front of his own door, and the whole world will be clean.
At that time, I was so excited about becoming the newly minted domain owner of what I thought was a premium domain, a coveted three-letter dot com.
Why was I so excited? The pieces were starting to come together.
I had a flashback to 1997 when I first thought about launching my Yellow Pages online idea, I was trying to name it. Yellow.com? Taken. Yellowpages.com? Taken. Every name I came up with seemed to be taken.
I suddenly thought of the Rorschach inkblots as a metaphor for my idea, creative, seeing double entendres. Inkblot.com it was. Again, to my dismay, it, too, was taken! I kept thinking... Was there a creative take I could play on it? Incblot.com–a play on inc as in incorporations. Surely, that would be a unique version. Taken!
I was so disappointed. I felt hopeless, so I decided to register inc-blot.com, my very first domain name. Oh, how hard it was back in 1997 to find a good domain name.
Fast-forward to late 1999 and hundreds of domainers were paying me for access to my Expired Domain List. They were registering domain names from my list that didn't even have the most premium names on it–like the coveted three-letter domains. It felt like a modern-day gold rush.
Business.com had just sold for $7.5 million earlier in 1999. Marc Ostrovsky, the owner, had bought it for $150,000 in 1996–a 50x return in 3 years (in 2007, it would sell again for $350 million).
Armed with this new insight, I decided to get on the front page of our local newspaper, the London Free Press, and get press for my new website, DNSIndex.com. I called the newspaper and declared, "I'd like to be on the front page."