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Comment by everdev | Hacker News Reader

> I dropped in a bid around $2,200 ’cause I was confident I’d be outbid. 5 minutes later, I was the proud owner of VidaliaOnions.com

For those that are looking to replicate the success of this Vidalia Onion business only have a $10 budget for a domain here are some other options:

onlyvidalias.com

vidalias.net

tryvidalias.com

yummyonions.com

ordervidalias.com

buyvidalias.com

organicvidalias.com

vidaliafarm.com

allvidalias.com

simplyvidalias.com

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SEO is more than just keywords in domain names, you're buying into a long-term investment. His domain cost $2200 because it likely had lots of backlinks and page rank in Google, which is how he was able to get 600 orders (about $30k in revenue if my math is right) in the first year.

It's also the perfect combination of the two keywords with nothing else. You'll automatically be at a disadvantage.

But every large market typically has 1 leader and 1-3 other smaller companies who can survive. I doubt this is a large enough market where being #2 or #3 is going to be lucrative. You might as well find other niche premium vegetables. Like 1-800-Flowers and Harry & David (which the author mentioned) does...

https://www.wolfermans.com made a decent-sized business selling premium english muffins.

It was a joke :)

Oh true. The author was also promoting domain name driven businesses [1] so I was mostly replying to that idea and other thoughts I had to sound off on the topic :p

https://www.deepsouthventures.com/build-a-side-business/

History back to 1996: https://web.archive.org/web/19961215000000*/VidaliaOnions.co...

And someone was running the same business on it just before him: https://web.archive.org/web/19961215000000*/VidaliaOnions.co...

Good strategy. I've seen it suggested to check the wayback machine archive before buying a domain name to make sure you can recreate the same content and backlinks that already exist to take full advantage of any existing SEO.

I had another comment in this thread where I said I thought of this idea in 2011. And you know what's funny? I actually bought the domain yummmonion.com. I think I ran drupal (or some other open source CMS) on there as a place holder. I'm not sure how you came up with this option for domain names, but quite a coincidence?

I looked at doman name historical records and it said it was registered October 2008...which makes sense because that was the year after I graduated college to start my job in Middle Georgia (I'm a software engineer, if anyone knows that area you know who I worked for).

I visited my friend in NYC in September to watch the US Open, so makes sense that it was 2008 that I thought of it.

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