> The way Faulkner treats his characters, I treat domain name projects. I buy them with an intention to develop. And I let them take the lead. They’re the inspiration for the business itself. They guide me towards what they need to become. I’m just the dude behind the keyboard (sorta).
I feel the same way about personal projects and blogs. A good idea tends to be self-reinforcing. It just needs someone to uncover it. Selling onions on the internet seems unusual but to the right person that idea is gold.
author here : ) happy to answer questions if you have any. We also have a twitter account here if you want to follow along: https://x.com/vidaliaonions
How would you market such a business in 2026? I am from an Italian region where farmer grow many special coltures, and I was always a bit surprised why they don’t try selling on the internet. I ended up convincing myself it is not a viable business model.
The internet was originally promised as a way to disintermediate these kinds of supply chains, yet we often ignore these "boring" businesses for hype trains. The fact that he added a phone number and it sometimes out-sells the website is the cherry on top.
I've found more and more often the last few years that a lot of the long time businesses I use still do most of their ordering by phone. Or some version that involves talking to actual person.
The restaurants I go to still generally do phone ordering because they care about the quality of their ingredients. They want to discuss and talk about it with someone before placing an order.
The engineering and consulting firms I work with are the same. The engineers I enjoy working with are all phone based, not a lot of emails unless there are details involved.
I'm a bit of the same way. There is a lot of peripheral information that we miss out on when everything is done via automation/email. Those dead moments when our brains wander, then we ask a silly question, tend to bear fruit.
It's gotten to the point where I generally don't order anything online anymore because I can't trust I'll get what I ordered. When I have to deal with support it's an automated system that only gives me 1 or 2 options, neither of which satisfy my needs so I have to make a compromise. I'm not interested.
I've been doing some version of this since college. ...holy shit that's almost 20 years.
It started as a bit of a joke on the "That's a good band name" line. It became "That's a good domain name". Yes, I went to a stem college.
Anyway, i've started 4 pretty decent businesses based entirely off that bit. My friends and I would be riffing out behind the pizza place/bar we frequented, someone would say something and then "That's a good domain name" comes out. I'd make a quick note and think about it for a few days. I found that if I come back to it after a week or so then it's maybe worth something.
Business and domain names can make or break a company.
On top of all that, i've also bought and then sold hundreds of domains for a profit based off this bit. I use various registars when they have sales, buy em up cheap for a few years, then park em.
After reading the OP, it's kinda funny. I did something similar with a garlic grower back in the early 00's. I had a domain, my brother worked for a garlic farmer, the farmer wanted to export to asia. It worked out well for a few years.
Very interesting, I feel like domain names definitely have values but I don't know much about domain names that much but how do you buy or sell hundreds of domains?
Personally It would be interesting to see some domain names for cheap and if I have an idea, I can perhaps have domain name for cheap or something similar to it but I don't really know if I should go into this hobby perhaps and no guarantees that I would but I am curious about resources basically and I wish if you can tell me more about it
I feel like the issue I feel as if is that most domains would just be parked in there or would be sold for losses perhaps.
author here... you're correct - it's highly unlikely I would have built anything unless I had this unique, exact-match domain. I needed that unfair advantage to start, as the name sortof branded the project for me in the early days and helped drive new customers.
Not really sure what's so crazy about that. A brick and mortar shop will spend way more than that on renting a good location for their business when they have no clue whether they'll turn a profit. This is just the digital equivalent of that. People trust authoritative domains like vidaliaonions.com way more than something like vidaliaonions-direct.net and they're given more SEO weight as well. At least I know that used to be true; not sure how true that is today but I'd imagine it still is.
been sitting on fullstackjavascript.com for years. been too busy writing javascript to do anything with it and now I work almost exclusively in elixir.
It's a good domain name for what its worth. But are you/ anybody not worried about the javascript trademark by oracle and the lawsuit of oracle vs deno and the times oracle sends cease and desist to even books about javascript one time or any conference with javascript as an example
This I think is the reason why javascript conferences are instead called ecmascript conferences
“ The way Faulkner treats his characters, I treat domain name projects. I buy them with an intention to develop. And I let them take the lead. They’re the inspiration for the business itself. They guide me towards what they need to become. I’m just the dude behind the keyboard (sorta).”
To me it makes sense. Without a domain name, it’s just an idea. The domain name makes it real, and it’s a foundation the biz can stand on. Too many people try to start a biz without a foundation.
Very interesting page, left me with a lot of mixed feelings after I read it. First, it seems like the biggest issue was not onion futures per se, but manipulating the market. It seems like banning onion futures was just a band-aid while ignoring the true cause. Second, if it really is the case that onions' perishable nature caused the problem, why not at least extend the ban to all similarly perishable products? Again it seems like they attacked the symptom rather than the root cause. But those criticisms aside, I kind of love that the government back then was willing to shut down shady money making schemes from finance bros. That would never happen in America today, so that part was pretty cool.
> Some folks can eat them like an apple. Most of my customers do.
My grandfather and my cousin, who he pretty much raised were eating regular red or yellow onions like apples like that. I had never seen anyone else do that. They would make an onion "salad" which was just cut up onion with olive oil and salt.
What a cool story. Not tech for tech's sake, but tech that grows into something simpler, more efficient, and more world-opening for something as wonderful as the Vidalia onion
Got these many years back after having been posted here. Very happy with the purchase, but wouldn’t order again as my wife hated the smell. Highly recommended everyone order these at least once.
I have a quick question if I may ask but your whole journey and even the article starts with the "I’M ADDICTED TO DOMAIN NAMES" / Addiction to domain names.
So I am wondering was there anything specific that caused this "addiction" (in a good way?) perhaps and has the addiction stopped after www.vidaliaonions.com/ or is it still continuing?
What mainly caused it: I kept getting laid off, and that nonsense infuriated me. So I was actively trying to find ways to save myself. Great domains, via the expiry marketplace, slowly became an unfair advantage I could lean into and compete with larger companies, just because I owned this unique .com domain. Hope that makes sense. I've written a few essays on my experience being laid off, if you're bored and wanna read: https://www.deepsouthventures.com/how-on-earth/ ; https://www.deepsouthventures.com/on-being-laid-off-unplanne...
Sometimes you start a business. Sometimes a business starts you. Awesome that the author saw this as an opportunity and not a down side to owning a name he never really wanted to begin with.
Sometimes the right business just finds you and you’re at the right place at the right time to see it.
I checked and its the 47th most upvoted post in all of hackernews. (Btw each algolia page gives 30 articles so it could've been simpler for me if I didn't manually read till 30 :) but yea, hope it gives some context)
47th most upvoted story is wild but so true. I feel like although we might upvote AI and what not posts in HN which can casually reach 1000+ at times. Deep down what really sells us more isn't AI but rather a fever dream of sorts that one sells onions and maybe the freedom we attach to it
I feel the same way about personal projects and blogs. A good idea tends to be self-reinforcing. It just needs someone to uncover it. Selling onions on the internet seems unusual but to the right person that idea is gold.
The restaurants I go to still generally do phone ordering because they care about the quality of their ingredients. They want to discuss and talk about it with someone before placing an order.
The engineering and consulting firms I work with are the same. The engineers I enjoy working with are all phone based, not a lot of emails unless there are details involved.
I'm a bit of the same way. There is a lot of peripheral information that we miss out on when everything is done via automation/email. Those dead moments when our brains wander, then we ask a silly question, tend to bear fruit.
It's gotten to the point where I generally don't order anything online anymore because I can't trust I'll get what I ordered. When I have to deal with support it's an automated system that only gives me 1 or 2 options, neither of which satisfy my needs so I have to make a compromise. I'm not interested.
It started as a bit of a joke on the "That's a good band name" line. It became "That's a good domain name". Yes, I went to a stem college.
Anyway, i've started 4 pretty decent businesses based entirely off that bit. My friends and I would be riffing out behind the pizza place/bar we frequented, someone would say something and then "That's a good domain name" comes out. I'd make a quick note and think about it for a few days. I found that if I come back to it after a week or so then it's maybe worth something.
Business and domain names can make or break a company.
On top of all that, i've also bought and then sold hundreds of domains for a profit based off this bit. I use various registars when they have sales, buy em up cheap for a few years, then park em.
After reading the OP, it's kinda funny. I did something similar with a garlic grower back in the early 00's. I had a domain, my brother worked for a garlic farmer, the farmer wanted to export to asia. It worked out well for a few years.
I found websites/newsletters like https://ungrabbed.com/
Personally It would be interesting to see some domain names for cheap and if I have an idea, I can perhaps have domain name for cheap or something similar to it but I don't really know if I should go into this hobby perhaps and no guarantees that I would but I am curious about resources basically and I wish if you can tell me more about it
I feel like the issue I feel as if is that most domains would just be parked in there or would be sold for losses perhaps.
I don’t understand this.
This I think is the reason why javascript conferences are instead called ecmascript conferences
To me it makes sense. Without a domain name, it’s just an idea. The domain name makes it real, and it’s a foundation the biz can stand on. Too many people try to start a biz without a foundation.
My grandfather and my cousin, who he pretty much raised were eating regular red or yellow onions like apples like that. I had never seen anyone else do that. They would make an onion "salad" which was just cut up onion with olive oil and salt.
[1] https://xcancel.com/searchbound/status/1996247844080996549#m
I have a quick question if I may ask but your whole journey and even the article starts with the "I’M ADDICTED TO DOMAIN NAMES" / Addiction to domain names.
So I am wondering was there anything specific that caused this "addiction" (in a good way?) perhaps and has the addiction stopped after www.vidaliaonions.com/ or is it still continuing?
Sometimes the right business just finds you and you’re at the right place at the right time to see it.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=1&prefix=false&qu...
I checked and its the 47th most upvoted post in all of hackernews. (Btw each algolia page gives 30 articles so it could've been simpler for me if I didn't manually read till 30 :) but yea, hope it gives some context)
47th most upvoted story is wild but so true. I feel like although we might upvote AI and what not posts in HN which can casually reach 1000+ at times. Deep down what really sells us more isn't AI but rather a fever dream of sorts that one sells onions and maybe the freedom we attach to it
It's not onions. It's lead generation.