I would love to begin the story of Pavel Domains with something beautifully entrepreneurial:
I bought one lemon.
I made lemonade.
I sold it.
Then I bought four lemons.
A few years later, somehow, I owned a lemonade empire.
Very inspirational.
Unfortunately, reality did not read the same business books.
The Original Plan: Start Small and Reinvest
The safest idea was obvious: start with a little money, buy a few good domain names, sell them, reinvest the profit, buy more domains, repeat.
In domain investing, this is perfectly possible.
Buy a domain for €20.
Sell it for €500.
Celebrate for approximately seven minutes.
Pay taxes, renew another 47 domains, buy three more names, and discover that your “€480 profit” has already found several new homes.
Then repeat.
The problem is not that the model does not work.
The problem is time.
Building a serious portfolio entirely from small profits can take years.
And good domain names do not politely wait until your cash flow improves.
First We Worked. Then We Asked the Bank.
My wife and I were already working when we first tried to obtain financing.
The answer was essentially:
No.
Fair enough.
So we continued working.
Later, our financial situation improved. We had better employment conditions, more stability, and a stronger application.
This time, financing became possible.
And that changed the speed at which Pavel Domains could move from an idea into an actual company with capital available for acquisitions.
Instead of buying one metaphorical lemon and waiting until someone bought the lemonade, we could buy the box.
Not the entire lemon plantation.
But at least the box.
The Interesting Part: The Credit Offer
The financing itself also taught me something surprisingly relevant to domain investing.
We received a promotional Cofidis offer advertising a personal loan at a 4.50% fixed APR.
That looked attractive.
After the application was reviewed, however, that particular financing was refused.
Instead, another proposal appeared:
- €12,000 borrowed
- 84 months
- 8.47% APR
- €188.35 per month
- €15,821.18 total repayment
So €12,000 of immediately available capital ultimately meant potentially paying about €3,821 more over the life of the loan.
The method naturally raises questions.
An attractive rate brings you through the door, your application is analysed, and suddenly the price of money is different.
Anyone who has spent enough time in the domain industry will recognise the feeling.
Domains Work Surprisingly Similarly
Imagine seeing:
PremiumDomain.com — €1,500
Excellent.
You contact the seller.
After some discussion:
“Actually, for your company, the price is €7,500.”
Welcome to negotiation.
Or imagine a registrar advertising domains “from €1”.
You register one.
Then discover:
Registration: €1
Renewal: €39
Privacy: extra
Marketplace commission: extra
Transfer: maybe extra
The domain you actually wanted: premium, €2,400.
The original number was technically real.
It simply wasn’t necessarily your number.
Credit can work in a strangely similar way.
The headline gets your attention.
The final conditions determine whether the deal makes sense.
Was Borrowing Money the Perfect Solution?
No.
Debt is not free capital.
Every domain purchased with borrowed money effectively carries an invisible additional cost.
If I buy a domain for €100 using financed capital, its real economic cost is not exactly €100 anymore.
There is interest.
There is time.
There is risk.
And unlike a registrar, the lender does not care whether your domains received zero inquiries this month.
The monthly payment still arrives with impressive punctuality.
That makes financing dangerous if it is used simply to buy more domains because buying domains is enjoyable.
A credit line should not become permission to register 600 variations of something ending in AI at 2:00 a.m.
But There Is Another Side
Capital also has value because opportunity has a deadline.
Domains expire.
Auctions end.
Portfolios become available.
Someone else registers the name tomorrow.
A domain investor can have excellent judgement and still miss opportunities simply because the available capital is too small at the right moment.
That was the real calculation for us.
Waiting several more years and growing exclusively through reinvested profits would have been safer.
But it would also have meant moving much more slowly.
We chose acceleration.
Not because borrowing money magically makes a business profitable, but because at that stage I could not find a faster realistic way to obtain a meaningful amount of starting capital.
And sometimes business decisions are not:
good option versus bad option.
They are:
imperfect option A versus imperfect option B.
The Pavel Domains Version of Lemonade
So the founding story is not:
One domain became two.
Two became ten.
Ten became one hundred.
Maybe one day I can write that story too.
The real beginning was less romantic.
We worked.
We were refused.
We worked more.
Our situation improved.
We obtained financing.
We created Pavel Domains.
And then came the important part – trying to turn borrowed euros into domain assets worth considerably more than the interest paid for those euros.
That is the experiment.
Because borrowing €12,000 is easy to describe as capital.
Turning €12,000 into a sustainable domain business is where the actual work begins.
The lemonade stand has officially opened.
Now I just need to make sure I bought lemons and not 1,000 beautifully spelled potatoes.
“Opportunity is rarely presented, and is easily lost.”
— Publilius Syrus
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