In his “Outliers” book, Malcolm Gladwell says it takes roughly 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery in your field. Now sure, I’m not saying we should agree with his 10,000 figure 100% but it is fairly obvious that no matter what it is you do for a living, it takes a LOT of practice to become an expert. A LOT!
The problem with the Internet is that it frequently makes us think we’re better at something than we actually are.
It’s so easy to find information about pretty much anything these days that we’re tempted to believe everything’s easy. Take domaining for example. Over the years, I’ve noticed that far too many people call themselves domainers after reading a couple of articles and hand registering a couple of names. I’m sorry but I don’t think such a person can call himself a domainer, I just don’t.
I’d call most of the people who read a few articles and consider themselves experts “paper domainers” for the simple reason that on paper, everything sounds just peachy in a lot of cases. As mentioned earlier this week.
So, what separates paper from real domainers?
Well, a lot of things but I’d say primarily work and failure.
Work as in:
1) scanning countless lists
2) coming up with various strategies and testing each strategy
3) negotiating with end users
4) trying to move inventory on the reseller market
5) actively optimizing costs (constantly searching for bargain domains, better renewal/transfer rates and so on)
6) testing various domaining-related services/marketplaces/etc.
… and so on. That would be the work dimension.
Again, not sure if 10,000 is the magic number for our industry but it might be. I for one have invested over 10,000 hours thus far.
But there’s another dimension that takes you from paper to reality:
FAILURE!!!
Oh, the sweet and comfortable life of someone who thinks he’s a domainer but never actually failed 🙂
It’s perhaps the biggest trap of our industry, which is why I talk about this stuff so much. Reading articles, finding out how much money XYZ made and so on… all of this take you to fantasy land. Where the skies are blue, end users are plentiful and inventory is cheap.
Unfortunately, all of this is only an illusion.
You’re not a domainer until you make your own mistakes. Until you take the strategy you’ve put together on paper and see how it works in the real world. In a lot of cases, seeing how it works in the real world means failing.
Some of my mistakes:
1) registering inventory that wasn’t investment grade
2) overpaying for investment grade domains
3) touching extensions I shouldn’t have touched (heh, even lost quite a bit of money with .MX back in the day believe it or not!)
4) screwing up negotiations
5) selling too soon (something I still tend to do!)
… etc., etc., etc.
Robert Solow is a Nobel Prize winner (economics) who claims he never had a paper rejected by a journal but even at his level, he’s a minority. For every person like Solow, there are many others on the other side of the spectrum such as another Nobel Prize winner (also an economist), George Akerlof, who had his “The Market for Lemons: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism” paper embarrassingly rejected as “trivial” by publications before ultimately being published… and changing economics in a meaningful manner!
Even among the elites of a certain field, failure is ridiculously common.
And it isn’t bad. It’s the exact opposite.
Look, the easiest way to never have a paper rejected is to never publish one. The easiest way to never lose money domaining is to just keep reading but never put your money on the line. Awful, awful strategies!
Maybe you’re a paper domainer now and that’s fine. We were all paper domainers at one point and there’s nothing wrong with that as long as you acknowledge this state of affairs and move on to becoming an actual domainer. Good luck!
