Am I getting this right? You spent 35K on a 5-syllable .io domain to capture traffic from a twitter account with 43K followers who misspelled your actual domain in a tweet? That can’t be right.
In the math you laid out, you have to get 6 subs a year for 10 years on your $600/year plan in order to recoup your investment.
Why would this tweet generate leads for 10 years? Why didn’t you figure discounted cash flows into the calculation? Will 36K be worth 36K in today’s money 10 years from now? 10 months from now?
And now, your hosting provider is rate limiting your website and returning 429. All this HN traffic is going down the chute. Perhaps you should have spent some of that cash on a more robust hosting plan?
Yes, this doesn't really add up, it's not like a tweet that's gone viral will keep going around, it's safe to say that nearly all the clicks it generated were in the past.
It did however let them write this blog post and generate even more interest, but unfortunately they've failed to make sure their blog can handle traffic, another missed opportunity I suspect.
You'd be surprised by the half-life of a tweet. I have tweets that are still bouncing around accumulating impressions and engagements half a year after I posted them. There's a self-driving cycle that forms where likes and retweets cause the algorithm to push them out into more people's feeds, which lead to a steady stream of additional likes and retweets, which push them into more people's feeds, and so on.
Another way to look at it is that the fact that the tweet made the typo is an indication that other people are likely to make the typo, and this way they don't lose out on those users. .io is probably more memorable than .to.
(It's all arbitrary, of course; they're both just unrelated ISO codes. But for whatever reason, .io has become the canonical “the .com was taken” refuge.)
I'm the founder who bought the testimonial.io domain.
You really underestimated the value of a SaaS, with 6 subs contributing $3,600 ARR, a business will have the chance to be sold 10x at $36k. I can easily recoup my investment from an exit offer, and the domain itself has its investment value too.
Look things forward, not backward! A twitter account has 43k followers today maybe will have 430k followers next year.
429 is fine, even Cloudflare has an outage just a few days ago. For me, it's just learn the lesson, fix the bug by simply upgrading the plan, then move forward :)
Yes. Before reading the Archive.org version someone linked below, I thought from the title that it was a ridiculous course of action, but testimonial.to is just so likely to misspelt that this is probably a good move. Not sure about the cost, though.
That doesn't take into account the additional traffic generated by the "I spent $35k on a domain" story, so there is that as well, this story is on the front page here and I expect will go out in daily and weekly newsletters, so I think it could pick up a few more customers.
I'd love to see a "I spent $35k on a domain" follow up in a year to see if it was a profitable decision or not.
The article doesn't focus solely on the tweet, but is considering this typo from the tweet to be common.
About the CloudFlare, not much to say. Poor planning it is...
Guessing only the .to was available, for what should have been obvious reasons. He would have been better off starting with some randomword.com and building his brand around that - no fear of mis-spelling and a whole lot cheaper.
Missed an opportunity with the tweet that pointed to a different domain. Now missing an opportunity due to the Cloudflare Workers reaching the free tier limit.
In the math you laid out, you have to get 6 subs a year for 10 years on your $600/year plan in order to recoup your investment.
Why would this tweet generate leads for 10 years? Why didn’t you figure discounted cash flows into the calculation? Will 36K be worth 36K in today’s money 10 years from now? 10 months from now?
And now, your hosting provider is rate limiting your website and returning 429. All this HN traffic is going down the chute. Perhaps you should have spent some of that cash on a more robust hosting plan?