How I Got Into Domains

Someone asked me this morning how I got into domains. The honest answer is that I did not. I got into internet marketing, and the names came with the work.

The first one was knup.net, in 2002. Register.com was the place you went then. I was interested in the web the way a lot of people were interested in it then: Google AdSense, small content sites, and the idea that a URL plus pages could make money while you were at a day job. I was not collecting domains. I was trying to publish.

It is a little funny that the brand is still Knup, now on knup.com. The experiments in between are a long list. The name is the part that compounded. The rest of this is the path, and the part I would skip if I were starting this week.

The first registrar was just where the site lived

In 2002 a domain was a requirement, not an asset class. You needed an address so the site could exist. Register.com handled that for me. Around 2006 I moved the habit to GoDaddy, and that is where most of the registrations lived for a long time. Dynadot is the registrar I use now, after the portfolio moved there in the 2020s. The tool changed. The reason did not, at least not at the start.

If you want the paper trail of what those early sites turned into, it is on the ventures ledger. KnupNET is the root: knup.net treated like a company instead of a last name on a mailbox. A lot of later logos are that same habit with better taste.

Small sites taught the habit before any portfolio did

The pattern was simple. Find something people already searched for. Put a site on a clear name. Publish. See if ads paid. Celebrity Club Network was that play in the fan-site years, roughly 2006 to 2012: one celebrity or athlete per site, news and photos, AdSense on the traffic. Golden Tee Fan is the version that lasted. I set up the domain and the structure in 2007. My friend Eric made the content. It is still up, still earning, and still the cleanest example I have that a niche URL plus useful pages can outlast flashier projects.

Not every name became a business. LinkBidding.com in 2007 was an internet-marketing product that did not work. Rough design, painful payments, no traction. I still count it. Owning the name was how I got to test the idea instead of only talking about it. That is the part worth copying. The part that is not worth copying showed up later, when I started registering names I had no plan to build.

Then the names were for clients

By the late 2000s I was registering domains for other people and building the sites on them. Content work had already started as nights and weekends out of a Caterpillar job. Site owners needed words. Then they needed a place for the words to live. If I already understood the name, the hosting, and the structure, the project moved faster than a pitch that began with “go register something.”

Knup Solutions is the company that grew out of that cubicle work. It launched as a solo writing shop around 2008. It did not become the whole job until 2015.

2015 is when domains became a piece of the business

Caterpillar offered severance. The side work was already close to the day-job income. I left, and Knup Solutions stopped being something I did after work. Domain flipping sat inside that business. It was not a separate hobby I had to justify. Clients, content, and names were the same pile of work.

The agency went deep into iGaming. Sports and betting sites needed a constant supply of articles, and the names around that industry started to look obvious. If you are writing gambling content all day, you notice which phrases people type, which geos are opening up, and which brandables a new operator might actually want. I built a betting and gambling portfolio on purpose and ran it for a long time as PremiumGamblingDomains.com. In the early years of legal US betting, a lot of those names sold.

That storefront is retired now. The useful record is Gambling Domains on the venture ledger, and the broader home that came after it: Knup Domains, launched in 2020, listed out, moved to Dynadot, then folded back into knup.com so the portfolio did not need its own logo. USA Wager and a stack of sports sites came out of the same drawer. Some names became companies. Some became inventory. Some should never have been registered.

The part I would skip

I started registering every bet-plus-word combination I could think of. Bet this. Bet that. If the string was available, it felt like a miss to leave it. That was wrong. A phrase people say is not the same thing as a name someone will pay for, build on, or remember.

At one point the list was more than 1,600 domains. I wrote about what that actually costs in The Real Cost of Owning Too Many Domains: renewals, attention, and brands that never ship. The cut is further along now. I am down to about 200, and I am still shrinking it. Fewer names. Higher value. Less of a yearly bill for inventory I have to keep explaining to myself.

Trademarks are the other skip. I would avoid them from the beginning. Celebrity Club was my first real lesson. Cease and desist letters from Miley Cyrus and Barry Manilow are extra stress you do not need in exchange for a registration fee. I went through that story in Why I Avoid Athlete, Team, and Event Domains Now. Availability is not permission. If the value of the name depends on someone else’s fame, I do not want it.

What I would tell you to do this week

Start slow. One name for a real idea beats a spreadsheet of maybes. Watch dropped domains. Watch new trends, and be ready when a real opening shows up. The .si rush after “super intelligence” hit the news is a clean example of how fast a category can appear. I wrote that up in Why Speculators Are Suddenly Buying .si Domains. Speed matters when you are looking. It is a terrible reason to check out.

Be quick to watch. Be slow to register.

Then build a network. Domain people are a fun community once you are actually in it: people who have sold names, people who track drops, people who will tell you a string is cute and worthless. You will learn more from those conversations than from another afternoon of hand-registering variations. The standards I use when a name is for a business, not a bet, are in How to Pick a Domain Name for a New Business.

A short timeline

• 2002: knup.net at Register.com. Internet marketing and AdSense, not a portfolio.
• 2006: GoDaddy becomes home base. Celebrity Club Network starts.
• 2007: Golden Tee Fan and LinkBidding.com. Own the name, test the idea.
• Late 2000s: Registering domains for clients and building the sites.
• 2008–2015: Knup Solutions grows from side work to the full-time business after I leave Caterpillar. Flipping becomes part of the company.
• iGaming years: PremiumGamblingDomains.com. A lot of sales in the early US betting window. Also the bet-plus-word bloat.
• Peak: 1,600-plus domains. Too many renewals, too many names with no plan.
• 2020s: Knup Domains, then Dynadot, then the portfolio back under knup.com.
• Now: About 200 names and still shrinking. The brand that started on knup.net is the site you are reading.

If you are starting from the question I got

You do not need a thousand names to be “in domains.” You need a reason to own the next one, a place to watch what is dropping and what is new, and people who will talk you out of the cute ideas. I spent years learning that by paying for the cute ideas. You can skip that invoice.

The ventures list is the long version of the mess and the wins. This post is the version I would send back in the thread: I got in because I wanted to build sites. I stayed in because some of those names turned out to be assets. I got healthier when I owned fewer of them.