Yes, you can be profitable, quickly. I've written about it before, I was profitable from my first sale and since then my return on capital is >10x despite a bunch of expensive mistakes.

You could turn $10k into $100k with the right strategy. The problem a lot of novices run into is that, yes, patience is important, but patience doesn't mean buying domain after domain after domain and then waiting years and years to see if any get a nibble. You should be treating every purchase as a learning experience, iterating on your strategy as you learn, not treating your initial capital as money to spend and then wait.

If I were starting over, I would take $1k and invest in ~100 domains and then when I achieved my first sale I would reinvest a portion of the profits, rinse and repeat. You should be profitable from your first sale, anything less is falling short.

1. Acquire 100 good .com domains for $1,000
2. List each for ~$3k
3. Make your first sale
4. Withdraw 50% as your profit ($1,500)
5. Reinvest the remaining $1,500 on 150 more domains

Repeat the process... banking at least 50% of your profits each time. As you get better at finding domains, your sell through rate will increase, improving your profitability. Eventually, you will be very profitable and have a really good sense for domain values and then you can start investing more and more capital, or you can just keep reinvesting a portion of your profits.

Alternatively you can send me $10k and I'll build you a profitable portfolio for just a 20% management fee... but you should be doing it yourself instead, paying someone else is dumb