Today I continued going through the thousands of domain ideas I’ve collected over the years and figuring out which ones might actually be worth doing something with. As I’ve mentioned in my previous blog post about this project, I have more than 4,700 ideas in my database. Over the years, whenever I came across one I particularly liked, I would often mark it “Urgent Buy.” The problem is that I was apparently very generous with the word urgent. I had more than 1,000 domains marked that way.

Thankfully, I didn’t actually buy most of them. Today wasn’t really about finding reasons to buy domains. In fact, as I got further into the process, the goal became almost the opposite: find reasons not to buy them.

I started with 1,099 of my old “Urgent Buy” ideas that I’d already put through an initial analysis. Rather than looking at each domain in isolation and deciding whether it sounded good, I started making them compete against each other. That made a huge difference.

A domain can sound pretty good when you’re looking at it by itself. Put it beside 100 other names, though, and suddenly you start noticing that another name is shorter, clearer, easier to remember, has more possible buyers or lends itself to a much better website.

I gradually narrowed the list from more than a thousand to a few hundred worth researching further. Then those were narrowed again to 75 serious candidates.

That was where things got much more interesting.

Of course, availability wasn’t the end of the research

I ran those 75 through a live domain search and discovered that some were still available at normal registration prices, a few were premium domains, and quite a few had already been registered by somebody else.

At first, seeing that someone else had registered one of my old ideas could feel like losing an opportunity. But I started looking at it differently.

Some of these ideas had been sitting in my database for years before somebody else registered them. That doesn’t prove they were valuable, and it certainly doesn’t mean the person who registered them made money. But it does give me another piece of information about my ability to recognize interesting names.

In a few cases, I even found evidence of very recent registrations. That’s something I’d eventually like to study separately: How many domains I independently wrote down years ago were eventually registered by somebody else? That could tell me more about my instincts than simply looking at what is available today.

I also ran into some surprises. A domain being available doesn’t necessarily mean nobody has ever used it. I found names with previous websites, old branding, historical registrations and other footprints. I also found ideas that sounded great until we discovered an existing company or product using something uncomfortably close to the same name. Those went down the list.

I would much rather discover that before spending money.
Resale value and development value are not the same thing.
One of the most useful things I did was stop treating every domain as though its only purpose would be resale.

There are domains I might like as investments because they’re short, memorable and could appeal to different kinds of buyers. Then there are domains that may never be particularly valuable sitting unused in a registrar account, but could make excellent websites.

Those are completely different things.
Several names became much more interesting when I stopped asking, “Could I sell this domain?” and instead asked:”What would I actually build on this?”
Some immediately suggested entire databases that I could build out as pSEO site.

A location could become one set of pages. A historical subject could become another. Cities, dates, buildings, people, routes or categories could all become structured records instead of me sitting down every morning wondering what blog post to write. That obviously caught my attention because it fits very well with the programmatic SEO projects I’ve been wanting to build.

It also fits the kinds of things I’m naturally curious about anyway—history, old businesses and buildings, travel, transportation and places that no longer exist.
That’s something I hadn’t really considered when I originally entered many of these domains into Airtable years ago.

I kept making the funnel smaller and by the end, the numbers were almost funny. I went from 1,099 supposedly urgent domains to a few hundred worth further research.
Those became 75 serious candidates.
Those became 13 finalists.

After another round of research, even those were reduced further.
I eventually ended up with seven domains that I would seriously consider registering at an ordinary registration price.
Seven.
Out of 1,099.
That’s less than 1%.
And strangely, that doesn’t make me feel like the other ideas were bad.

It makes me feel like I finally have a system for separating an interesting idea from an idea worth spending money on.
Those are not the same thing.

I did have a few problems along the way though, the process definitely wasn’t perfect.

Early on, I accidentally imported analyzed records back into Airtable as new records instead of updating the existing ones. I had to delete those and learn how to merge the results properly.

I also discovered duplicate records in my database.
Then I wasted a couple of limited bulk domain searches by uploading files that weren’t formatted the way they needed to be. After that, I changed the workflow so there would be one file specifically for updating Airtable and another clean file containing only the domains for the live search.

There were also moments where a domain looked promising until additional research changed the picture completely. But that’s really the point. I’d rather have the process kill an idea than have my bank account do it later.

Probably the biggest lesson is that I don’t need to act on every idea I like.
I can keep it.
I can research it.
I can develop it later.
I can watch what happens to it.
Or I can simply let it go.

I’ve collected ideas for most of my adult life, and sometimes the sheer number of them becomes overwhelming. I think part of that comes from feeling like every good idea creates an obligation to do something with it.
It doesn’t.

In the end, the domains I’ve narrowed down so far, are more appropriate for building pSEO sites on….. which are database driven sites, that believe it or not, are still relevant in the age of AI… Of course, how you must build them has changed, gone are the days you can auto build thousands of pages and hope for the best… Quality is the winner, plus it’s more sustainable. If you want to learn more about domain investing and how I use database driven sites to earn affiliate income, be sure to subscribe… I post a lot about what I’ve done in the past, and how the industry is changing…. more importantly for you, how others can still get their piece of the internet money pie.