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Hey there 👋,
I just sold the domain Dillon.ai:
Six-month payment plan, $1,500 a month, through Atom. I found it on One Word Domains — my second sale using the tool. The first was shiny.gg, hand-registered and sold for $10K on Dan.
So naturally I did what any reasonable person does after a second win. I tried to turn it into a system.
I spent a few days going deep on the actual economics of domain investing. Sell-through rates, renewal costs, portfolio sizing, what the top 100 sales of 2025 looked like, how the aftermarket actually works. I haven't gone this deep on domains since my chat with Josh Reason back on the Website Investing podcast during covid. I wanted to know if this was a real income leg or just luck wearing the costume of strategy.
Here's what I found.
The sell-through rate on a curated portfolio is roughly 1 to 2 percent per year. Meaning if you register 50 names, you will sell one of them this year. Maybe. You might sell zero. You might sell three. But that's the average you're working toward, and it only shows up over multiple years, not as a steady monthly drip.
That number gets worse as you price higher. A $10K ask has a smaller buyer pool than a $2K ask, which pushes your effective sell-through below 1 percent on the premium names. The flip side is that you don't need many $10K sales to make the math work. The problem is that "the math works" and "this is a reliable income leg" are two different things.
Then there's the renewal cost. A .ai domain costs around $85 a year to keep. Build a portfolio of 50 names and you're bleeding $4,250 annually whether anything sells or not. I ran every version of the model. Twenty names. Fifty names. Price at $10K. Price in the middle. Price everything at $1K for velocity. None of them produced the income leg I was imagining. The renewals eat the wins.
So I stopped trying to build a portfolio.
What actually made me money, twice, was not a system. It was spotting a specific available name, recognising it had commercial potential, registering it for next to nothing, and waiting for the right buyer to appear or finding them. Opportunistic, not systematic. And the honest version of it is: you can't manufacture the finds. You can get better at evaluating them when they appear. That's it.
The useful part of going deep on the economics is that I now know exactly what a name is worth before I bid on it. I know what the floor is (what another domainer would pay to take it off me), what the ceiling is (what a funded startup in the right category would pay), and where the bid should stop. I found a name this week at GoDaddy auction that I'll be bidding up to $2K, listing at $20K. That's the whole thesis.
What I am not doing is registering 50 names and checking my inbox every morning.
Here's the contrast that clarified everything. This week I also simplified and updated my Physical AI stock portfolio inside the Skool community. Tesla remains the core conviction — Optimus, robotaxis, energy, autonomy. Around it I've built a layered stack covering the full ecosystem: perception, edge compute, real-world robot deployment, space infrastructure, and AI power. A proper portfolio, sized across two buckets with different risk profiles, designed to compound over a multi-decade theme.
That's the difference. Stocks compound. Domains don't.
A domain sits there costing you $85 a year until someone wants it. There's no structural tailwind lifting all boats. There's only your judgment on individual names and the patience to find the right buyer. The portfolio model works for Physical AI stocks because the underlying thesis keeps running whether you check on them or not. It doesn't work for domains because a domain is inert until you sell it.
This connects back to the one-third framework from last issue. The temptation after any win is to concentrate into it. One good outcome, one decision to make it the whole thing, one slow realisation that concentration was the mistake. I've done this enough times to recognise the pattern.
Domains are a small asymmetric leg within investing, same category as the stocks and the Sui position, where I've been sitting in stables since it broke $1 while I build out thisweekinsui.com.
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Until next time. Compound where you can. Flip where you can't.
Cheers
Richard (@richardpatey)