New-to-Me .COM Hustle

I just discovered this little hustle/arbitrage that people do. I have sweepspotter.app (for my street sweeping schedule app), and recently I got an email asking if I would want to buy the .com version for $500.

I mostly ignored it because I didn't care that much (not $500 much).

Every week, the guy would follow up, and today he lowered his offer to $299. And that was getting close, still too high but seemed like he might accept a lower offer. I decided to take a look at who owned the domain (knowing that usually it is masked) as I wanted to avoid some sort of middle man ideally.

It turns out the .com had expired a few months back and was also out of the pendingDelete stage. I just went and directly registered it at my preferred registrar for $7.

I guess there are people out there that scrape the recently dropped lists, match them up against other TLDs and try to sell them at huge markups. Probably not too difficult of a sell and can be pretty automated (at least the initial outreach). Despite knowing better, I almost "fell" for it as it didn't cross my mind that the .com would have expired and just been sitting there.

...

I thought that was the end of that story, but another week later the guy is still emailing me to see if I'm interested in the .com. I guess he hasn't yet checked that someone has registered it already. Or that if he were to check he would see that the .com now has the same content that the .app had.

Though I suppose he probably goes through a bunch of these domains at any given time and doesn't have time to check the contents of the sites. But it wouldn't be a big deal for his script to filter out the domains that are no longer available.

...

And then a few more days later, he's back offering the domain for a new low price of $100. His processes have some room for improvement.

Anyways I've now migrated the app over to sweepspotter.com.