Ken Lin

Excited to share my first public interview in over 20 years in the domain industry! 🙏 Huge thanks to Bob Hawks (@AGreatDomain) for the detailed article about my journey and the story behind dotDB. If you're curious, feel free to read and share! namepros.com/blog/interview…

For a year my little Madagascar board game site fanorona.com averaged like 50 visitors a day. Yesterday: thousands, out of nowhere. The reason? The Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag remake hit #1 on Steam, Fanorona is a quest minigame in it, and stuck pirates are googling "fanorona solver" in a panic. So I built one for them overnight: fanorona.com/solver Go beat that smug tavern NPC. 🏴‍☠️ #AssassinsCreed #BlackFlagResynced #Fanorona

@Ravi26329535 Yes, I did, but I wrote it too small. Damn

@KenLin1985 If you get chance to mention the site name also...it will get good promotion and can get more kids to play..

I’m currently on a Disney cruise somewhere between Singapore and Indonesia, taking my kids on a summer vacation. There’s a fun activity on board where you draw your own character, and during dinner, it gets projected onto the restaurant screens for everyone to see. So of course, I drew the little worm mascot from eWorm.com. 😂 Seeing it appear on the big TV wall and turn into an animated character was actually pretty fun. It also gave me an idea: maybe I can bring this “draw your own character” concept into one of my games someday!

@brandomainable My kids just started their summer break, so we’re here for a family trip and taking a Disney cruise! Next time, when I have more time in Singapore, I’d love to meet up with you.

@KenLin1985 how are you here for?

Just arrived in Singapore, and one thing I didn’t expect to see is chickens roaming around everywhere in the outdoor parks. 🐓 Apparently, some of them are even protected by the government as part of local wildlife conservation. Singapore is beautiful, with trees and greenery everywhere. It really feels like a garden city. But wow, the weather is seriously hot. Is anyone here based in Singapore?

I launched eWorm.com just 2 days ago, and total game plays have already exceeded 1,000! Come give it a try and see if you can make it into the top 10 on the leaderboard.

@MustaAras Haha that’s crazy. Singapore has chickens everywhere, and Boston has turkey gangs. I guess every city has its own roaming bird gang. 😂

@KenLin1985 if you visit Boston, you will see the turkey version roaming around, i was super surprised to see turkey gangs everywhere.

@ParkMyDomain Thanks for sharing! Good to know that the game has siblings in different cultures.

@KenLin1985 I love HasamiShogi because in our country this game called '12 gotti'

Yesterday, while organizing my domain portfolio, I found a domain I have owned for more than 20 years: eWorm.com The funny thing is, in all these years, I don’t think I have ever received a single offer or inquiry for it. So I was asking myself: should I keep renewing this domain, or should I finally just let it drop? Then I suddenly had an idea. What if “eWorm” could mean “Eating Worm”? A little worm that keeps eating things. That sounded like it could become a fun web game, something similar to Snake, but with a cute worm theme. And since Fable 5 finally came back and became usable again, I spent around 5 hours turning the idea into a real game. So now eWorm․com is live. This is what I love about domain driven development. Sometimes a domain sits quietly in your portfolio for 20 years doing absolutely nothing, and then one random idea suddenly gives it a new life. I have been building games like crazy recently. Actually, eWorm was not even the only game I launched today. Earlier today, I also launched HasamiShogi.com, a simple Japanese board game that is very popular among elementary school kids in Japan. The rules are very easy: You capture your opponent’s pieces by trapping them between two of your own pieces, either horizontally or vertically. That’s basically it. Capture more pieces than your opponent and you win. Two very different games launched in one day: eWorm.com HasamiShogi.com Come try them out and let me know what you think.

@Motorv8tion Thanks! And sorry, I’m not really from a technical background, so I may not be the best person to explain the stack. Since Fable 5 wrote all the code, I honestly don’t know the details. I only know it uses Three.js for the game itself.

@KenLin1985 Just played it man it’s actually super fun! Bravo man. Mind sharing your tech stack other than Fable? I have one game related domain you just inspired me to dust off and execute.

@MM_Domains Not much, as I am still in the process of developing more projects to test the waters, rather than monetizing them at this stage.

@KenLin1985 how may developed domains have you been able to monetize?

@AgenticChris @SaudiYachting Yes, exactly! I gave it a pretty detailed vision of what I wanted the game to look and feel like, and then most of the work afterward was just fine-tuning the details, adjusting the gameplay, fixing small issues, and improving the UI/UX.

@KenLin1985 @SaudiYachting Nice! So you built these games with Fable 5? Just gave it your detailed vision and it built them?

@Domainer86 Mostly Claude Opus 4.8, but for the eWorm game, I used Fable 5, as it is the most powerful AI model and just came back in the last two days.

@KenLin1985 Great idea, nice graphics, and it looks a cool game though. May I know which AI model you mostly use to develop your games?

@KSertttttttt Not seriously yet. I’m mostly just doing trial and error for now, building as many games as I can and seeing which one gets real traction. If one of them starts growing big, I can think about monetization later. For now it’s fun, but also a way to test ideas fast.

@KenLin1985 Do you even monetize these? Or work on the seo and get traffic? Just curious or if its more of just a fun project

@Ravi26329535 Sleep is cancelled, Ravi. Someone just beat your score by almost 5,000 points. 😂

@KenLin1985 I will sleep now..

@Shabbirabbas123 Thanks! 😃

@KenLin1985 Amazing games ... amazing idea ...

Just picked up two domains on DigitalJunkyard: YuanWallet․com AudioTranslation․com YuanWallet․com feels like it could be a payment or digital wallet brand, especially since “Yuan” is the name of the Chinese currency. AudioTranslation․com is even more interesting to me. I can imagine building it into a real-time audio translation SaaS. For example, a user could paste a YouTube URL or upload their own video/audio file, choose a target language, and convert the original English audio into Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, etc., while preserving a similar speaker tone and style. Then the platform outputs a translated audio file for the user to download. Maybe this will be my next project. By the way, this was my first time buying domains on DigitalJunkyard, and the experience was pretty good. The pricing there is very reasonable, almost in the reseller range. My process was simple: I scraped/downloaded the list of domains for sale, put the list into ChatGPT, and asked it to help me identify: 1. The most undervalued domains 2. Domains that could potentially be developed into a service, SaaS, or app I’ve been doing this for a while now. Whenever I have a larger domain list to review, I usually run Bulk Search on dotDB first, then use AI as a second layer to help me spot opportunities I might have missed. Just sharing my process.

I’m actually in a very similar situation. I also know very little about coding, although I’m quite comfortable with HTML and CSS. Over the past year or so, I’ve still managed to build quite a few applications with AI. I strongly recommend using Claude Code. I’m currently on the Claude Code Max 20x plan, which costs $200/month. One big advantage is that the token limit resets every five hours. Before this, I was using Cursor, but Cursor with a stronger LLM like Opus 4.8 became extremely expensive. After spending around $3,000 on Cursor over two consecutive months, a friend told me about Claude Code Max 20x, which helped me reduce the cost significantly. Now I’m still building every day and using Opus 4.8 as much as possible, but I only pay $200/month.

@KenLin1985 btw could you share token cost needed to generate something similar to Weiqigo? Also what tools are you using? Thanks

Thanks for mentioning me, @TonyNames. A little context: I have actually been building websites for almost 30 years, slightly longer than I have been investing in domains. Back in the late 90s, I was already putting websites online and earning ad revenue from them. Over time, though, I became more focused on building business models than manually creating every webpage myself. For many years, my usual approach was simple: I brought the ideas and startup capital, then worked with professional engineers and programmers to build the products. I have tried at least a dozen projects this way. Some worked, including dotDB, which many domainers use today. Others were smaller web apps outside the domain industry. This eventually became my main business, although I rarely talk about it on X. In fact, the money I have made from operating websites, including things like AdSense, is far greater than what I have made from domain investing. And this was all before the AI boom. I have always had more ideas than time. Whenever an idea comes to mind, I want to build it quickly, test it, and see whether it works in the real world. Before AI, that process could take one or two months. Now, I can often go from idea to MVP in one or two days. The biggest change is not just coding speed. It is removing the communication cost between founder and engineer during the early testing stage. That does not mean engineers are no longer valuable. Quite the opposite. Once a product grows, real engineering matters a lot: architecture, scaling, infrastructure, performance, security, compute, databases, and everything behind the scenes. A product used by 50 people a day is very different from one used by 50,000 people a day. This past year, I went all in on indie development. So far, I have sold one project, SpeedQuiz.com, and launched probably 30+ websites. Most of them went nowhere and quietly stopped getting updates, like EditVideo.com. A few did much better than expected. One of my sites now gets over 1 million visits per month and has started generating revenue. But the failures are still the majority. My approach is what I call domain-driven development. I start with strong domains that already give the product a natural advantage. Even then, around 90% of the products still get little or no traction. For example, I recently built LowGI.com, and I am already considering shutting down the server. Building products is much harder than buying domains based on data, pricing them well, waiting patiently, and eventually getting a 10x or 100x sale. But it is also much more exciting. With domains, you often wait for luck to arrive. With products, you can keep testing, improving, learning, and compounding. And if one of them really works, the ROI may not be 100x. It could be 1000x or more. Hopefully, one of them will hit soon. And hey! I just launched another new site today: a browser-based Go / Weiqi board game. Come try it here: WeiqiGo.com