I Bought a Defunct Video Chat Platform for $12K and Turned It Into a Profitable Side Project

Last year I stumbled onto something I couldn't stop thinking about: TinyChat, one of the original video chat platforms from the early 2010s, had shut down. The domain was just sitting there. No product, no team, no users. Just a name that millions of people once knew.

I'd been dabbling in domain flipping for a couple of years — mostly small buys in the $200–$800 range, fixing up sites and reselling them. But this felt like a different kind of opportunity. So I drained most of my side project fund and bought it.

Here's how that turned into a real business.

The find

I use a few tools to monitor expiring and auctioned domains — GoDaddy Auctions, ExpiredDomains.net, and a couple of Telegram groups where people share drops. TinyChat popped up in early 2025 after the parent company (PeerStream) had officially closed the service a few months earlier.

The domain had a DR in the low 70s, thousands of backlinks from legitimate sources, and — most importantly — real brand recognition. People still searched for "TinyChat" every month. That residual search volume alone made it interesting.

The auction was competitive. I ended up paying just over $50K, which was by far the most I'd ever spent on a domain. My wife thought I was nuts. Honestly, I wasn't 100% sure she was wrong.

What I did with it

My first instinct was to just park it and flip it. But when I dug into the traffic data and keyword potential, I realized there was more value in actually building something.

The original TinyChat was a group video chatroom platform — think early Twitch meets Zoom, but chaotic and fun. I didn't have the resources to rebuild that. Instead, I went with a much simpler concept: one-on-one random video chat. No accounts, no downloads, just open the browser and start talking to strangers.

I'd been learning WebRTC on the side for another project that never launched, so I had just enough technical knowledge to be dangerous. I built the MVP in about three weeks using a Node.js backend, a simple frontend, and TURN servers I rented from a cloud provider. Nothing fancy — the whole thing probably cost me $400/month in infrastructure to start.

The site went live in May 2025. You can check it out at tinychat.com.

Early traction

The first month was slow. Maybe 50 visitors a day, mostly from people Googling the old brand. But that was the thing — those visitors were already looking for a video chat platform. The intent was baked in.

I spent the next two months focused almost entirely on SEO. I wrote comparison pages, "what happened to TinyChat" content, and landing pages targeting long-tail video chat keywords. The domain's existing authority meant these pages started ranking within weeks instead of months.

By month three, I was getting around 800 daily visitors. Not all of them used the product, but enough did to make the ad revenue meaningful. I added a simple premium tier — $4.99/month for gender and country filters — and that started converting at about 2%.

Where it is now

As of early 2026, TinyChat gets roughly 3,000–4,000 daily visitors. Revenue is a mix of display ads and premium subscriptions. I'm not going to share exact MRR because it fluctuates a lot with traffic, but I'll say this: the domain paid for itself within six months, and it's now consistently profitable.

The best part is how little maintenance it needs. The product is simple by design. I spend maybe 5–6 hours a week on it, mostly writing content and monitoring the servers. The rest of my time goes to my day job and other side projects.

Lessons for other indie hackers

Don't sleep on dead brands. Everyone wants to build the next big thing from scratch. But there's an entire graveyard of internet brands that had real users, real backlinks, and real search volume. Some of them can be bought for less than a used car.

Match the product to the domain, not the other way around. I didn't try to rebuild what TinyChat was. I built what I could actually ship and maintain as a solo developer, and I let the brand do the heavy lifting on distribution.

SEO is the cheat code for acquired domains. If you buy a domain with authority and write content that matches what people are already searching for, you skip the hardest part of organic growth. I went from zero to thousands of daily visitors in under six months without spending a cent on ads.

Start ugly, improve later. The first version of the site looked rough. The video quality was inconsistent. The matching algorithm was basically random. None of that mattered because people were just happy the platform existed again. I've improved things gradually, but perfection on day one would have meant never launching.

What's next

I'm looking at acquiring one or two more domains in the same space. The playbook works: find a dead brand with residual authority, build a simple product on top, and let organic search do the distribution. It's not going to make anyone a billionaire, but as a side income stream it's been one of the best investments I've made.

If anyone has questions about the domain acquisition process, the tech stack, or the SEO strategy, happy to chat in the comments.