How did you get into domaining?

[Cav]

My route,.......
I recall a holiday to Morocco in the mid 2000s and sitting next to a guy at the pool called Nick who disappeared each day to an internet cafe. I asked him what he was doing and he said he had an internet business which he was checking on and it made him a lot of money (it was porn).

I thought I could do this and did research, registered awful .coms etc, and got nowhere with affiliate earnings. I then thought what do I do with this dross? I found Sedo and listed them and to my amazement a .nu I had listed sold for a small profit.

I then recall reading in a broadsheet about some guy who was making available a huge amount of quality .co.uk to the general public for the first time. I have no idea who that was (domains co uk???). So I looked into .uk domains, found a website which listed dropping .uks (until Nominet shut it down I think) and started registering .uks.(they were dirt cheap at that point).

 

[Kaleido]

I caught the bug at the .co launch in 2010. I registered my client domains with DomainMonster.com (RIP) back then and spotted an ad on the homepage. I was intrigued and soon became obsessed. I spent hours and hours punching names into the sunrise search box. Launch day dawned and DomainMonster wiped the floor with every other registrar so I ended up with most of my picks.

When the .uk launch arrived I got excited all over again. I'd always wondered why .uk wasn't available to register, but suddenly it was and I ventured further down the rabbit hole. I couldn't believe so many companies and domainers didn't want the .uk equivalent of their .co.uk so I filled my boots.

I love words and language and domains uniquely contain amazing meaning, value and potential. So buying, selling, chasing, catching, collecting and developing those little strings with a dot and some letters on the end makes domaining the perfect pursuit for me

 

[Lee]

In 2003 I started learning how to build websites and noticed that some domain names had been suspended/pending delete.

After investigating this I found out these names would soon be deleted and came across Dropcatcher that was run by Chris Holland and Ronnie Davies back in the day. I booked a few domains and they picked them up for me! It was then I joined the detagged forum and remember talking to @paullas and @rob to name just two!

I also hand registered some cracking domains back in 2003 and 2004 and anyone old enough to remember will know that both these years were a big moment as lots of domains got dropped!

It was at this time I became an affiliate and went on to develop some of my names to help pay for new domains and renewals. It then became my full time job and has continued ever since.

Now I feel old as I was a teenager when I started and now I'm fast approaching my 40s.