In this article, I’m sharing my entrepreneurial journey with Brandpa, a digital marketplace I founded and successfully sold in June 2024 (read about it here). Brandpa is a marketplace for buying and selling premium domain names.

Lesson 1. Learn from your burnout

I don’t want to encourage burnout. But it can teach you a lot.

I was working 30 hrs a week on Brandpa during my full-time Master's degree. I barely slept (I remember working on coursework at 4am while replying to Brandpa customers – not fun 😓). One night, on the verge of collapse, I wrote down everything I was spending my time doing.

A lot of Brandpa didn’t need to be done by me. At the time, I was spending about 20 hours designing logos every week, on top of my studies. By the time we had about 3,000 domain names listed, I had designed over 2,500 logos myself.

Designing logos seemed like a no-brainer to delegate. But we didn’t yet have the money to hire a full time designer.

After in-depth research on this problem, I designed a system which allowed me to appoint many 3rd party designers as contractors, and let them work with sellers directly. The idea was to automate away almost all the source of my burnout.

Basically, we built a mini-Upwork. Over time it expanded to measure the quality of the work provided by the designers, chase late responders, handle abuse, and even automate the creation of 3D visuals for each logo:

This automation took time, but brought many benefits:

The designers loved it: They could get clarity and direction from sellers!
The sellers loved it: They could communicate their vision for a logo directly to the designers!
I loved it: It made the sellers and the designers happy! And I had enough time to sleep!

In the end, my burnout led to challenging how the whole business should work. And made it better as a result.

I wrote more about the chat design for Brandpa here: Chat design for Brandpa.

Lesson 2. Size matters - and small is great

At the beginning, Brandpa was only designed to sell our own domain names. It wasn’t even designed to be a marketplace. A few months in, people unexpectedly began contacting us, asking to list their domain names for sale.

I was initially unsure why. At that point, we only had a few hundred domains for sale, while our competitors had tens of thousands. I thought we lacked enough choices for buyers. While this might have been true from a buyer's perspective, I was wrong from the sellers’ viewpoint. What actually attracted those sellers was Brandpa’s small size.

With smaller inventory, they wanted to have their domains listed with us so that any potential buyer didn’t have to scroll through a lot to see every domain name we had 😊.

On top of that, our small size helped solve the classic "chicken or egg" problem. I was worried that not many buyers would come to Brandpa because there weren’t enough domains. I was also concerned that not many sellers would want to sell on Brandpa because there weren’t enough buyers visiting Brandpa. However, our smaller inventory actually worked to our advantage, providing greater visibility for each domain and attracting both buyers and sellers.

Lean into the advantages of being small. It’s one way to get big!

Lesson 3. Don’t over-research before launch

It might sound controversial, especially coming from a product designer who thrives on research. But had I extensively researched starting a domain name marketplace, I might have been discouraged by the strong competition, and never even started. As I later discovered, Brandpa faced many skilled competitors.

Instead, I let my entrepreneurial instincts guide me. I focused on creating a user-friendly website where buyers could quickly find what they needed and sellers could easily list their domain names through an attractive interface. I built something I would use myself.

Later on, I supplemented the business by addressing gaps I observed in the competition, based on thorough research. The result?

A quote from one of Brandpa seller’s on the domaining forum Namepros.
The problem with research, sometimes, is it can make you do what everyone else is doing. By not doing that, we did a lot of things better.

Sometimes, trusting your instincts and learning as you go can be more effective than researching before you get started.

Lesson 4. Embrace opportunities

Seize every opportunity, even if you think you're not ready.

There were several moments when my fear held back Brandpa's potential. For example, when prominent businesses approached me for an interview, I hesitated due to self-doubt, missing the chance to increase Brandpa's visibility.

Eventually I chose to embrace more opportunities like this, and Brandpa grew faster. But if you wait until it feels like the right time, you might never start.
I learned that overcoming self-doubt and embracing opportunities can significantly enhance your business's growth.

Lesson 5. Put users’ needs before your business needs

I consistently prioritised the needs of our users—designers, domain sellers, and buyers alike–over our own business.

Understanding and meeting their needs shaped our roadmap for years. We were consistently delivering value through listening to people’s feedback.

This is probably the main reason we were able to launch a successful marketplace, with no money and no reputation. Because we focused on making people happy.

Thanks to this we not only enhanced their experience but also built a passionate community around Brandpa. People who supported us by sharing their experiences on social media, industry forums and more helped Brandpa grow.

Of course, meeting business needs is still very important. We occasionally had to make some less popular decisions that many of our users didn’t like but we knew would benefit Brandpa long term. Also Brandpa, for a long time, was a business in which I and my business partner were the only stakeholders. We didn’t have to run any of our design or business decisions by anyone – and that’s not the reality many people are in.

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Conclusion

If you want to learn what you’re capable of, try starting a company. Having no-one else to blame for your mistakes is a great teacher!

I think for Brandpa, our success came down to:

Trusting your own instincts in the beginning
Obsessing over your user’s happiness once you launch
Making an advantage out of being small

If I could do it again, I’d also lean more into embracing opportunities, even if I felt like I’m not quite ready for them.

I’m grateful to everyone who supported me and Brandpa on this journey. It has been quite the adventure! I look forward to seeing how its new owners will continue to elevate Brandpa’s success.

How I built and sold a business: lessons in entrepreneurship