Let’s hustle #1

Sharing a side-hustle idea that you can build a business around

Introduction

Welcome to Let’s hustle. In this new series, we’re gonna talk about development-related side-hustle ideas that you can build a business around.

I put together a small Go program that transcribes the most important technology and business related podcasts and extracts interesting business ideas from them. They discuss a lot.

I’ll also share my own ideas.

Let’s hustle!

The problem

Domains can be very expensive. Especially, when you want to buy one for a business and you don’t want to craft a brand name but rather use a combination of words such as SubStack.

There are always trending technologies, trending ideas, and trending domains as well. Nowadays, it’s all about AI.

The other day, I was thinking about some AI journaling app so I checked journalai.com if it’s available. Yeah, it is. For $25,000.

But it is nothing compared to chat.com’s $15 million acquisition. Yeah, 15 million. And the story gets better. Originally, HubSpot's CEO Dharmesh Shah bought it for $15 million. It is one of the oldest domains out there. In a My First Million episode he said he bought it because he believes AI-powered applications with chat-based interfaces will dominate the future. Now the domain redirects to ChatGPT. Yes, Dharmesh sold the domain to ChatGPT. We don’t know the purchase price, but he probably received OpenAI stocks in return. Just imagine this. You have shares in one of the most valuable companies before it goes public. If the AI-hype continues, and LLMs get better and better OpenAI is probably going to be one of the largest companies in the world. This one domain can mean billions and billions of dollars for Dharmesh. It’s crazy.

But let’s be real. We don’t play in this league. We play in the vidalia onion league. There’s the famous article called I sell onions on the internet. It’s a pretty good read. Peter Askew once saw that the domain name vidaliaonions.com has expired and is up for auction. It was a great domain name so he bought it. He had no intention to build a business around onions, but now he sells onions on the internet and he runs a very successful business. But this is not his only domain-related adventure. He always buys expired domains and builds interesting businesses around them. Want to build a side business? Just buy a great Domain Name.

The problem is that maybe you don’t want to browse expired domains (I tried it once and it was pretty boring). The problem is that maybe you don’t have 15 mil to buy a great domain.

The idea