Ask: I own a great domain name, how can I turn it into a business?
Question: I own a valuable dot-com domain, but I’m not a programmer. I think it could sell for a million dollars someday, with the proper traffic. What sould I do?
A: The basic idea here is to build a site to take advantage of the great domain name. By going on FairSoftware and listing your site, you should be able to find a technical co-founder who can program your site or develop content for what is currently a parked domain.
Let’s assume it works out pretty well and the combination of the domain name plus the site content becomes successful. An acquirer comes along and offers you one million dollars.
Sweet. But who pockets the money?
You both agreed to the Software Bill of Rights. You are still the sole owner of the domain name, but your technical co-founder is the copyright holder of the site program and content.
You could sell just the domain name and keep the million dollars for yourself. But to do that, you’d have to shut down the site first, since you’d lose any rights to your co-founder’s code and content. Then you’d have to rebuild everything from scratch. Probably not a good idea.
Or you could convert your FairSoftware startup into a corporation (this is explicitly allowed in section 3.1 of the Software Bill of Rights), share for share, and then have that corporation be acquired for the million dollars. So both you and your co-founder would share the money, according to the original split you decided when you created your FairSoftware startup.
If you consider that without your co-founder, you would never have received the offer, I think it’s the right way to go.
Can I suggest an alternate idea: Get off the web, you're ruining it.
It's got to the point where you've decided on a name for a startup, site, etc so you check it out, find it's registered and some squatter is wanting 'paid' for doing absolutely nothing. I wanted to make a website the other day – ratemysnack.com – where you could post culinary inventions for a laugh. Guess what – squatted (no surprise).
Personally if I had my way I'd up domain registration fees by an order of magnitude just to try to cut down on all the 'entrepreneurs'. There is few people more despicable than those who register domain names with no intention of actually using them.
As a developer I would never go into partnership with someone who's only contribution is to pay £20 for the domain before I did. Unless they have real, tangible skills and talent I'd just get a more obscure name as would anyone else.