In 2020, when the pandemic forced the whole world to move online almost overnight, I ended up living what I now think of as a COVID-preneur life. I was co-founding and running AffordNames, a domain investment and advisory practice, while also volunteering full time in grassroots relief work on the ground, and squeezing a public policy fellowship into whatever hours were left. Looking back, it wasn’t three separate stories. It was one stretch of life, lived at three levels at once: building something commercial, showing up for people who needed help, and trying to understand the systems underneath both of those things.
Running AffordNames: A Domain Investment Business.
While most businesses were just trying to get any website up at all, I co-founded AffordNames as a proper, structured domain investment vehicle. We built it across two entities. Namaxis Private Limited handled advisory and brokerage work for clients, and AffordNames managed our own investment portfolio. Keeping these two separate mattered a lot, because one arm was representing other people’s interests in a deal, and the other was representing our own money, and mixing the two would have compromised both.
We treated premium domain names the way a real estate fund treats land. Not something you flip quickly for a fast profit, but digital real estate you acquire carefully, hold, improve the value of over time, and eventually place with the right owner. That way of thinking shaped almost every decision we made, from what we chose to buy to how patient we were willing to be before selling.
Most people’s relationship with a domain name is almost accidental. You think of a business idea, you check if the .com is free, you buy it, and you move on. We flipped that completely. We brought real investment banking discipline into a market that had rarely seen it applied at our scale before: careful sourcing, layered due diligence, defensible valuation, real negotiation, and clean execution. In a normal year, that discipline would just have been a nice edge to have. In 2020, for a lot of the businesses we worked with, it became something close to essential, because a domain wasn’t just a web address anymore. For many small businesses, it was their entire storefront.
Why the discipline mattered more in 2020 than ever before. When lockdowns hit, businesses that had spent years building a physical presence (a shopfront, foot traffic, word of mouth in their neighbourhood) lost access to almost all of it within days. The ones that came through that shift in better shape were, more often than not, the ones that could put up a credible digital presence quickly: a domain that looked trustworthy, was easy to remember, showed up reasonably well in search, and didn’t look like it was thrown together in a weekend. The ones that struggled most were often stuck with clunky, hyphenated, hard to spell names, simply because the clean version they actually wanted was already sitting there, unused, under an owner who’d long since walked away from the business behind it. That gap, between what a business needed and what was actually sitting available on the market, is exactly where AffordNames stepped in.
Scale and Global Reach
Over the life of the business, we closed transactions on more than 80 domains, and we ran over 1,000 through our own evaluation process: sourced, screened, priced, and then either bought, brokered for a client, or deliberately walked away from. That gap between 1,000 and 80 wasn’t inefficiency. It was discipline. For roughly every twelve domains we looked at closely, only one made it to a signed deal, because the valuation didn’t hold up against comparable sales, or the ownership history was murky, or there was a trademark risk we couldn’t get comfortable with, or the seller’s price expectations simply never met reality.
We never limited ourselves to India. Our counterparties (sellers, buyers, sometimes brokers in between) were spread across several continents, which meant our day to day work involved a few constant challenges. The work was primarily with early-stage founders and small businesses across India, Singapore, the Middle East, EU, & USA.
Key clients included: BullionStar SG, Kraftronic, PetMax, Itrus, NotifAI, CircleAndLine.com, Yooya Group, TTQ1, CoCampus, Linkup Studio, Ikra Market, MooseTools & .. 80+ clients across globe.
We were always navigating different registrars, each with its own transfer process, lock periods, and verification steps. We had to understand how ownership of a domain is treated legally in different countries, since it isn’t handled the same way everywhere. And we had to adapt to very different negotiating styles depending on where someone was based. A seller in one part of the world might expect a slow, relationship first conversation stretched over weeks. A seller somewhere else might expect a quick, numbers first exchange wrapped up in a single day.
Running deals across all that variation meant we couldn’t lean on one fixed playbook. Every transaction had its own rhythm, and part of the job was figuring out which rhythm applied before we’d even sent the first message.
Focus on Expired Domains and Digital Transformation Support
A large part of our sourcing focused on expired domains, names that had lapsed for all kinds of reasons: a business closing down, a rebrand, an owner simply forgetting to renew, or a domain investor deciding it no longer fit their portfolio. On the surface, an expired domain can look worthless, just a name nobody wants anymore. In practice, a good number of these names still carried real, measurable value.
Some had aged backlinks: years of accumulated inbound links that a brand new domain simply can’t replicate no matter how much money you throw at SEO. Some still had type in traffic, people who remembered the old business and typed the address directly out of habit, long after the original site was gone. Some carried leftover brand recall, meaning something to a certain group of customers even though the business behind it no longer existed. And sometimes the value was simpler than any of that. It was just a short, clean, memorable word, and names like that don’t come back onto the market very often.
During the pandemic, these assets became especially valuable, because so many small businesses were being pushed, not choosing but pushed, into e-commerce and online storefronts, often for the first time in their history. For a small business making that leap under pressure, with little time and often little budget, getting hold of a strong existing domain instead of starting from a blank, unranked, unfamiliar name meant a few concrete things.
It meant faster credibility, since a domain that didn’t look brand new signalled legitimacy to first time online customers who were themselves nervous about buying from an unfamiliar name during a chaotic period. It meant better organic visibility, since they inherited some existing SEO value instead of starting from zero, right when paid advertising budgets were often the first thing to get cut. And it meant stronger brand consistency, since the name matched what the business had always been called offline, instead of an awkward variation forced on them because the clean version wasn’t available.
By offering this kind of advisory, sourcing, valuing, negotiating, and acquiring domains end to end, AffordNames and Namaxis helped a real number of early stage founders and small businesses strengthen their online presence at exactly the moment it counted most. For many of them, the domain wasn’t a small detail in their digital transformation story. It was the foundation everything else, the storefront, the marketing, the trust, the search visibility, was built on.
Building Credibility in a Decentralized Market
One of the hardest things to explain to people outside this world is that domains don’t trade the way stocks do. There’s no central exchange, no standard disclosure rules, no regulator watching every transaction the way a securities regulator watches trades. Trust in this market gets built one transaction at a time, and we worked at that on three fronts.
We stayed fully ICANN compliant. Every acquisition, transfer, and dispute we handled ran within ICANN’s rules, the body that ultimately decides how domain ownership works globally. This wasn’t a nice extra, it was necessary. A brokerage that plays loosely with these rules eventually ends up in ownership disputes it can’t win, and loses the trust of everyone it’s ever worked with.
We were also a recognised backordering partner for GoDaddy, one of the largest domain registrars in the world. In practical terms, this gave us a real, structural edge in catching domains the moment they expired, instead of competing blind alongside hundreds of other opportunistic buyers the second a name dropped.
And every deal we closed moved through escrow style settlement. Funds and ownership changed hands in a coordinated, verified sequence, so neither side was ever exposed to the other defaulting midway through. It’s the same basic idea that protects both sides in a property sale or a company acquisition: nobody hands over the asset, and nobody hands over the money, until both sides of the exchange are secured at the same time.
Valuation, Done the Investment Banking Way
Instead of pricing domains on instinct, which is honestly still how a lot of this market works, we built our valuations the way an investment banker values a private company, using a precedent transaction approach. That meant pulling recent, comparable sales: domains of similar length, similar extension, similar keyword strength, similar traffic history, and similar industry relevance, and using that set of comparisons to build a defensible price range instead of pulling a number out of thin air.
This mattered a lot during such an uncertain time. Founders deciding to acquire a domain in the middle of a pandemic, often with tighter cash reserves than they’d had a year before, needed to know the price was defensible. Not just that someone was willing to sell at that number, but that the number itself would hold up if they ever had to justify the spend to an investor, a co-founder, or their own future selves.
Key Learnings from AffordNames
Running the business end to end, sourcing, screening, valuing, negotiating, closing, and sometimes walking away, was an intense, uncushioned crash course in dealmaking. There was no institutional safety net behind me. No legal team on speed dial, no senior partner to pass a hard negotiation to. Every conversation about price was a real, sometimes uncomfortable conversation about value, and I learned quickly that the negotiations that went best were the ones where both sides came in willing to actually justify their number instead of just anchoring and waiting the other side out.
Working directly with more than 80 early stage founders and small businesses, many of them making one of the more important digital decisions of their business’s life, gave me a close, repeated view of something I don’t think you can learn any other way. How much a single, well timed resource, in this case the right domain, bought the right way, at a fair price, can genuinely change a small business’s whole trajectory. Multiply that across more than 80 businesses going through a forced, accelerated shift online, and it stopped feeling like a string of individual deals. It felt like watching, up close, how small businesses actually survive a crisis.
On-Ground COVID-19 Relief Work
In 2019, I began volunteering with a grassroots community initiative that supported underserved communities through education, healthcare, women’s empowerment, youth development, and livelihood programs. At the time, I was simply looking for a meaningful way to give something back beyond my regular work, and to understand, first hand, the challenges faced by communities that rarely make it into a headline or a policy paper.
What started as a volunteer commitment quickly became one of the most rewarding and eye opening experiences of my life.
Before the Pandemic: Community Development, Village by Village
Before COVID-19 changed everything, the work was steady, unglamorous, and deeply rooted in community. Based out of Pune, this on the ground effort covered both villages and urban slums, running dozens of welfare projects at any given time across a few core areas.
There was education, supporting programs for children whose access to consistent schooling was already fragile long before anyone had heard of COVID-19. There was healthcare and awareness, taking part in health camps and campaigns for communities with limited or inconsistent access to basic care. There was skill building and livelihood work, helping organise activities to improve income opportunities, especially for women and families with very little financial cushion. And there was women’s empowerment, supporting efforts specifically aimed at giving women in these communities more say over their own economic and social lives.
The work itself was often simple and hands on, showing up, helping organise, listening more than talking, but it gave me a real, close view of realities that a huge number of people live with quietly, every day, with almost no visibility from the outside.
Then Came 2020
The pandemic didn’t really create new problems. It took every existing fragility in these communities and pulled hard on all of them at once.
Families who lived on daily wages lost their entire income within days, not months. Small business owners struggled just to stay open. Access to healthcare, already inconsistent, became far harder right when it was needed most. Children faced a sudden, complete break in their schooling, with no digital backup in households that didn’t even have a second device, let alone reliable internet. And many already vulnerable families found themselves without the means to manage even the basics: food, medicine, rent.
As volunteers, we saw all of this up close. Not as a number on a dashboard somewhere, but as a specific family, a specific child, a specific conversation on someone’s doorstep.
Shifting Into Crisis Response
Our focus shifted almost entirely, and almost immediately, toward supporting communities through what was, for nearly everyone involved, an unprecedented crisis. Alongside a large number of other dedicated volunteers, my part of the work centred on a few things.
There was work on essential supplies and outreach, helping coordinate access to basic necessities for families who’d lost their income overnight, and simply going door to door to understand who needed help most urgently. There was meal support for children, helping run something like a no child hunger effort, because school closures didn’t just interrupt education, they also cut off what was, for a lot of children, their one reliable meal each day. There were health awareness campaigns, adjusting the message as our own understanding of the virus changed week to week. And there was direct help for households in serious financial trouble, families who’d gone, almost overnight, from getting by to having nothing left to fall back on.
The scale of it all was, honestly, bigger than anything the initiative had dealt with before. But what stood out to me most, again and again, was the resilience of the people we worked with. Despite the uncertainty and the hardship, communities kept finding ways to support each other, adapt to constantly changing circumstances, and keep moving forward, often with far fewer resources and far less certainty than any of us volunteering ever had ourselves.
Where the Impact Actually Lived
Over time, I came to understand that the real impact of this kind of work almost never shows up in a statistic or a report.
It shows up in the mother who gains real confidence through a livelihood opportunity she didn’t have six months earlier. It shows up in the child who somehow keeps learning despite everything stacked against them. It shows up in the family that gets help at the exact moment they need it, not weeks later once some paperwork clears. And it shows up in communities that come out the other side of a crisis stronger, simply because people kept choosing to help one another through the hardest stretch.
What It Taught Me
This experience taught me lessons that still shape my personal and professional life today.
I learned, in a very practical sense, how much empathy and active listening actually matter, not as soft skills, but as the real way you figure out what a community actually needs, rather than what you assume they need. I learned that big social challenges almost never exist on their own. Health, education, economic opportunity, and community wellbeing are all tangled together, and trying to fix one in isolation rarely works. And I saw, again and again, how much people can achieve together when they come from completely different backgrounds but share one genuine purpose.
Most of all, I came away with a much deeper respect for resilience, not just in a single person, but in an entire community.
Looking back, volunteering through that period was about a lot more than giving something back. It was a chance to learn, to grow, and to understand, in a way no article or policy paper ever could, what millions of people were actually living through. It reminded me how much community driven action matters, and showed me, concretely, how even a small contribution, mine included, adds up to something real when it’s combined with everyone else doing the same thing.
Several years on, these lessons are still with me. This experience is a big part of why I believe lasting impact takes patience, real collaboration, and a genuine effort to understand the people you’re trying to help, not the version of them you assumed before you ever met them.
I’m grateful for the chance to have played even a small part in that work.
If you volunteered during the pandemic, or have been part of similar community efforts, I’d genuinely love to hear your story and what you took away from it, in the comments.
A Public Policy Fellowship, on the Side
Even while I was building AffordNames and volunteering on the ground during the pandemic, I found time, usually early mornings or late evenings, to take on a part time fellowship in public policy. This wasn’t about switching careers. It came from a real need to understand not just what was visibly breaking down around me, but why it was breaking down in the first place.
Building a Daily Discipline
A big part of the fellowship was building a daily writing habit. It sounds like a small, almost mechanical exercise, but doing it every single day genuinely changed how I take in information.
I stopped reacting to headlines the way most people do, with an instant, gut level opinion, and started asking better questions instead. What trade off is this policy actually making? Who exactly pays the cost of that trade off, and who benefits from it? What happens once this policy meets the real world, rather than the tidy version of the world it was designed for on paper?
Threads That Stayed With Me
A few specific ideas from that period have stuck with me long after the fellowship itself ended.
I came away with a much deeper interest in Public Private Partnerships. Watching, in real time, how public systems buckled under a genuinely unprecedented level of demand, for healthcare infrastructure, for logistics, for relief at a scale no government had ever really planned for, got me seriously interested in models where the state keeps the policy direction and public accountability, while private capital and execution speed help fill the gap the public system simply couldn’t build fast enough on its own. Looking back, this connects directly to the other two parts of this period. The relief work, where volunteers and community groups basically acted as an informal private layer holding up an overwhelmed public system, and the business side, which sharpened my sense of where private capital and speed genuinely help, and where that same speed can create its own new risks.
I also started seeing governance and economic reform as a set of trade offs rather than a set of headlines. Instead of reading policy news as simply good or bad, the way most coverage frames it, I started reading it as a series of deliberate trade offs: speed against due process, central control against local freedom, short term relief against long term financial discipline. Nearly every important policy decision I studied that year turned out, once I looked closely, to be a trade off dressed up as a clean solution, and learning to see that difference has stayed with me well past the fellowship.
And I picked up an anthropological way of looking at institutions, through focused study with a dedicated group. This ended up being the influence that’s lasted the longest, even though I didn’t expect it at the time. Studying governance through an anthropological lens meant learning to see institutions not as abstract systems that exist on paper, but as things that are built, lived in, and constantly reshaped by the actual people inside them, shaped as much by culture and everyday habits as by formal law. That way of thinking changed how I understand why some policies read brilliantly in a planning document and then fall apart completely once they meet real people, because implementation always runs through people and their context, never through procedure alone.
Carrying It Forward
The fellowship was always the secondary thing, running quietly alongside building a business and showing up for relief work, never the main track. But it left a real, lasting mark on how I read a policy announcement today, how I think about incentives in any system I’m part of, and how I try to understand institutions and the people inside them, instead of just judging the outcome from the outside.
Final Reflections
Looking back at that whole COVID-preneur stretch, building AffordNames, volunteering on the ground, and studying public policy on the side, I’ve come to realise something I didn’t fully see at the time. Entrepreneurship and service aren’t competing for the same hours. Done right, they actually strengthen each other. Whether it was helping a small business find the right digital asset at the exact moment it needed to reinvent itself, or standing alongside communities going through the hardest stretch most of them had ever faced, that period kept teaching me the same thing over and over: the value of resilience, of adapting when the ground keeps shifting, and of acting on purpose during genuinely hard times.
I’m grateful for the chance to have contributed in these different ways during that time, and I carry the lessons from all three parts of it forward into how I work today.
If you have your own story as a COVID-preneur, a volunteer, or an entrepreneur who lived through that period, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.