Nikul @hypernames

Every TLD that became a winner followed the same pattern: Founders arrived first. Investors arrived later. Not the other way around.

@domainpro Encouragement ftw 🔥

@NameBio @afternic Thanks again Michael - will be interesting to see if defaults climb going forward or settle. It's quicker to spin up new ideas, but also easier to fail faster. LTOs make a lot of sense for founders and startups who don't have product market fit yet and want less capital at risk.

I did a deep dive into our 290 LTO deals at @afternic and discovered some valuable insights concerning cancellations, early payoffs, and trends. 📉 Cancellation Rates Our raw cancellation rate was 26.9%, but that understates risk because it counts active deals as non-cancellations. A better number is the resolved cancellation rate: cancellations divided by completed LTOs. Historically, among our LTOs that have reached an outcome, about 59% completed successfully and 41% were cancelled. ⏱️ Cancellation Timing Cancellations are heavily front-loaded. Obviously the more payments they make the less likely they are to walk away at the next payment. But at what point are they really committed? Of our 78 cancellations, 28 (36%) made only one payment, 40 out of 78 (51%) made at most two payments, and 63 out of 78 (81%) made at most six payments. Once a deal avoids cancelling after only one payment, its resolved success rate rises to about 70%. Once a deal avoids the early churn window and gets to around six payments, the resolved success rate rises to around 86-88%. 📆 Cancellation and Term Length Most of our LTOs (87%) were in the 12-23 month range, so I'm not sure how statistically significant this data is. But there was a pretty clear pattern that the longer the length of the LTO, the higher the raw cancellation rate was. The raw cancellation for LTOs less than one year was 25%, for 12-23 months it was 25.3%, for 24-35 months it was 31.2%, and for 36+ months it was 53.8%. You might think the longer the term, the more manageable the monthly payments are, and the more likely they'll be to stick around. But in this dataset, longer terms were clearly riskier. Personally, I’d be cautious offering terms longer than 24 months. 💳 Cancellation and Monthly Payment Looking only at 12-month LTOs, the raw cancellation rate was essentially the same for sub-$200 monthly payments vs $200-299 payments vs $300-499 payments. But interestingly, once the monthly payments reached $500+ the raw cancellation rate dropped by more than 50%. That's somewhat intuitive though, someone committing to a $500+ monthly payment is probably more serious and well-funded. 🤔 Confusing Cancellations Three buyers cancelled with only one payment left, which seems pretty unbelievable. In 8 cases, a cancelled LTO later sold again shortly afterward — 6 through LTO and 2 through BIN. The data doesn’t include buyer identity, but given normal domain sell-through rates and the short timing, these were very likely buyers coming back after missing a payment or regretting the cancellation. ⚡ Early Payoffs 17% of completed LTOs were paid off early. Nearly half of early payoffs happened close to the finish line, but of the early payers, 32% paid off after only 1–2 payments. 📈 LTOs By Year 2023: 13 (53 annualized) 2024: 106 2025: 114 2026: 57 (137 annualized) We're seeing a steady trend upward as LTOs stack up. 🎁 Wrap Up I hope this helps you get a better picture of what you might experience if you enable LTOs. The interesting takeaways for me were how heavily front-loaded LTO churn is, how longer terms reduce your odds of success, how little the monthly payment amount affects the odds except at the high end, and how more than 10% of cancelled LTOs still ended up in a sale shortly after.

@_mrsodiq_ Thanks Sodiq - delay as long as you can! As a side hustle, you will be able to enjoy it more and learn without the stress!

@cultra @Sedo 😂

@eftycom I love Lionel's hat... Efty pivoting into fashion?

@MiaJennerrrrr Thanks Mia! 😊

@BTCUFO @DomainNameWire 🙏

Six years have passed since I went full time into domain names... so this convo with @DomainNameWire seemed like a perfect place to share some of the things I've noticed along the way. My brain was going faster than my mouth during recording, but afterwards I took a bit of time to think about some additional tips for new investors or anyone else thinking of making the leap: 1) Don't quit your day job! Do whatever it takes to delay going full-time as an investor. Once you need those early profits for living costs, you lose out the advantages of reinvesting and compounding. You can also balance out the volatility of domain sales with a steady income source - it's a lot less pressure/stress, especially during dry spells. 2) It takes time ... to learn, and time for capital to compound. Maximising time in the game is half the battle. Some domainers give up before they reach a critical velocity - and others don't get off the ground because they haven't made enough effort to learn before buying names. Prioritise long term survival over trying to get rich quick with luck-based outliers. 3) Keep learning. There's a ton of awesome content out there - podcasts, blogs, investors here on X and domaining forums too. We're lucky to have so much data and information available to us. There are more tools out there than ever before too - filtering and finding names has never been easier. 4) Make friends. Find yourself a small cohort of similar like-minded investors you can chat to... people at a similar level and maybe who've started at a similar time. Learn together and sharpen each other. Question, support and inspire each other. Go to conferences and meet other people in the industry too - you'll be surprised how much you'll learn in person that you won't online. 5) Health is wealth. It's cliche, but the grind takes its toll - mentally and physically. Long hours sat at the computer. The isolation of working alone, often late at night. The ups and downs of the game. The constant burden of 'hindsight'. It all adds up... so looking after yourself is priority number one. Without that, it all means nothing. Hope you enjoy listening. Thank you to Andrew - it's always a pleasure chatting with you. domainnamewire.com/2026/05/25/ful…

@djkabzx @DomainNameWire 🙌

@gridzzle @DomainNameWire Thanks Ahmed!

@ankurraheja @DomainNameWire Thank you Ankur! 🙏

@domain @domainNameWire Cheers James! 🙏

@heyheyfred In reality, you can own over 5,000 good domains and also not sell a single one in a month.

@DavidSustiel @DomainNameWire Thanks David - that's awesome. When it works out, there's no other business like it - especially in terms of freedom and autonomy.

@blueleaf_garden @AGreatDomain Congrats on two years and good luck with whichever direction you go in. It's always more pressure when you're forced into investing full time, especially if your portfolio isn't established yet... hopefully you can find a balance that works for you 🤞

@AGreatDomain Thanks Bob - I also remembered a great post you wrote a couple of years back... I think the core lessons are the same ... and pretty timeless! namepros.com/blog/domain-na…

@oceanadomains @cultra @DomainNameWire Thank you 🙌