I've been running Newsy - to turn my un-used domain names into automated content sites & more
Hello there indie hackers!
My name is Eric, and I've been running Newsy for the past 12 months or so.
Problem? - I had ~50 domain names which I purchased over the years that were sitting there collecting dust. My intention has been (as many of you share) to develop them into something in the future. But where do I find time to develop all these into my $1B startups?!?!
I really don't like the traditional domain parking pages (they look uuuggglllyyy), but I didn't want to spend too much time developing them, but I wanted to make use of them.
Solution? - Newsy - https://www.newsy.co - With Newsy, you add your domain, you add niche keywords (hopefully related to your domain or related to the future idea that you want to work on) and Newsy will create a content-aggregation site for your domain instantly. Newsy finds contents from a variety of sources (RSS feeds, YouTube, Reddit, HN, web, news etc etc).
Over the past several months, I've been working hard to add more features to make sure Newsy delivers values to users. Some of its major features are
- Visitors can sign up to your site, leave comments, vote on contents, save favorite items.
- Newsy sends out automatic newsletters daily, weekly, monthly.
- It integrates with Twitter, Reddit, Blogspot, Slack etc to periodically push out popular contents from your site.
- You can add widgets, banners, and custom links & pages (and monetize!!!)
- You can add contents yourself. You can let your visitors to submit contents and you can review & approve.
- Themes & designs - you can select different themes and apply your own styles.
- HTTPS for your domain, use GMail for your custom domain
(And.. there's a LOT more..)
So I've added all of my 50 domains to Newsy and it's been super interesting to see those 50 idle domains having growing traffic (slowly at first, but it builds) - through newsletters, tweets, regular contents being fed into sites, your site slowly builds to a sort of "community".
The best thing for me is that I am not spending any time on these sites. Almost everything is automated. It sends me reports every week on how sites are performing, but I also know that my domains are being used without collecting dust. Later on, when I actually want to turn it into something, I might even have some users who I can reach out to.
Some example sites that you can take a look
https://www.faithfulnews.com
https://www.getinfosec.news
https://overthinking.solutions
https://www.frenchiefavorites.com
Anyway, thanks guys!
(Our PH launch ~ a month go - https://www.producthunt.com/posts/newsy)
