Regrets: Part 1 of 2
May 27, 2007 Posted by Tyler CruzAs a web publisher and entrepreneur, I am faced with more possibilities of regretting something due to the nature of the business. This is most likely true with any self-employed person as such people’s decisions directly affect their work, compared to an employee, whose regrets are usually mistakes but not missed opportunities.
When I was thinking of my own past regrets 10-minutes ago while I was making the outline of this post, I surprised myself in that I discovered I have few regrets. In fact, I could only come up with three:
1. DomainForums.com
In the fall of 2005 I purchased DomainForums.com for $10,000 USD. I knew and understood that I was purchasing mainly just the domain, but the site also came with a small vBulletin community, custom skin, and a domain-management script made freely available to the public.
I bought the site because I knew the domain was valuable. Domain forums such as DNForum.com and NamePros.com are extremely popular and gross a lot of income simply because they provide an area for users to list, and thus buy and sell domains. I knew that DomainForums.com, while only a small forum, had such enormous potential due to it’s domian name.
Several months later I sold DomainForums.com for $14,500. Why? For a car. Yes, for a car. And not a BMW or anything, but a 2004 Toyota Corolla. I live in a medium-sized city (by Canadian standards), and so while we have “decent” public transportation, it is not the same as a large city. I had wanted a car again, and I didn’t want to keep paying interest on a car loan, so I sold the site to help pay it all off.
I helped justify the selling of the site by telling myself that it was an easy $4,000 profit (I had spent around $500 on promoting the site), and it is a fair justification. Thus, this regret is not a major one. However, I believe it was still a small mistake. I should have been a bit more patient, and used public transportation for a little while longer until I could afford the car; after all, I work from home.
What rubs salt in the wound is that the site is now a PR7 (It was a PR6 when I owned it I believe)! I don’t have to tell you how valuable a PR7 domain is. It is also #1 on Google for “Domain Forums”. What’s even worse is that the owner hasn’t done a single thing to the site, so the value and potential of the site has been wasted.
I tried to buy the site back recently, but the owner turned out to be a complete jackass, and there is no hope of me getting the site back.
To be continued tomorrow with two more “regrets”…
11 Responses to “Regrets: Part 1 of 2”
Nice post! Interesting to see people actually admitting mistakes!
You don’t regret putting your last post on Digg, to be lambasted by… everyone?
At the risk of sounding like Pollyanna, you can call them mistakes, but as with my screwup of a few weeks ago, I could also consider it grad school tuition.
I think it was Churchill who said, “Many men stumble across opportunity, but most just pick themselves back up and take no further notice.”
When this latest post of Tyler’s popped up in my reader I was just reading a post on the DomainTools blog about a mystery (in my mind) now solved … this little company owned the URL “utube.com” and they hired a consultant to find out where all the “nuisance” traffic was coming from 😉 They know now, to the tune of around $8k per month.
Really interesting post tyler. I’m interested to see part 2
regret will be one of ur lessons in our life . so just learn from it , we can gaim more back.
My biggest regret, so far, is that I wanted to buy fewknow.com. I was going to use it as a blog, or something, but I really just liked the name. Well, when I went to finally buy it, someone snatched it from me either the day before, or that very day.
I sent the person an email to see if they wanted to sell it. They are asking almost 6K for it. There went a nice addition to the down payment on my new house.
The new owner’s a jackass for not selling it back to you?
You’re a sucker for selling it to him.
Live and learn.
No, he was a jackass for other reasons not relating to declining to sell me the site back.
Obviously I wouldn’t call somebody a jackass just because they wouldn’t sell a site to me.
Should have kept the site and financed the car.. that counts as a good debt… 🙂
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