Project Link : Subreddit-Domains
I am a big time Reddit User. I use it to research about potential ideas / projects that I could work upon.
A month back, i was browsing the Sub r/csCareerQuestions and i realised that this could be turned into a blog of its own. I quickly looked at the Domain www.csCareerQuestions.com and it was available for $ 700. While i didn’t end up buying the domain, i realised that every subReddit has a domain value attached to it. The subreddits are stores of value, the higher the number of subscribers the greater the value.
I than started mining the Subreddit Info and used godaddy Api to check if the domain corresponding to that subreddit was available or not. I will probably write a Post on how to do that, but now let’s continue here. I was able to mine 18,000 subreddits and got more than 2,500 available .com domain names, 10,000 + .org .net and .io names combined.
While there were a lot of junk domains (Subreddit names can be a little useless like techSupportGore.com), but hidden in them were some cool names as well, maybe for your next Project like :
- AskEconomics.com
- maleHairAdvice.com
- logoRequests.com
LAUNCH DAY :
I launched on several Platforms at once. Ideally, it is better to launch at one place and than relaunch it on other places to get a sustained traffic. But the Biggest hurdle in this Project was Displaying Available Domains to People is a depreciating Asset. The more People would check out the Domain names, the Lesser the number of Available domains would get.
So i had to make sure i launch it at once on all the Platforms. I launched it on PH, Reddit and HackerNews. Here are some of the Stats :
- Product Hunt : 13 Upvotes and 6 comments
- hacker news : 10 Points and 4 comments
- r/EntrepreneurRideAlong : 235 upvotes and 35 comments
- r/findAReddit : 1,200 + upvotes and 65 comments
Here is the Link of the Original Reddit Post in r/findAReddit :)
Above i have posted a few Testimonials from the Reddit Users :P
Learning :
- Posting on Reddit is so dependent on the Subreddit and the relevancy of it with your Project.
- The tagline really matters ! I earlier posted an Obscure Tagline like “A list of TLD’s named after Subreddits” and it almost got no Engagement compared to “A RedditList of 18,000 + Subreddits Categorized”
- Reddit is a very Hate/Love place. Some will absolutely love it and some will still hate it, but it is genuine. On Product Hunt Ihave felt, people say nice things but they will never use it even once. So for Feedback Reddit is ++
- I realized What getting to a Product-market-fit would feel like. The post grew by itself. The People would pour by themselves to use it
- Lastly, i am glad i took some time off from reddit and twitter, because it made me feel extremely overwhelmed and i was extremely addicted to my screen, checking reddit and twitter after every 5 mins. It’s good to flush all of this out and than start working again.
RESULTS :
After a day of Launch I tracked all the domains which were either bought (Unavailable) or put to auction after Buying. The results are shown here :
TRAFFIC :
I got around 600 unique users on my website in a span of 3 days, with the majority being on the 1st day. The reason is that my Product was a google Sheet and people bookmarked the sheet itself, so instead of going to the main site they directly went to the sheet.
For Google Sheet, i assume, the number of users would have been atleast a multiple of 2x or 3x. Also it still does have traffic. Though i didn’t measure the number of users on the Sheet. There is actually a way to do analytics for your google sheet. Here is a tweet Thread by me explaining the same.
MONETIZATION ??
After i created the domain List I thought of monetizing it by selling the list of domain names on gumroad. But the major problem of doing that was as people keep on buying it the data starts reducing as the available domains get sold. I therefore decided to try out if there is any interest for this.
After seeing the interest, i hastily added a buy me a coffee button in the Sheet and added a sponsors section. Anybody who buys me a coffee gets to be on the sponsor section and their twitter bio will be shown there. The business model was similar to the way github libraries show sponsors on the side bar.
After 2 days I received $ 30 through this method. I have thus come to the conclusion that buy me a coffee is good only if you have a following or if people connect with your story. If you randomly pop out and use this tool, there will not be much success.
I have learnt a lot from this Project. It’s time to build a website now and add the data there. I have received several requests to sort by filter so i will be doing that.
Oh and i have also bought the domain www.findAReddit.com. Pretty cool !!
