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…

@UpHonestReal No, I have never listed this domain for sale anywhere. A broker from DomainAgents approached me and brought me an offer from an anonymous buyer.

@KenLin1985 How long was the listing process of your portfolio? Any import mecanism?

Still struggling to secure my first domain sale on DomainAgents…

@StartupApe Mine is Sagus․com - 1992

What’s the oldest domain in your portfolio? Mine: GoEducator .com 1999 Let’s see some vintage internet assets. 👀 #domains #domaininvesting

@Varun_Goyal Is this your own company’s name? I can see an established website and company being built on this domain.

@KenLin1985 Great names.. Btw what do you think of my long tail domain name.. SkySailGlobal. Com .. SkySail. Com is listed at $175k, so thoughts of it if any?

Picked up a few more long-tail / niche .com domains recently. I like these types of names because they often sit outside the obvious investor radar but still have clear development or investment potential. A few interesting ones 👇 1️⃣ TexasPanhandle․com A regional name covering the northern part of Texas. This area includes: • Palo Duro Canyon – often called the 2nd largest canyon in the U.S. • The city of Amarillo • Historic Route 66 running through the region Feels like a good fit for a regional travel site, possibly monetized with day-trip tours and travel affiliate programs. 2️⃣ Malaren․com Refers to Lake Mälaren, right next to Stockholm, Sweden. This lake is historically significant as one of the centers of early Viking civilization, surrounded by castles and historic towns. Short, clean name with both: • travel development potential • strong brand feel 3️⃣ MovieCostumes․com This one was inspired by the legendary sale of HalloweenCostumes․com, which reportedly sold for around $1M and later became the leading online Halloween costume retailer in the U.S. “Movie Costumes” is a more long-tail keyword, but still a clear category within the costume industry. Could work as: • an ecommerce brand • a niche costume marketplace • or a movie / cosplay costume hub 4️⃣ Collations․com In English, collation generally means organizing, compiling, or assembling information or documents. So this could potentially work for: • data tools • document processing utilities • text or dataset organization platforms Interestingly, in French (especially in Quebec) collation commonly refers to a snack or light meal. So the domain carries two different meanings depending on language. 5️⃣ Plaquemine․com A historic city in Louisiana, USA (population around 7,000). Known for: • historic architecture • Mississippi River scenery • nearby industrial growth The name comes from a French word referring to persimmons. Could have potential for: • local real estate • regional tourism • or a city guide site. I've always liked picking up long-tail geo and category domains like these. They may not look flashy at first glance, but many of them have clear development paths or specific end-user markets. Sometimes those are the most interesting bets.

I would like to keep the price I paid for it. The reason I bought it was because I have been heavily engaged in game development. I’ve already built some game sites with good traffic, such as Gomoku.com. When I noticed the domain was available at a reasonable price, I decided to buy it and develop it.

@KenLin1985 Huge congratulations 🎉 Ken!! 🍾! Choosing the right name is all that really matters! I’m curious how much did you pay for this name? And what researches informed your decisions??

@cultra Yes, it seems they really just wanted the domain. So they paid for it and convinced me to give up my original plan. But I think the price would have been very different if I hadn’t already built a site on it. 😄

@KenLin1985 Thank you for this great story. I feel like he just wanted the domain. We'll find out soon

@koke_eth Actually the key was building the site. Owning the domain is one thing, but launching the project lets potential buyers see the whole picture and understand the real value behind it.

@KenLin1985 It was purely for the purpose of acquiring domain names.

@edwinhayward x.com/KenLin1985/sta…

@KenLin1985 Intriguing. Look forward to learning more.

Just sold the first project I built using vibe coding. A little bittersweet. I spent hundreds of millions of tokens and several sleepless nights building it from scratch. But the buyer made a solid offer, and after thinking about it for more than a month, I finally agreed to the deal. Once the transaction is completed, I’ll reveal which site it was. Meanwhile, I’m already picking the next domain from my portfolio to start building again.

@ilovedotcom @AGreatDomain You may want to try DNX.com. I believe they have included all these domains, and you can set the filter to the last 7 days.

@KenLin1985 @AGreatDomain cool, how to find the list though? 🤔

I spent quite a bit of time yesterday researching this domain portfolio owner and trying to understand why they suddenly listed around 10,000 .com domains for sale, many priced below market level. I found some interesting things. First, about 90% of the domains appear to be typos of well-known brands — things related to names like Amazon, Netflix, Gmail, etc., with small spelling mistakes or extra or missing letters. It looks like they were mainly doing typo traffic / typo-squatting, and most of those domains were pointing to parking pages. The remaining ~10% are generic domains, things like PaidSurvey․com, PetBirds․com or BackyardBBQ․com. Another interesting thing I noticed is that many of these domains were originally won in expired auctions on platforms like NameJet or DropCatch. What surprised me is that the current GoDaddy BIN prices are often lower than what they originally paid. For example, BackyardBBQ․com was won on NameJet in 2020 for $2,545, but now it’s listed for around $2,000. There were also a few domains where I actually remember competing in the auction and finishing as the second highest bidder, with them winning the auction — and now some of those are listed for less than half of their original purchase price. In one case I saw, they paid around $3.5k but are now selling it for about $500. (I already bought that one, but I won’t say which 😄.) Based on all this, my guess is that their main business model was earning parking revenue from typo domains. But earlier this year Google exited AFD, which likely made domain parking much less profitable. So they may have decided the business is no longer worth continuing and are now liquidating the entire portfolio. That’s my best guess after digging into it. I’ve already picked up around 20 domains from their portfolio.

@ilovedotcom @AGreatDomain It’s not in the auction. It’s a GoDaddy Buy It Now listing with around 10,000 domains.

@KenLin1985 @AGreatDomain which auctions can i see these names?

@djkabzx @AGreatDomain Use a reverse WHOIS lookup to find all the domains owned by the same person.

@KenLin1985 @AGreatDomain What I still can't figure out is, how could you tell the portfolio size (10K) and knew for a certain that they all belonged to the same person. Even before you started to research the person behind the names.

Dug up some more information about this bidder po3kjd5nf4b: dnforum.com/threads/nameje…

If you ever bid against the bidder po3kjd5nf4b on NameJet or SnapNames and lost, you might now have a chance to buy that domain for less than the original winning bid. 😁 I paid less than half of the original winning bid to acquire this Spanish-related domain yesterday.

@Motorv8tion No, I was referring to a portfolio holder with around 10k .com domains who recently listed them for sale on GoDaddy (probably through Afternic), mostly priced below typical market levels.

@KenLin1985 Are you talking about that portfolio that was just run through GD auctions

@AGreatDomain Yes Bob, I think we may see more big portfolio holders doing similar liquidation or downsizing, especially those who relied heavily on domain parking and can no longer make meaningful revenue from it.I’m ready to keep picking up bargains if that happens.😁

@KenLin1985 That makes a lot of sense. I suspect other portfolios that depended mainly on parking may be considering liquidation or at least downsizing. Thanks for such a perceptive and detailed answer.

@Castello_Bros Oh, sorry, I didn't know about this! Maybe it's because the domain is parked and being redirected to a bad site or something like that?

@KenLin1985 Interesting, because PetBirds.com tries to install a virus.

Yesterday it looked like a portfolio holder with ~10,000 domains decided to shut down and run a massive liquidation sale through GoDaddy. Most of the inventory was niche .com domains, but there were also quite a few single words and interesting compound terms like Miraculously․com, PetBirds․com and FuneralServices․com, all listed at pretty reasonable prices. Honestly, this is my favorite moment to go shopping. When portfolio holders liquidate, you can often pick up domains below typical market prices. I grabbed 10+ domains from the list. Here are five that I like the most (most of them I bought with potential development ideas in mind): 1. Pedalboard․com I know almost nothing about music, but I can imagine building an online Pedalboard Planner where guitar and bass players can visually design their pedalboard setup, simulate signal chains, and maybe even preview tones. It could also integrate affiliate programs to sell pedals and gear. 2. Spintax․com Short for “spinning syntax.” It’s a format widely used in marketing and SEO to generate multiple variations of the same text automatically. This one feels very SaaS-friendly to me. I already have a product idea in mind, so this will likely be high on my development list. 3. BassBoost․com Thinking about building a web-based audio tool (similar to what I'm doing with EditVideo.com) focused on enhancing bass in audio files. The idea would be to offer it as a subscription-based tool. 4. DistanceFrom․com The name explains itself. A tool where users enter two places (cities, landmarks, addresses…) and the site shows: • straight-line physical distance • travel distance/time via driving, walking, flights, or public transport This one is also on my priority development list. 5. HorseDentist․com This one I bought purely as an investment. I already own several horse-related domains like HorseShipping․com, and years ago I successfully sold HorseRug․com. From my experience, horse-related niches often have surprisingly strong buyers, so “Horse Dentist” might have potential. Interestingly, dotDB shows that the keyword “horse dentist” already has 13 exact-match domains registered across extensions. For a relatively high-value professional niche, I actually think that’s a pretty solid signal. There were also several other interesting names on my watch list, but I hesitated for a moment… and they were quickly picked up by others. Curious — Did anyone else buy anything from that sale? Or what do you think about the domains I picked? Would love to hear your thoughts 👇