Last year I bought a competitor’s domain. This year I bought another one. Two former leaderboard tools, both shut down, both now sitting in my account waiting for me to do something with them.
A bit of context
I started KeepTheScore.com in 2017 as a leaderboard tool — a simple way to track points, rank participants, and display live standings. Generic on purpose. The first users were sales teams, classroom teachers, fundraisers, anyone with a list of names and a column of numbers.
Then customers started asking for things I hadn’t built for. Sports scoreboards. OBS overlays. Scorebugs. Basketball shot clocks. Soccer match periods. So I added them. The product grew, the audience grew, and over the next few years the platform turned into two things squeezed into one.
On one side: sports parents, youth leagues, and community broadcasters streaming local games. They want professional-looking scoreboards, mobile control, OBS integration, sport-specific rules. On the other side: sales managers, classroom teachers, event organizers — the original audience — wanting leaderboards, scoresheets, fundraising thermometers, goal trackers. Two completely different ICPs sharing one domain.
Splitting them is starting to feel inevitable. Which is where the domain acquisitions come in.
The first one: Leaderboarded.com
Leaderboarded.com was one of my competitors. They shut down last year and started recommending KeepTheScore to their users on the way out — a generous gesture I still appreciate.
I bought the domain. Not the user list, not the codebase. Just the name.
If I do split KeepTheScore — leaderboards on one domain, sports scoreboards on the other — Leaderboarded.com is the obvious place to put the leaderboard product back. Search engines already understand the topic. The name is on-the-nose. Former Leaderboarded users searching for the brand will land on a working product instead of a 404.
If I don’t end up splitting, I haven’t lost much. The domain wasn’t expensive. The optionality is what I’m paying for.
The second one: Rise.global
Rise.global is another former leaderboard tool that shut down around the same time. Similar story: real customers, real history, a domain sitting unused.
I have a vaguer plan for this one — probably a tournament bracket maker, with live scoreboards, streaming overlays, and custom themes. The bracket use case never quite fit KeepTheScore because brackets are structurally different from running-score leaderboards. Rise.global feels like the natural place for it. Same logic as before: built-in topical authority, brand recall among former users.
It’s not started yet. We’ll see.
On buying competitor domains
The unusual move is treating dead competitor domains as a viable acquisition strategy. The conventional wisdom is to build a new brand. The contrarian case is that for any niche older than a few years, there are dead products with domains sitting unused — often available for low five-figure sums. Each one comes with topical authority, brand recall among former users, and sometimes a pre-built audience.
It’s not a strategy I’d have predicted when I started KeepTheScore in 2017. But two acquisitions in, I’d do it again.
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