At one time, many Chinese domainers did business following their hometown feelings. They preferred buying their hometown city domain or hometown area code domain for investment or website building, but it turned out that only a small number of them succeeded. Recently, a little story about this kind of investment has been extremely hot in Chinese domain circle, and I would like to share with you.
The story below is about Chinese domainer Chi Yuan and the domain 0531.com, which is told by Chi Yuan himself.
"About ten years ago, I planned to build an information portal of Jinan City, so I wanted to buy Jinan City area code domain 0531.com at fair market price. Jinan City is the capital city of Shandong Province, and at that time, the market price of a capital city area code domain was no more than 200k RMB (approximately 30k USD). But the owner rejected my 200K RMB offer, so I kept increasing the offer, thank God he finally agreed at 680k RMB (approximately 102K USD). I was so excited and immediately paid him.
Although it cost me more than 3 times as much as the then market price, it was no big deal. What the most stupid was, I spent another 3M RMB (approximately 451K USD) and 3 years to build a failed website.
But I'm not finished yet, and what I like to say is, after I spent 680K RMB on buying 0531.com, I suddenly and thoroughly realized that end users were willing to pay much more than the fair market price if they really needed that name just as I did for 0531.com. So immediately I went on to invest 3M RMB (approximately 451K USD) in tens of NNN.com and NNNN.com. As a result, this investment totally brought me a net profit of more than 30M RMB (approximately 4.5M USD). It can be said that if I didn’t lose 680k RMB in previous investment, I wouldn’t get the 30M RMB proceeds!
I had been reflecting in a year after the 0531.com project failed. During that time, I gradually realized that it was important to follow the trends when starting internet business, in that way I could see things from a higher perspective and thus avoid making bigger mistakes. So the 0531.com failure was actually pretty rewarding!
Therefore, certain decision you have made appears stupid, still can be a bright idea from a higher perspective! I think of a sentence I read in high school that describing Van Gogh's experience, 'All we can do is to do what we think is right, if we end up finding ourselves wrong, it doesn't matter, what matters is that we did it!' So as long as you try your best to do the right thing, there will be only one result - you will gain. Because the failure in short term can be an important foundation of your success in long term. So try your best, even if you fail, you can still benefit from it!"
