He buys abandoned domains before building the products

Most small SaaS projects find an idea, build the product, then discover with some surprise that they also need to find people.

Erik Aronesty tries to reverse that sequence: buy the place where people already arrive before deciding exactly what to build there.

In an Indie Hackers interview, the developer says roughly thirty small sites now generate about $15,000 a month combined. That number comes from him. I found no public accounts or independent audit that could verify it.

The method remains interesting without taking the spreadsheet on faith. He looks for dead companies or abandoned domains that still appear to carry traffic, references or a readable intent, buys the domain, then builds the service those visitors expected to find.

It is an unusually literal version of "distribution first."

It can also slide quickly into the uglier side of SEO if the new product does not deserve the reputation it inherits.

A domain becomes demand research

Aronesty points to two projects as the main current earners.

OnwardTravel sells a $16 temporary flight-reservation service: users receive an airline reservation code and PDF itinerary presented as onward-travel documentation when an airline or authority requires it.

DirtSignal collects public property-related records such as code-enforcement cases, hearings, liens and demolition orders, then turns them into leads for property professionals. The current site offers free address lookup and paid market feeds starting at $29 a month.

In the interview, Aronesty attributes roughly 70% of revenue to OnwardTravel, 20% to DirtSignal and the remaining 10% to a long tail of smaller projects. He also notes that most travel revenue is transactional rather than recurring.

Those percentages are self-reported too.

What can be checked is narrower: the products are live and provide actual services rather than sitting as keyword pages. Q32, the management company around the portfolio, currently lists a rather absurd number of small live and experimental properties.

DirtSignal really was for sale

The word "abandoned" deserves something more concrete.

Internet Archive snapshots of dirtsignal.com show that in 2021 and 2022 the domain did not host today's product. It displayed a Sav marketplace page saying the domain was for sale, around $280 in the snapshots I inspected.

That does not prove the most important part of Aronesty's method: that the domain already carried useful traffic or backlinks aligned with the current property-intelligence product.

It does show that at least one portfolio name genuinely passed through a parked-for-sale period before the current service.

OnwardTravel has archive history reaching back to the early 2000s. Again, age alone does not quantify whatever demand survived when the name changed hands.

An old domain is evidence of history. It is not an acquisition channel until somebody shows the traffic.

Google distinguishes reuse from abuse

Aronesty says you need to rebuild something aligned with existing expectations or Google will eventually demote the site.

I would not treat that exact mechanism as a documented ranking rule. Google does not publish its systems that way.

Its public spam policy is still directly relevant to the model.

Google defines expired domain abuse as buying and repurposing an expired domain primarily to manipulate search rankings by publishing content that provides little or no user value. Its standard example is taking an old medical domain and turning it into a low-quality casino site in hopes of exploiting the old reputation.

Google has also explicitly said that using an old domain for a new, original, people-first site is fine.

The boundary is therefore not simply "new domain good, acquired domain bad." It is the difference between serving real demand and wearing a domain's history as an SEO costume.

That is exactly where the method becomes more interesting than merely clever.

Buy the channel before the software

Aronesty says one sniped domain cost him roughly $2,000, followed by another roughly $2,000 in more advanced AI tooling, hosting and one-off outreach. Those are not reference startup costs, only his account of one unusual portfolio.

His larger claim is that he spends relatively little on advertising. In his process, the domain is part of market research: if people still arrive, the intent is understandable and a dead service has left a gap, the distribution channel exists before the new implementation.

That shift is useful even if you never buy a domain.

Instead of asking "what idea could I build?", look for places where people already struggle to complete something: a marketplace category nobody serves well, a recurring search, an abandoned plugin, an old workflow, a community repeatedly sharing the same workaround.

A domain is simply a particularly visible version of pre-existing demand.

You can inherit trust as well as traffic

An old domain can carry more than potential visitors. It can carry memory: former customers, old links, citations, habits and sometimes an impression of continuity that no longer exists legally or operationally.

Building "what people expected" can therefore be both strong product research and awkward territory for transparency.

A new owner has to be particularly clear about what was acquired: a name and perhaps an audience, not necessarily the previous company, its guarantees or its reputation.

Aronesty's technique is less interesting as an SEO recipe than as a blunt reminder of a problem makers often postpone until the end.

A product does not only need to be buildable. It needs a path to somebody who wants it.

Buying that path is one option. Understanding it before the first line of code is probably the cheapest part worth stealing.