Buying a new domain is not the way to start your side project

When an idea strikes, the very next thing to do is buy a domain

I do this a lot and started to slow down recently.

• You take a shower and the idea generator puts an awesome idea in your head
• It would be the most incredible idea you have ever come across.
• Rush to laptop see if that perfect domain name is available and boom
• What did just happen? You got a dopamine effect of achieving something. Feels like the project is half done right? Nope. Wrong.
• In reality, you did nothing. You just paid some few $$
• Now you have 1 year to work on the project before it expires.

Guess what? You will probably let it expire or worse, renew it for one more year assuming some miracle is gonna happen this year. Nope, you are wrong again.

I started keeping aside at least an hour for side projects starting March and obviously, I ended up buying few domains - nonolist.me, shipit.club, myfailedstartups.com

Wanna know the current status of these projects? MVP is not ready yet.

Meanwhile, I started thinking about this domain hoarding problem and hit the aha shower moment again

Let's build a website to find out how many domains people own

For some miraculous reason, I didn't buy a domain for this

I created a form using typeform and tweeted the link asking how many domains people own.

oh boy, many owned hundreds of domain names

Ok, now I hit that rush to buy a domain to build a website for this.

HIGHSCORE.domains is born. A fun leaderboard to find out who owns more domains.

I know you are reading this and thinking "oh wait, how many domains do I own actually?"

HIGHSCORE.domains is the project I bought the domain after seeing people are responding to it and might have some potential.
Guess what? this is the only project which is live and not yet another "Sign up for early access" page.

Do you face this problem as well - ie, ended up buying domains and not use them? Is there any tricks/realization you had recently which helped to overcome this?