Erik Aronesty, a software engineer of about 30 years who built and sold ZoneEdit.com and now works on AI native accounting at puzzle.io, described his side portfolio in an Indie Hackers interview. He runs roughly 30 projects that together bring in, in his words, "approximately $15k in monthly revenue. Most of that is not recurring." The interesting part is where the traffic comes from. He does not create demand, he buys it.
The strategy
He looks for domains belonging to companies that have shut down but whose names people still search for. When a business dies, the searches do not die with it at the same speed. Those domains keep pulling in visitors typing the old brand name or the category it served, and the domain itself is usually cheap or expiring.
He then builds a product that matches what those arriving visitors expect to find. That matching is the whole discipline. He says Google "de-ranks a mismatch", so parking a general landing page on an old domain, or pointing it at an unrelated product, wastes the traffic it was bought for.
The portfolio he describes shows what falls out of this. OnwardTravel, which books dummy tickets, is about 70 percent of revenue. DirtSignal, which he says scrapes around 200 municipal code enforcement and magistrate hearing portals and sells access to the data, is about 20 percent. The remaining long tail projects make up the rest. His summary of the marketing budget is "no marketing required", because the distribution problem was solved by the purchase.
He is equally blunt about the alternative. He claims around 90 percent of the leads he got from Google and Meta ads were bots, and that he now puts a $1 charge in front of signup purely to filter out non humans.
Why it works
Most founders build the product, then go looking for people. This inverts it: the audience already arrives, and the build is a response to what they were looking for. It also removes the slowest part of SEO, which is waiting for a new domain to be trusted. An old domain with history and links starts from a position a new one takes a year to reach.
How to find expired domains that still get traffic
Pick a category you can build in, then list companies in it that folded in the last few years. Check whether their names still get searched and whether the domain is available or expiring. Buy the ones where the leftover intent matches something you could ship, then build that exact thing rather than whatever you already wanted to build.
Credit: Erik Aronesty on Indie Hackers