Last month I bought the domain chooseyourfuture.org.
Apparently this website used to be owned by the Chicago school district association as a career resource for students.
Now I have it for just $65.
Why? Well eventually I want to start more software businesses.
I got inspired by the guy who runs Vidalia Onions. He makes the case that your next business doesn’t have to be so calculated. He bought vidaliaonions.com off a domain auction as well. And now he’s running a farm to home onion e-commerce website.
That’s kind of like how I started Yo! Focus. I just wanted to jump off with an idea and get going. However - I am realizing that starting businesses, specifically selling physical goods, is definitely not easy.
Buying existing domains from auctions instead of building them out from scratch helps when you are pining on SEO as the main acquisition strategy. It’s much easier to rank on Google with a higher domain reputation.
For example, a friend told me a story of someone who bought a website for a popular generic game played online. I can’t say what it is - but for example purposes let’s say it was backgammon. The original website was buried in the Google search results. Like page 5 when you searched “backgammon”. They ended up buying the domain for cheap, pumped the domain up with backlinks until it got to the number 1 spot on Google when you enter in “Backgammon”.
Now it does 9 figures a year in ad revenue. No changes to the actual website. Maybe minor feature optimizations to the playability of the game to handle the increase in traffic. Overall just pure SEO arbitrage.
This story really rejuvenated my own motivation in what’s possible in content and growth. Is SEO going to be dead from ChatGPT? Maybe. But even if it does die, it’ll take a while.
So back to chooseyourfuture.org. I ended up buying it at auction on Namecheap. I saw it priced at $30. I ended up paying $51 for it at the end ($65 with auction fees). Now I’m wondering what I can do with this domain. Then the next week I say healthifybody.com for sale. Somehow I ended up paying almost $500 for this one. Again - no idea what I’m going to do with it.
Choose your future.
It’s tickling me a bit. The name’s got a mysterious vibe. I went down rabbit holes trying to think about what I could work on. FYI - if you go to the website, the email capture doesn’t even work. But I’ve started down an idea around improving your social skills. Right now it’s on the backburner. But I’ll announce when I’m ready to launch it for real.
Why I love ShortForm’s Business Model
ShortForm has a business model to drool over.
It’s core model right now is providing lots of book summaries of popular non-fiction books at a monthly subscription.
It’s a great business for four reasons:
Their customers have money: Rich people read books. Rich people can also afford digital subscriptions. Consumer SAAS is finicky business because churn is always high. So most of the time it only works if your customer base has money or you’re fulfilling one of their 7 deadly sins.
Endless content marketing opportunities: When you’re selling book summaries, you have an SEO and content goldmine. You’re in the business of selling the world’s best ideas. Every insight from each book can be repurposed into well optimized results from search queries. Did I also mention that there are an unlimited amount of books to read in the world?
Hiring English majors: This is more controversial - but ShortForm can literally hire the most underemployed class in human history: English major graduates. It’s a win-win scenario: they get to avoid pouring coffee and instead get paid to read books and write essays summarizing their findings. And ShortForm can probably hire them for a slightly higher rate than the alternative path (librarian, barista, copywriter?).
Generative AI Dominance: Shortform has a great transition period towards AI. As they begin to scale the summary process - they can use AI to improve the efficiency of their content team. And eventually use it to dominate their content strategy going forwards.
Personally how I end up using ShortForm is that if I start reading a book but end up putting it down - I’ll read the ShortForm book summary instead. It’s a great way to not feel guilty about finishing books.
The CEO is also very interesting. I started reading a bunch of blog from his website. His blog on avoiding building businesses with GPT-3, is a great read.
(Disclosure: I am doing a paid sponsorship with them.)
Thinking About and Tinkering With
Intensity vs Sitting Around
There’s two quotes from podcasts that I’ve been thinking about. One is with Shaan Puri who outlines this idea in tweet form: Intensity is the strategy. The strategy and playbook is straight forward. All you have to do is dial up the intensity and grind.
Then there’s this quote from Charlie Houpert: “When I am recognizing how wonderful life is, I tend to sit and look around more, and I tend to work less.”
I’m pondering the dichotomy between these two quotes. There’s an essay in here somewhere.
I’m experimenting with this app called Reflect for note taking.
I’ve heard of a couple of business influencers using it. And I have been disappointed with Apple Notes for a bit, even though it gets the job done. I listened to Alex Mcgraw, the founder, talk about bootstrapping the app to $50K+ in MRR on Indiehackers. And I’m sure they’re doing more now.