The graveyard
I just audited my Namecheap account. Twelve domains, none of them attached to a live product, all renewing at $14 to $40 per year. That is a $300+ annual tax on optimism. Worse, every dead domain is a small emotional weight that says "you started this and stopped."
The new rule
No new venture gets a domain until it clears $1,000 in real revenue.
Until then it lives as a route on the studio hub. venture-lab.vercel.app/skillvault, venture-lab.vercel.app/llmradar, and so on. Free hosting, free subdomain, one analytics setup, one email list, one deploy.
What changes
- Speed up. New ventures go live in hours, not the day-long DNS dance.
- Costs down. Vercel free tier and Supabase free tier are both fine for the volumes we hit at smoke-test stage.
- SEO consolidation. All the link equity feeds one domain that I actually intend to keep.
- Less brand commitment too early. Half my domain graveyard was products I renamed three weeks after launch anyway.
What I gave up
- A vanity URL on launch posts. I am OK with this. If the product is good, the URL does not matter.
- The "feels real" feeling of buying the .com. That feeling is the trap.
When a venture graduates
When it clears $1,000 in cumulative revenue. Then I buy the domain, set up a 301 from the hub route, and keep the canonical SEO equity. There is a graduation checklist in the studio repo.
What the hub looks like
One Next.js 14 app, App Router, on Vercel free tier. Each venture is a route. Shared email-capture backend on Supabase. UTM-tagged outbound links from a central helper. Stripe Payment Links live in a config file, not hardcoded into pages.
Total monthly cost at smoke-test volume: $0.