How to find a million-dollar domain? 

EP01 Million Dollar Domains

[00:00:00] Welcome everybody. Welcome to million dollar domain. And what we’ve been doing since March is we’ve been creating a room and a discussion talking about million dollar domain names. And the reason we do it is I think with 150 million.com domain names registered it’s easy to try to lump everything into one category.

Can you buy a domain name for $8? Can you buy a domain name for $80 or $8,000 or 80,000 or 800,000? And some of the generalities you might make talking about lower price domains or hand registration names really may not be relevant when you’re talking about we’re going to call million dollar to.

And million dollar domains would be names that are selling for, or worth or cost about a million dollars or multiple millions of dollars. As we’ve seen five and 10 and 20 and $30 million this year, the same point many times [00:01:00] you’d like to buy a million dollar domain. For less than a million dollars. If you apply maybe a typical 10 to one expect to return, you’d like to buy a million dollar domain name for a hundred thousand dollars.

If you were going to take the position as a domain investor, which I think is the most accurate that you make your money on time and time. And what that means is domain names are e-liquid assets. And when you buy an illiquid asset, like a domain name, even a million dollar domain name, your goal is to try the, by the name, as an investor, when it’s available for sale, somebody either wants to sell it.

They need to sell it. It’s their business model to sell it and you can buy it because that seller wants to sell that name today. That’s the most advantageous time to buy a million dollar domain name. It could be [00:02:00] because it’s a registrar that owns the name and they have decided to sell a certain amount of names.

Each quarter could be because a company owns the domain name and they’ve decided it’s a non-core asset and they want to sell it. It could be because a company’s not using it. They’ve gone out of business. They’ve had business interruption, they need to sell the domain name and in a perfect world, they could reach out to the most likely buyer who would pay the most for that domain name.

But that buyer may not want to pay the most for that domain name right now. So a domain investor can buy a name when it happens to be for sale. And then hold that name. That’s the time until the timing is right. Meaning a company or a website or a startup once that exact domain name and the power and the prestige and the scarcity of that domain name, [00:03:00] and they know what it’s going to be worth to them.

And it’s going to be worse, close to a million dollars or over a million dollars. Or multiples of million dollars. So that’s my, we can talk about million dollar domain names that as an investor, you might want to buy it for a hundred thousand dollars. If you’re a company or a startup, and you can understand the domain investing business, like an investor, you’re going to be able to search out and see what’s available right now for a low price, but it may not be a good fit for you.

So if end-user buyers want a domain name, that’s the right fit or the perfect fit, they’re going to pay what we call a retail or an end-user price. That’s where we get to million dollar and $2 million and $3 million domain names. So we’ve had a great run since March. We had some early guests like Kate Buckley and Braden Pollick and [00:04:00] Louis pixel from brand force talking about the names they had for sale for a million dollars.

And what was funny is I go through and look at the different inventories. We looked at almost a third of the names that we may have talked about are off the market. They’ve either been sold, or we talked about the name in a price range that doesn’t exist anymore. Many of the fixed prices that were put on names above 300,000 to 5 million have disappeared.

And more than ever. Names are being offered with, to make offers scenario. We’ve talked to a number of other brokers, Dave Evanson from Seydoux and he shared with us his names. He’s got a couple of new ones out this week. He’s got fashions.com and he’s got a couple others. If you follow him on LinkedIn or get his newsletter, I’d suggested we talk to Frank who runs a site called brokers crowd, which led to a [00:05:00] lot of independent brokers.

Post the domain names that they’re selling or they’re brokering, and most of them are make offer. And most of them right now say, make offer, they’re looking for 250,000 and above. And some of the best on that list at broker’s crowd are names like translation.com. Which you think, as you think about bringing the whole world together, it makes a lot of sense.

You think about anxiety.com, which you may say, Hey, page, wait, I want a one word I want to noun or a verb or an adverb. And that’s great. And that may cost you two or $3 million as we see, but with anxiety.com, you’re looking at a business that between counseling and therapy and medication and the harmful effect.

Would be a globally, a multi-billion dollar business. And they’re looking for interest at 250,000 and [00:06:00] above. We’ve even seen two word dot comes on, brokers, crowd and other sites start to get close to the multiple hundreds of thousands. One of the ones there was tiny homes.com, which I think is exactly the type of name that’s probably moving.

The current market. Tiny homes have been highlighted by Elon Musk. Sharing that he lives in a pre-built or manufactured or prefab home on his Texas space property that he paid maybe 60 or $90,000 for. And whether it’s for the the green earth benefits, the solving, the homeless population benefits, the ease of construction benefits, the idea that you could live maybe anywhere in the U S.

Or anywhere in the world with the wifi connection and plop down a tiny or a prefab home, that name is moving right now, in [00:07:00] my opinion, in today’s market. And they put a 250,000 or above that said, brokers, crowd.com. If you’ve got names, I think you can talk to Frank about listing them there. Another one that was interesting, that did have a price range of 50 to 100,000 was Zam dot.

Say, come on now page, I thought we were going to talk a million dollar domain names. There’s no way that a name like zam.com could be a million dollar name. And I would say you may be right, but maybe in three years, it is because if you look phonetically and how many, four letter combinations that are one syllable.

So you’re talking about being able to create a brand identity. That’s. With four letters, one sellable, very little confusion about how you say it, even though people may say it’s a Z. Some people say Zed, but you’re going to say Zam. And if you’ve done your work and made sure it doesn’t mean something crazy in another language, [00:08:00] you’ve got a one syllable name to build almost any type of brand or company around with a name like zam.com.

And if you say that’s not a good deal. That’s fine. Go see what else is available. But I would suspect over the next five years that you’re going to see if I could make a list of a hundred, one syllable, four letter names that maybe 20 of them are disappearing each year or every two years.

And you may see a name like zam.com, especially when the holders realized there’s not too many left, go up and back. We talked to Mr. Premium. We talked to Joe, you Demi. We talked to Troy Dunn who had home gym.com and has had a hugely successful experience in the media industry. We’ve talked to Larry Fisher a couple of times when we did our NCAA March madness domain tournament, where we started with [00:09:00] 64 domain names.

All publicly offered for sale, added around a million dollars and we played them off and we ended up having a tournament and we talked about him each week. So that’s the type of thing. We’ve talked about a million dollar domain names. So as we introduce the show now to the new podcast form, I want you to just give a sense of what we’ve done over that time, besides the speakers that we’ve talked.

We’ve also talked about some big themes. I think the biggest theme that’s happened with one word and million dollar domain names has been the idea of direct to consumer businesses direct to consumer businesses, especially in the finance areas where now you don’t need a distribution system like owning a bank.

You don’t need a distribution system like having insurance brokers in every city, around the country, around the world. You can go directly to your customers and they can buy [00:10:00] savings and loan products, credit products, loan products, directly online. And if you’re advertising on television, yes, that’s still where most things get advertised.

You can send people directly to your website. And in that moment where you’re going to tell them your domain name, if your domain name is something like upside or Upland or overcome, or, credit.com would be the ultimate. You’re able to build that customer relationship with the customer, not having to pay a middleman.

So if the lifetime value of that customer to you is worth thousands of tens of thousands. And even if you advertise online with Google, you’re going to have to pay to advertise to get your customers. You may not get them from natural search anymore. No matter what your company is, the dominance that paid search plays now.

You really can’t rely on being the [00:11:00] best organic ranking. Cause even if you’re the best organic ranking, you could be the fifth one down the page. So you’ve got to have this one word, catch you domain name in my opinion, to reach if you’re going to be spending 10, 20, a hundred million dollars on advertising.

So probably one of the biggest themes we talked about was this direct to consumer businesses, buying one word, domain name. Like purple.com even if it was for mattresses, lemonade.com, even if it was for software hippo.com, even if it was for an insurance company. You’ve got this idea that there’s only, I think out of the 115 million domain names, we’re going to do some work for an upcoming show where we may say that the category of one word domain names.

May only be 10 to 20,000 long. That may be the sole amount of names and maybe half of those are in use. So you’ve got a constantly shrinking market of these one word domain names. So [00:12:00] anyway, that’s what we’ve been talking about over the next over the last six months. My name is Paige Hal. I host million dollar domain names for domain.club.

I want to thank the.club registry for their sponsorship and support of the show. And and the ability that they’ve given to, to kinda give me shows back to the domain name industry, to be able to talk about these topics. And one of the reasons I was so excited when I talked with them about doing million dollar domains, is that most of the time people learn about million dollar domain names, really only one way or two ways I’ll say to it.

One is they learn about million-dollar domain names when they get. So they’re going to read in the paper that bird.com, which ended up not selling, but may have sold for $3 million. So if they want to evaluate using that for a social media, that, or a computer software company, or really any type of company.

So most of the time people, [00:13:00] companies in there. That have bought one word domain names when the domain names aren’t available for sale anymore. So they learn about what people would actually pay people. This many millions of dollars for home.com or for voice.com when they can’t be done again. On the second time they learn about a domain name is when there’s a broker offering the domain.

And it’s a bunch of brokers on the street, do a fantastic job. Most of the time, they’re totally focused on educating the person about domain names, to the extent that it’s going to the sale of the single domain name that they’re presenting at the time. And so as much as they do want that buyer to be educated about domain names, to understand about.

They really want it to be in a way that they can control the conversation as I would, if I was brokering your name. And I think what we’re trying to do on million-dollar domain names is [00:14:00] introduced in this podcast. People thinking about what I paid a million dollars for the ultimate domain name in my industry.

And that, and then I think that pre-thought and thinking about it when the right name comes available, you’ll already handle a lot of the internal complications of shopping. The idea of buying a $2 million domain name or a $5 million. Hey Paige, sorry to interrupt your you’re a little bit muffled at something’s wrong with your microphone.

It keeps coming in and out a little bit. Oh no, there we go. That’s perfect. That’s perfect. Now. All right. Thank you, mark. I appreciate that. So let’s see. Let me go back to where I was. We were talking about, oh, Prisa. So we want to do a million dollar domain names is talk about specific names that are available.

Talk about names maybe in comparison to. Today, we’re going to talk about whether it’s better to own one name as a domain investor, or whether it’s better to own a thousand names that [00:15:00] say cost a thousand dollars each, which is the same million dollars worth of domain names. And we can either talk about it as spending a million dollars on a domain.

Versus spending a million dollars to buy a thousand names at a thousand dollars, we can talk about buying a million dollar domain name, say for a hundred thousand dollars, 10% versus buying a thousand domains. That you want to put up for sale for a thousand dollars. So we just want to talk about some of the things, but but that’s a brief history of million dollar domain names.

My name is page how I host the show. I’ve sold two domain names over a million dollars. I sold seniors.com for over 1,000,005, and then guide.com from. And that’s the time they were both in the top hundred domain sales that had happened. They’d been eclipsed since then but I know what it’s like to own a million dollar domain.

And the psychology of the owner is really important when it comes to selling [00:16:00] those of you out there that may have million dollar domain names, hopefully I can discuss with you and we can talk about what it’s like to wonder. Am I getting enough for it? How much should I sell it for? What do I do?

What’s the pressure. And I think another thing is really a lot of times, if you’ve owned this type of valuable asset, For five or 10 or 15 years, because learn industry had a real weak time, the last 10 years leading up until 2020 a lot of your identity in your future and your hopes and your dreams are tied up in that name.

And a lot of times you get into negotiation and people just want to talk about the price and. Would it take and what’s the lowest you’d take for the name and, and I think there’s so much more involved in it. So I’ve owned million dollar domains. I’ve helped people buy million dollar domain names.

We had a number of million dollar brokers on our domain show lab last year. So I’ve tried to stay abreast of the space. I talked to a lot of you early on about the idea of staging million dollar domain names and really slowing [00:17:00] down. And taking the time to look at a name, if you’re going to broker or represent or decide what it’s worth, and you’ve got to stare at it, you’ve got to really chew on it.

A popular movie that talks about chewing down to the bone, really look at the different things that come from that now. From its meaning. I think one of the biggest strengths in a word right now in a domain name is, does it represent attributes that our company would like to have in their products?

Or have the public see in their product. So one of the biggest things that’s changed over the last 15 years and million dollar names is there was a time when everything was really based upon keywords. If you own life insurance.com, which is still a very valuable domain name, don’t get. If you own sofas.com or if you own anything that could be sold on Amazon, the idea was [00:18:00] those names had a huge search volume.

If you own the domain name, bedroom furniture.com or manufactured homes.com that you would have a category killer is what we. And then the market moved those names, especially the best ones are still really valuable, but we moved to this idea that a few had names that exuded strength and confidence and power, or even a name that we’ve talked to.

A couple of times here, like pineapple.com and you say that’d be great if you wanted to dominate the pineapple industry. But if you think about it, I had done a video about pineapple.com five or six years ago. When you start saying, what are the attributes of a pineapple they’re sweet. It represents vacation and the tropics and maybe.

An unserious cuteness, it’s a summertime, it’s a happy domain name. It’s yellow really represents the color yellow. So while your branding and your everything is going to be around that color. And [00:19:00] so you start reading into these names a bunch more than just maybe what they mean and what the strict definition is.

So anyway, that’s an introduction for those of you who are listening this first podcast, a million dollar domain names and. I wanted to talk about now, what’s been going on this week in million dollar domain names. And I posted a couple of the topics on the website that goes along with the podcast and that’s million dollar domain name.

And I know a lot of you may be listening in the car or while you’re working out and you really can’t go and look at the website, but if you’re participating in. Before we get our video app. want to talk about some of the news of the week. so@milliondollardomainnames.com, you can just click on the most recent post.

And we’re going to talk about only one name or owning a thousand, but I want to say, but first the news near.com sells for 1.15 million. So Larry Fisher and Ari Goldberger or anything, or add it again, selling a one-word [00:20:00] domain name now. Dot com four letter name for 1.15. And I think that’s right in the sweet spot of today’s market, where people talked about owning a name, like one word name that has so many different uses so many different ways that people could buy it.

Rick Schwartz talks about it being an intersection of so many roads. And I think whether near.com is going to be used for a proximity service, a delivery service. A directory of businesses near you. If you want to be emotionally near somebody or close to somebody you’ve really got a number of ways to go.

And so they sold near.com for 1.15 million. The industry also covered a company. It wasn’t a domain named sale, but we talked about a company called bungalow, a marketplace for real estate that offers tools for landlords. They raised $75 million. And a $600 million valuation. So if you think about their valuing the company, it’s [00:21:00] $600 million.

And I would say if owning a simple one word, easy to remember name like bungalow, instead of having to be my bungalow or go bungalow or bungalow bungalows for sale.com, they can add even 1% to their $600 million valuation. That means that domain name could change, the cost of their venture capital by $6 million just by buying one domain name.

So when we talk about million dollar domain names, we’re talking about their value in relation to what they can do for a company that’s worth or raising 500 million to a billion. Some of the other news this week. Let’s see, let me go to owner.com. Andrew, Alamanda a domain name wire. He covered the profit boss.

So imagine your company is called profit boss. And now you’ve got to spend the first two or three minutes of your pitch. Saying what profit boss [00:22:00] does and now you’ve got. Owner.com. So they re, they say rebrand owner.com prior to raising 10 and a half million dollars. And again, say they were going to raise 10 and a half million dollars and they were going to raise it at a a a hundred million dollar valuation.

Then they were going to have to give up 10%. Maybe as profit boss, they may have only got an $8 million valuation. An $80 million valuation. They would have to give up more of the company to get their 10 million. So now maybe they move to a hundred million dollar valuation. And I’m an Andrew talks about a door dash.

They’ve switched to rose and rose.com. A social survey, rebranded to experienced.com treat adult. Kind of part of the family of companies that that we know about move to pod.com. There’s a company called place pool was co founded in 2018 place poll. So that was the name of this company when it started [00:23:00] place pole.

So that would be hard to say and hard to remember, but it’s a good name for their startup. Let’s say in June of 21 profit Boston acquired owner.com and. They bought it from digital media, which owns some of the best domain names in our industry, like bed and dark and read. But right off the acquisition of it they talked about buying owner.com and then raising 10 and a half million dollars.

So now you’ve got the idea that their owner.com and Andrew ends up with saying, what would you rather buy a product, a service from product boss, doc. Or owner.com a domain agents did a great post. And if you’re not familiar with domain agents, there are a group of independent agents and they do a couple things.

One, they buy and sell domain names too. They have a really innovative way of allowing. To list domain names on their marketplace and take offers. What they do is to confirm that a buyer is interested because they’ve been around long enough to know that we all get these [00:24:00] inquiries on domain names that aren’t even real.

They actually asked the buyer to pay $10 to make an offer on a domain name. And as the seller, just for hearing out their offer, you get $10. So that’s domain agents, they’re constantly in the top five of brokers. In escrow dot coms, annual awards. So they wrote a little newsletter at domain, a domain agents.com on their blog, and they covered July and August.

They talked about marketing.com selling for two and a half million. And I asked.com selling for 2 million and e.com selling for 1.35 million. We’ve also seen a lot of three letter names, which have always been popular, but now we have one going for 790, 2000 a V a.com selling for 792,000. So those of you who think that three letter domain names only trade around their floor or only trade within [00:25:00] a certain five figure range.

We’ve got Ava going for 700,000, another two word domain name Livewire sold for 600,000. George character was found a couple more. He does work@freespeech.com. He found better.com, which sold for 1.8. 2 million is actually back in 2015 and hip o.com sold for 3.3 million. And I thought this was interesting because I actually got a quote for insurance from hippo dot.

And what they’re doing is they’re really trying to disrupt the home insurance industry, where normally you buy a policy from your local agent or some of the household names like state, farm, and Allstate, and. Over the years you’ve paid them a lot of money and you have a local agent, but when you need to have your claims, you’re dealing with the home office and they want you to do everything electronically and you wonder what am I paying for?

I really don’t get that [00:26:00] benefit of local agent anymore. So what’s interesting is they said as long as you’re not going to get the benefit of the local agent, why not buy your home insurance on an app and you go in there and you put the size of your house. And you put number of bedrooms and number of bathrooms and the year that was built and they give you a quote.

And it’s usually a lot less than what you’re paying now. And then they send out an inspector about two weeks later to make sure that that, your house is what you say. It is as funny because the reason that they were called hippo was cause water damage accounts for such a huge number of claims and the insurance industry, and a lot of companies now.

Once you had a water damage claim, they’ll exclude you. And I know this is a kind of a rabbit hole here for today’s million dollar domain. But just understand their thinking a little bit. So what they did is they said we’re going to, we’re going to cover water damage no matter what. Although they may limit it down the road, but they also put some interesting things on their coverage.

Like they cover all your [00:27:00] electronic devices in your house. So instead of having to pay for extended warranties at a bunch of places, they include that. So it’s a customer friendly policy bought on an app and they were called hippo, but they didn’t have hippo.com until last year and they bought it for 3 million.

So that’s part of the news of the week. Let’s see, last thing, I got two things I want to cover before we get to the the million dollar domain. One is since I started investing in domain names about 20 years ago, I, and a lot of other investors, I’ve always thought, why don’t more big companies buy great domain names.

If you take a name, that’s maybe a two word domain name, and it can be used by a company and their business. Why wouldn’t they be. And early on, I think there was such an effort in the mindset of companies to stick with their brand and their website. [00:28:00] And even if it meant that they would have a marketing campaign that directed you to their website.com/something, or maybe even two slashes, they would do it because it kept everything in their website.

And then maybe the rest of the old people told him you need to keep everything to rank your website as high as possible. And so they would say we’re not going to buy a two-word domain name. When they went out and talked about now, it’s called moving you.com. And if you were a domain investor and you own that name, you’re like, oh my gosh, a movie company should want to buy this name.

But for a long time, it seemed like they really didn’t, they would rather go with you hall.com. Slash moving you and still advertise on TV, moving you without owning the.com. So I thought it was interesting when I saw a commercial last week for you. Where they were advertising their new service called moving you.com where you can not only rent a [00:29:00] track from them, but you can, Trent, you can hire the people to move you with moving you.com.

Now a lot of you that are domain investors are thinking, wow, they should have gone from move u.com. But that’s another story, but I thought it was interesting that we’re starting to see cases where companies for specific marketing projects. For a specific advertising opportunity, these where they may be spending 10 to $100 million, we’ll buy a two-word domain name, if it matches exactly what they’re trying to do.

And I think that hasn’t always been the case, but it’s a trend that I think will continue. So that was moving you and you home. So I wanted to throw that. All right. Let’s see. I didn’t know if we had any questions. I’ll take a break here and reset the room. This has million dollar domains.

And I’ve been talking about the history of million dollar domains as we switched to a podcast format. So we are recording today. And I wanted to let [00:30:00] anyone who is marketing a million-dollar domain name or has a million dollar domain name they’re looking to buy or is selling a million dollar domain name to come up and ask a question, maybe I’ll share with you what I saying.

Anyone else thinks. And I think this isn’t a time to, maybe we talk about hand registration, domain names. Sometimes we talked about, Hey, I just bought the same last night for 20 bucks. Can you tell him what I think I’d like to keep it to names of, maybe 50,000 up to 15 million, which is quite a big range.

But I wanted to stop and ask some questions and I wanted to give anyone who has a show on clubhouse coming up this week, a chance to announce it before I do my second segment. So thanks for staying with us so far, mark. I appreciate you coming up from being a speaker in a prior show. Metta, you came up and had a question nice to meet you and you are being recorded.

How are you today? I just entered the room and I saw you sorta died or con right? [00:31:00] Yes. Okay. Of course. Dot com is very expensive. I, because I just a hundred, certainly got my attention because I have a guide on it’s. There’s, it’s there’s so much nothing compared to.com, but it was interesting to see that you fall such a big domain with them.

You are. Yeah. What extension.

gotcha. It’s funny. I think I used to own that name back when XYZ launch, but anyway, yeah, I think it’s interesting because you can use what happens in million dollar.com domain names to help guide maybe you’re investing in other TLDs and I think. Extension or top level domain name as Metta talked about X, Y, Z, or X, Y.

Has its own pricing formula, whereas a million dollar domain name and.com may be worth, 400,000 in.club. And it may be worth 200,000 and X, Y, Z, but it may be worth a million or a $10 million domain [00:32:00] name and.com may be worth 2 million and dot I O now. So I think each other extension has their own relative ranking and it also works in reverse.

If you look at what’s selling and some of the other extensions, a lot of times you can find out what people tried to get in.com were priced out of the market. So they went to another extension and you could see what they were willing to pay for an extension that might only be one. A half a percent or 1% or 2% of.com and you can use that to determine what you think the.com would be worth or how to buy another extension.

Thanks Metta. I also have guy f.com for later guy. If I have to guide, dive that common guide or XYZ. That’s terrific. I think you’re in a, you’re in a good spot and I don’t know if any of those will get the million dollar thing, but thanks for coming up and sharing your question. I wanted to go ahead or unless you had something else to say, [00:33:00] I wanted to go ahead and move on to, we talked a bit about million dollar domain name portfolios.

So in that we’re going to end a little early today. We’re just going to go about 10 more minutes. I want you to talk about the idea of owning $1 million domain. Yeah. Or owning say a thousand domain names that you pay a thousand dollars for. So what would it look like to own one name and a million dollars where you put all your eggs in one basket.

And as I put on the blog post today, you can adjust this to your own pay grade. If you want, you can think about. A million million-dollar name versus owning a thousand names at a thousand. You can think about owning a hundred thousand dollar name versus owning, say a hundred names at a thousand dollars each, or you could even talk about whether you want to buy one name, their class to $10,000, or do you want to own a hundred names that cost you a hundred dollars?

And it was interesting [00:34:00] because what I learned was, and I made some numbers. It is roughly, if we go back to the million dollar number, I think if you’re buying a domain name where you’re investing a million dollars, that you’re probably buying a domain name that you’re hoping to sell for between getting your money back a million dollars and at least having a good storage of capital and probably hoping to get 5 million or maybe $10 million for that domain.

It’s the same. I don’t think you can buy a million dollar domain name that you could offer out for a million dollars for much less than a hundred thousand dollars. So if we talk about investing in billion dollars, you’re going to buy a name for a million dollars. And I ran some numbers and I put the link there in the blog post under pages numbers that said what would be some of the potential things that might happen and say your holding period was three years.

So this is what it would look like to own $1 million [00:35:00] domain name on. If I spend a million dollars for a domain name, I’m probably either going to put it for sale for 10 million as a buy it now, or I’m going to say, make offer. And I’m going to just go through some hypotheticals here on my number charts that I put at the blog at million dollar domain names, and you can click under pages numbers.

And I’m going to say that maybe that there’s going to be about a 5% chance. Then I may sell it the next three years say Paige, why would you buy a domain name? If there’s only a 5% chance you’d sell it. And the next three years, the reason I say that is because I want to sell it for between two and $4 million.

So if I just bought it for a million dollars and everyone else in the world could have bought it for a million dollars and all of a sudden I turn around and want to see. I don’t think I can assume that there’s someone out there for sure. That’s going to pay two to $4 million. [00:36:00] So say I cited the next three years.

There’s a 5% chance I could sell it for $4 million and maybe there’s a 5% chance I can sell it for $3 million. I can do three to one. So together I’ve done a 10% chance maybe of doing at least three to one on my money.

And so what do you have to do to achieve that? And you pretty much don’t do anything to be able to sell a million dollar domain name for three to 4 million or 5 million or 10 million, in my opinion, unless you bought it in an industry that’s rapidly moving. You just need someone else in the world. And the more that your name could appeal to so many other people in the world that have the means to buy it to the side.

That’s the name that they need. That’s the name that’s going to let them do it achieve their 50 million or a hundred million dollar objectives. So you’re by your domain name, you make sure [00:37:00] that there’s a way to contact you about inquiring for it. I would say you stay close to the industry or the different options that your name is.

So that you’re able to have relevant conversations with buyers. And you’re going to sit back and you’re going to say I’ve got maybe a 5% chance of selling this name for three to 4 million in three years. Took me seven years to sell seniors.com. Now, if you lower your price expectations, you probably got a better chance of selling.

If you said maybe there’s, I’m going to want to only sell it for 2 million. I’m going to double my money, but I’m going to make a million dollars. So now if there’s a hundred people that may want to buy the name and only one or two of them could pay three to 4 million, maybe 10% of them would pay the $2 million to buy that.

So now you’ve got a larger group of people that you still need them to decide that they want that name. You could do outbounding, meaning you contact back people and [00:38:00] say, Hey, would you like to buy this domain name? But they may not be willing to offer the best price in that level. So say you have a 5% chance of making 4 million, a 10% chance of making 2 million.

I would hope that you have about a 30% chance of selling it for 1,000,005. 50% above what you paid and then if you bought it for a million, you were probably hoping to buy it to a discount to its true value. And I would say, hopefully we’d like to think that there is a hundred percent chance that you’re going to get your million dollars back.

Let’s say that you did have to stretch up to. No one can never lose on domain investing. So say there was maybe an 80% chance that you’d get 80% of your money back, but there was a hundred percent chance that you’d get your $500,000 back. So that’s where it looks don’t a million dollar domain name you’re probably not going to lose.

You’re definitely not going to lose all your investment. You probably got an 80% chance. Being able to get out of that name within 20% of your purchase price, you [00:39:00] probably got a 10% chance of doubling or getting at least a million and a half, maybe a 5% chance of doubling your money and a 5% chance of doing 4 million.

So that’s what I think the numbers are for buying a million dollar domain. Now let’s look at the other way to do it. You’ve got a million dollars you want to spend on domain names and you go out there in the marketplace and you buy 1000 domain names, paying a thousand dollars each and you can get a pretty good two word.com domain name for a thousand dollars.

You can get. Maybe a little bit of a top 30,000 English word domain name for a thousand dollars, you can probably get a lot of good brandable domain names for a thousand dollars. And you’re going to sit there at the beginning of each year and you’re going to have a thousand domains. And if you could sell, say 2% or 4% or 6% of those names each year, depending on how aggressive you’d be on price, put your [00:40:00] million dollars to work and you might sell between a hundred thousand and $300,000 a year of domain names.

So now instead of having everything be all or nothing, You’re going to have to respond to offers. You’re going to have someone monitor your landing pages, but you can do that as long as you pay him a commission. So you might make with your million dollars, you might make between a hundred and say $200,000 a year.

If you can do two to 4% sales rate, now, some people would say, Hey, wait. I thought it was only one to 2%. The truth is that number was made up 18 years ago. And let me tell you. It’s much harder to buy domain names and it was 18 years ago, but the quality of name that you’re getting now is not as good in my opinion, as it was 18 years ago.

But if you’re paying a thousand dollars for names, they should have a pretty good sell through. And so I ran some numbers where I said out of those 2% and 4% and 6% you might say. Of all your sales, you might sell 1% of your names for [00:41:00] 25,000. You bought it for a thousand. It’s the perfect name for somebody you get 25,000 and a very small group.

You might get 20,000 for them again, you pay the thousand, a smaller group. You may get 15, there might be a larger. As much as 40% that if you do sell them, you’re going to get between five and 7,000 and then maybe there’s a larger group where you set your expectations in a lower and you sell them for between 20 $502,000.

So what I came up with, if you look at the numbers on million dollar domain names, as if you invest in a million dollars in a thousand domain names, That you might make over the next three years between one and a half and $1.8 million. If you were selling between two, four, and 6%, and then at the end of three years, you exited your names, you got out of them.

And when you got out of them, I had, you’re getting out of them at between 400 to $800 per. With a small percentage of [00:42:00] them getting 1500 or $2,000 per name. So I had a random thing. So I learned from doing this exercise is that the multiples are higher on lower price domains. If you can consistently have discipline and buy better, lower price, domain names, you’re probably going to make more money, spending a million dollars to buy a thousand names.

Then you would buy one name, but the one name is going to be easier to exit than getting rid of a thousand names. Cause the more you need to sell them, the bigger discount you have to sell them for. The other thing that benefits the thousand named portfolio is you do have a chance that if in general, the entire universe of domain names grows, you have a chance where every one of your thousand assets might be worth two to five to 10 times, I think in [00:43:00] million dollar domain names.

Whereas the gross amount of money you can make on one transaction is a lot. If the whole domain name industry grows by 10 or 20 or 50%, you may only see a doubling or tripling of your million dollar domain name. So I thought it was interesting as I talked to, as I went through this exercise to think about when you think about spending a million dollars, if you want to be concentrated in one asset.

You don’t want to actively manage a portfolio? The best thing to do is wait until you’re offered a name for a million dollars. That’s going to have the most amount of buyers for the next five years. And that’s the only way you can buy a million dollar domain name. I think in a way that you can sell it for three to 5 million is you just have to be the one person at the right time.

That would buy the name when it’s not obvious it’s going to sell. And then wait until it’s obvious [00:44:00] by doing the active part of buying a thousand domain names, paying a thousand dollars for each, you’ve got a much wider range of scenarios. You may not be able to make $20 million in one pop, like if your million dollar domain goes off, but you’ve got a range of scenarios.

If you’re willing to put in the. Anyway, that’s a little different than I normally talk about, which is, would you rather have a million dollar domain names or for a thousand? And when we start off next week, a million dollar domain names, those of you that listened to the podcast or follow me today, we’ll do some follow-up and some discussion.

But if I haven’t lost you I wanted to see if anyone had any questions about this idea of owning one, one name for a million dollars or owning a thousand names and say a thousand dollars. The last thing I wanted to mention, I put it on my notes. Here is it may take you two years. So it makes none of my numbers really work to find a [00:45:00] thousand names at a thousand dollars.

That are really worth buying without simply chasing and paying more than you should for each of the thousand things. So that’s probably the hardest thing to do about the thousand named strategy is that if you went in today and over the next two months started paying up to a thousand dollars for names, you would actually probably end up having to overpay.

By 20 or 30% and you’d be less likely to be successful. But if you’ve pictured that over two years, you were going to buy a thousand domain names and that each spot in your portfolio was so valuable that you only made room when you saw a really good value equation name. That would be the way to do that.

The better. So anyway, that’s my sharing today on billion dollar domain names. And I wanted to see if anyone had any questions and Lou, how are you? Welcome to million dollar domains.

Thank you page. Just a quick question. I’m not really [00:46:00] into the domain thing. I’m just learning about it from you. One question would be if you had one dome. And you wanted to broker it. Can you do that or are you, do you have to have many? That’s a good question. And I appreciate you asking it. I think that right now in our industry, the brokerage community is set up to broker single domain names.

So I would say not only, yes, but that’s probably. The normal way that people would do it. You, as the owner of your domain name, there’s a popular stock market person, Jim Kramer, and he talks about spending an hour a week on each stock that you own. And if you own a million dollar domain name, you probably are spending two or three hours a week, keeping up on that industry, seeing what’s going on, see who the new players are.

I know I did when I had seniors.com and I think by hiring a broker, you not only gain access to their [00:47:00] network of who they may know in the past. Who they may know, that’s a serial entrepreneur that may want to buy your name, but you’ve also got someone who’s going to, besides just whatever you can glean from, public records or things like that.

News blogs, they’re going to go out there and find who wants to buy your name the most. So I think they’re going to increase your turnaround time. Versus waiting for someone to come to you. So yes, I would say that’s the most likely way that million-dollar domain names are sold is through a broker. And I see that on go daddy, they have brokers.

Do they have their own brokers or do you know anything about GoDaddy? Oh, quite a bit. So go, daddy actually owns probably 300,000 to 500,000 domain names and they have an entire. Network of maybe 60 brokers. I’m not even sure between their different divisions that handles people wanting to buy names and their [00:48:00] portfolio.

Now they will say to any customer, Hey, you can use one of my brokers, but they probably are not skilled in reaching out to sell a domain name as much as maybe the top 10 brokers in our business are where that’s all they do is sell million dollar domain names. I think of Andrew Rosen or media options or jester Abriel at thought.com and Tessa, and really Amanda Wall.

A lot of people, our industry that are really good at selling single domain names. So I would probably not use GoDaddy to broker a million dollar domain. And I didn’t hear, did you say some of the, would you recommended some brokers and where I would start looking for brokers.

I’ll send you a back channel message. How’s that sound? That sounds great. Thank you so much. I think I can probably do. Thanks, Lou. Thank you. Sounds like it sounds like you have an interesting name to work on. Thank you. I actually have my own cosmetic line, which is Lu mesh cosmetics.[00:49:00] Fantastic. All right.

Thank you everyone for coming in today, we did today is more of a podcast episode and I think over time we’ll do more discussion on million dollar names, but I had encouraged anyone to give me any feedback on the back channel if they liked today’s show. By going to domain.club and putting your email address where it says, get our newsletter.

We’ll let you know the link to the recordings of this and future shows which has a million hours domain.club. Hopefully you’ll click on the green box up there and follow and join domain.club. And. We talking about million dollar domain names. We’ll discuss a little bit, this idea of only one domain versus owning a thousand domains.

And we’ll try to identify places where you might buy a million dollar domain name today as an investor, as well as talk to them about names that may be next year’s class of 2022 [00:50:00] biggest themes in million dollar domain names. So that’s probably our next three to four weeks.