Rebuilding the first social network after a life-changing exit

Mike Carson side hustled until one project — park.io — became a quick and resounding success at $1M per year. After selling it, he quickly started two new projects: Spaces Protocol and Friendster.

Yes, that's the Friendster — the first social network. Here's Mike on how he came to own that domain, and what he plans to do with it. 👇

Introversion and money

I am an introvert — and happily so. I even own introvert.com. Most people think calling someone an introvert is a negative thing, like an insult or a defect, but I love being an introvert.

I wasn't able to climb the corporate ladder, like some of my peers — the working environment was stifling for me. So I kind of just automatically self-selected into a work-at-home indie hacker. That's the only place I fit in.

Plus, I've also always been very driven to make money.

My family didn't have money. My father worked nights, weekends, and holidays in a factory and he was suicidally depressed.  My parents borrowed money and always struggled to make ends meet. They never had a positive net worth. I remember thinking that newborn babies had more money than my parents.

And the worst part was that people would look down on me and my family because of this.  I felt responsible for helping my family. I was determined to show the people who looked down on us that they were wrong. That's why I do what I do.

Finding success

I started park.io and ran it myself for five years, growing it to over $1M/year in revenue.  park.io was a domain name drop-catching service for "hacker domains" like .io, .ly and .ai.

It started as one of many fun side projects that I worked on in my spare time, but it quickly started making a lot of money so I quit my job and worked on it full time until I sold it.

Now, I'm fortunate enough to be able to work on projects that I think are fun and interesting without having to worry about them making money right away.

So I'm working on two projects right now: Spaces Protocol and Friendster. Yes, Friendster.

Spaces Protocol is a protocol to create decentralized identities on Bitcoin.  We plan to make money by selling subspaces for this, but we can't monetize yet because we're still only on testnet — we plan to release to mainnet in November.

Friendster doesn't have any revenue either.

Rebuilding Friendster

Friendster is a social network. In fact, it was actually the first social network ever. 

I didn't buy Friendster the company, though. I bought the domain friendster.com.

I have a lot of experience and connections with domain investors from my time building park.io.  I had been periodically checking friendster.com to see what was happening with the site and, for several years the domain name did not resolve.

Then, one day, I checked it and noticed a lot of advertisements were coming up on the website, so I checked the WHOIS info and realized that the domain had expired and a park.io user that I knew had purchased it.  I connected with him and we worked out a deal for the domain.

The previous owners had completely abandoned it, but I thought it would be worth bringing back.

I am not sure how I will make money, but it won't be by selling user data. I bought it because it was the first social media network and I actually used it and loved it when it first came out.

It was a positive era of the internet, where people were happy to connect and social media companies weren't run by advertisers - it was before social media networks became a kind of poison for the internet. 

We are slowly giving out invites for Friendster. We have hundreds of thousands of people on the waitlist.

Don't focus on growth

Everyone just takes it as a given — that you NEED to grow your business.  It's not a given.

With park.io, I intentionally decided not to try to grow my business. To me, the idea of growing a business is like a painter trying to make the biggest painting.  It's one way to do things, and it may be the right way for some people and some companies, but not for everyone and everything.

Instead, I focus more on happiness and peace of mind.

I'm not against growth, of course. Growth is fine if it comes naturally and makes sense, but to make it the main point of focus is a mistake.  I think having faith in the product, and focusing on the joy of creating and refining the product, are the most important things.

I think that's actually the best way to make a successful business.

That said, you do have to share what you've made.

For most of my projects, I post on Hacker News. This brings in an initial spike in interest, but then no one uses it again.  With park.io it was clearly different. People started paying right away and they never stopped. It just kind of grew on its own from there.

The best thing I did to grow park.io was putting up landing pages on the domains we caught, directing traffic to park.io.

Don't focus on success

When I first started out, I desperately wanted success. It was painful, always wanting and never having what I wanted.  And I started to realize that my mentality was a big part of the reason I'd never had success.

I think success would have come much sooner and life would have been easier if I'd focused less on success. So now, I think it is really important to simply focus on the joy of making something.

It is hard to do when you haven't had success yet and you really want it, but it's important. Try to find a way to focus on the joy of creating something without getting distracted or too focused on the success.

The best way to do that is to build what is interesting and fascinating for you. Those are the best business ideas anyway.

So keep building cool things that other people can use. Launch a lot of them and see what sticks.  Don't worry about success, it will come naturally, one way or another.

That's what I'm doing. You can follow along on X.