Quality Over Quantity?

Quality over Quantity?

This first episode of 2022 is centered on discussing whether quality should be favored over quantity… and it’s a classic question: Is it wiser to invest in domain names that withhold a higher quality? Or is it better to own a large number of domain names? What is considered best practice? Tune in to the episode to find it out!

  • Read the Transcript

    TRANSCRIPT: Monday Domains – EP09

    I wonder how you’re thinking about, uh, the attack on the variant on activity and sort of the economic disrupture, then there’s boards that are able to work and what that does to Q1 versus the impact on supply chain and what that may do to our inflationary concerns in any way to starting the year. And I’m all in a day job.

    Hey, everybody, welcome to Monday domains, the first show or the year Marianne we’re back to varying volatility. Um, you know, I think what we also understand is this is a very different, um, people, well, people are getting sick, they’re not being hospitalized. And instead of government checked down on the shoulders of corporations and the health of their employees to start, I think we continue to see sort of select.

    Um, shut down. It’s not surprising that the same sectors that were impacted in the early days of the pandemic and through, down to are, are being impacted right now that these also seem to be temporary status because the one thing that’s really different is that we have that, Hey, everybody, welcome coming in.

    I’m just inviting a few more people or before entering any new vaccines based on variance. And so my advice to clients right now, a lot more people have notifications turned off. Then there used to be, we want to really look at asset allocation, stay within the us stocks, start to add international emerging market.

    And as

    uh, squarely said,

    Um, where companies can deploy capital and ensure the human cost of this temporary state of this particular, Hey everybody happy new year, welcome to the first Monday domains or the year, which sort of entrenches us in these themes. And then I would rewind the clock as a severe. Are you also sort of tapping the screen or the Forevers of your framework?

    Thanks for coming in. If anyone has any questions before we start an issue, you’re working on a name, you bought an appraisal. An offer or evaluation question, go ahead and hit me up.

    I’ve got some stuff I want to share today about what I’m looking forward to in 2022, but I also just want to be a resource as much as I can about, uh, domain questions, using different companies, using different services, what to do when this happens, or should I sell? Should I buy, I’ve got an offer. I’ve got a name I’m looking at, or you just want a quick appraisal anyway, let me just finish.

    There we go. All right. Mambas. Welcome mambas. Happy new year. Good morning and happy new year. How are you? It seems like it was just a scant 12 hours ago. I was hearing your voice, but I wonder where that is. That’s cause I was at the dome Mamba Sunday night.

    I am great. And I do actually have a question before you get started. If you could take a quick one. Sure. What are your thoughts on volume of domains compared to higher quality domains? Do you think it’s better to have, let’s say 10,000, you know, domain names that at hand reds you can sell between three and five K or should you maybe get a hundred that you pick up, you know, between five and 20 K that you’re looking for, the big bucks for it?

    What’s your opinion on it? Well, it’s a great question. No surprise coming from you. I think that in the last three years, uh, I have more, both. I have more higher quality names and I have enlarged my portfolio. And I think what’s better. I’m going to think about this. You know, a good question deserves a good answer.

    I think right now

    having fewer better names is better, except for the fact that I think having a lot of what I do, which is hand read speculation that I may drop in a year. I consider that to be different than owning a portfolio of lots of names for years and years and years. Does that make sense? In other words, I may buy a hundred NFTE names last year and I may drop 80 of them this year, especially if I’ve sold some for 30 and 50 times.

    What I bought. So I’m not planning on owning those for years and years and years. So I differentiate that from having like my old portfolio, which would be like a bunch of blog names. You know, at one time I probably had 400 blog names and then it went down to 300 and 200. Now it’s about 40. So I’ve shrunk the size of my permanent portfolio.

    And I’ve only shifted in the last year toward trying to buy better names. And the number one reason for me is I haven’t seen the aftermarkets get better after Nick is great, but it isn’t getting better. And I’ve still got to compete against all the inventory at huge domains. And I guess I had to admit after a while that they’re pretty good at owning 3 million names and, um, and unless I’m going to be better than they are.

    That it might be hard. So right now I’d probably say quality.

    Thank you very much for that. That’s very helpful. I’ll tell you what I did today. I picked a new theme this morning at five 30 that I bought over the weekend. And I did both. I bought five names for $2,000 and above with these two letters at the beginning. And I’m not going to tell you what they are, but some of you know, and, uh, and then I bought about 60 hand registrations.

    So I’m fortunate. I had a good year. Last year. I had some good sales. I have the money to do both. And, um, and I’m going to try to do both. So welcome to 2022. Welcome to the first show of Monday domains. We want to thank Mike from Mamba, uh, for his question, quantity and quality. And I think asking those types of questions is a great thing to do on this first day of the year.

    Some of you may be working, but some of you may be getting a benefit and that it’s either a holiday in the UK or other countries. It’s a holiday because, you know, people don’t feel like they got a new year’s day holiday or you’re snowed in. Um, we got snow in Tennessee here, so, uh, not all the schools are going, not all the schools are back and maybe after getting through the holidays where I was more inclined to rest and, uh, do what I had to do in domaining respond to off.

    By a bunch of new stuff, but now it is a time to say, what do I want to do in 2022? What am I going to be about? And as I mentioned a year ago on the domain show, the 24 7 room, which started a year ago today, when you start thinking about what you’re going to do in domaining in 2022, I want to encourage you to have accurate data and to know yourself clearly as to how many domains you own, what is the total cost of all the domains you own and how many domains did you sell last year?

    And you may be operating off false conceptions of how well you’re doing or how not. Well you’re doing, here’s what I found when I’ve done this exercise. Most of us have too much. Risk in our portfolio. And what I mean by that is in the stock market. If you own a stock that is a high growth stock, a higher earning stock, you know, you’re hoping you’d get a double or a triple.

    And in domains, we’re hoping to make a hundred or 300 times our money. And most of us, me included if I actually sold all 10,000 of my names for what I think they’re worth, I would make $40 million. Now when I go to RVs tomorrow and I’m not ashamed to admit it, and I cut my little coupon that gives me a buy one, get one free.

    I’m not acting like someone who’s got $40 million worth of value sitting at home. And when I looked at transferring domain names out of a registrar, Because they’re $10 and 99 cents to go to someplace where they’re $8 and 3 cents. I’m not really acting like someone that has $40 million worth of assets sitting on their books.

    Now the cost of my portfolio is a lot less than that. It’s between half a million and a million dollars. Some of you, if you’re a smaller, you may have 30,000 invested in your portfolio. And if everything sold for your asking price, it’d be worth $4 billion. And what I mean by that is so much of what we do.

    We’re fearful that we’re going to sell a name for less than its maximum price. And at the same time on months, when we don’t have sales, we worry. Should I be buying anything? And there’s this huge disconnect between what we would, what we would be worth if everything sold for its true value. And the way we tend to value domains when we’re trying to buy him, which is at deep wholesale.

    And the reason I think it makes it tough is that I think you would be self-serving to think that that environment can continue. That we’re always going to be able to buy domains for 30 to a hundred dollars. And we’re always going to be able to sell domains for three to 5,000. I think that environment only exists in a very e-liquid world where businesses come online, slowly people out there in the real world slowly buy domain names.

    We don’t have a lot of turnover and because we don’t have a lot of turnover, we have to price names at 10 to 20 to 30 times. They’re. Now, I’m talking about generic domain names here, geos keywords and things like that. If you’re domaining in the wholesale market where you’re buying a geo service names for what they can be, you know, purchase for, and then outbound in.

    If you’re buying four letter names, you’re really focused on the Hey, every four letters, we’re at 160 bucks. I got this one for 95. I think I can get to 10. You know, that’s more, you’re just playing on the wholesale side. Um, so that’s different. And if you’re brokering, you don’t have to hold a lot of names.

    You can represent other people’s names. You can just make a percentage of the big sales. So you’re not taking the risk of owning them, but I’m talking to true pure domainers where you’re owning domains. Now this was the way the market’s always been. We have. Liquidation value and we have a retail value and there’s a huge disparity in those.

    I would like to see domains get more popular, but that’s going to mean that one of those things has to change. Either more people are going to want to buy domain names, which may or may not raise prices. It may have more people buying domain names, and we may get a lot of entrance into our business that are willing to buy domain names for higher than we want to pay and sell them for lower than we want to normally sell them for, because they can do turnover.

    And they can do a lot better than any other business. And this is how I got into domaining. When I first got into domain name, investing Mike man, um, and buy domains. And after Nick or not, I’m sorry by domains were kind of the two big companies and they were selling domains for four to $8,000 that they were buying for reds fee.

    So I thought I could pay reg fee or a little bit above and sell mine for two to 3000. So what I saw happen in 2021 was that the cost of acquiring domain names doubled or tripled, the cost of buying a hundred dollars. Name is now 300. The cost of buying a $400 name is now 800, and I’m not sure besides the trends of Ethereum and NFT.

    And one word dot comes that the retail prices people were paying necessarily went up. But the reason I say all this is before you even start thinking about what you want to do in 2022, I really want to encourage you to go back and look at your sales for last year. Now, last year I had my best year in the last four or five years, and it was solely because of NFT and Ethereum domain names and none of what I did to make money and NFT or Ethereum domain names had to do with what my portfolio looked like at the beginning of 2021, my standard purpose names and my geos and my brand doubles and all that stuff really just kind of had an average year.

    So what I’ve done is I’ve taken all my domain names and I’ve segmented out all my NFT, Ethereum metaverse names, and I’ve put them separately so I can truly assess. Whether I should keep renewing a lot of my standard domain names, because what I don’t want to do is make a bunch of money on the current trend that is working and simply reinvest that money in a trend that doesn’t deserve it.

    And this is what most domainers do. And me included. The only reason I’m telling you this is because I’ve learned this, I have probably made more money in domaining and the last 20 years than I realized, but I have given that money back, paying for names and please hop up on stage and tell me if this is familiar or back channel me paying for names that I’m personally attached to that I think we’re going to work when other people didn’t trends that I could get a lot of names in thinking that they were going to be great, but they really weren’t.

    Um, some new TLDs that had high renewal fees. Names that I always said I was going to develop and develop and bulk, those have all been losers and I’ve actually probably been a better domainer than I thought on names that I just bought for resale. So that’s why I’ve looked at my names and my numbers and going into 2022, I’m segmenting out everything I bought last year for NFT and a Sirium just so it doesn’t skew the results I have this year.

    So this year, when I look at my month, each month, I’m going to say how many NFT and metaverse names did I sell? And then I’m going to say, how many names did I sell in my regular portrait? ’cause back to Mike’s question about, as a better to have a lot of names or a few high-quality names. I may find that I may want to keep buying a lot of names in the most trendy, fast moving categories.

    And I want to reduce the number of names I own in the longterm names that I’ve owned for years, names that used to have highest about values, names that, uh, you know, brandable, you know, I think brandable is, have probably suffered the most, in my opinion, from the energy that was taken by the NFT and the theories and metaverse domain spaces.

    I think that. If you’re in brand doubles and you’re on squad, help, you’re on brand bucket, you know, you know how to bind, you’ve got a big portfolio, you know, that’s probably still working for you, but just the idea of going out there and buying six letter brandable bulls, or seven letter brand doubles.

    That’s probably not the, the, you know, the best thing that the public wants to buy right now, because it’s been usurped, I think by NFTs and other digital assets, but anyway, back to it. So I think I’m going to own, I’m going to now the problem becomes, how do you get out of names? How do you buy names? I don’t want to sell them because to sell them means that I’m the winner and someone else’s dilute her.

    We used to have a great way to sell domains on club. We had various auctions where you could exchange names among wholesale buyers at a wholesale price. And other people could say, you know what, I’m going to put some energy into that name. I liked it. I’m going to give it a try, but we’ve kind of lost that and we’ve lost any other way to sell it wholesale.

    So you really, the only way to get out of a name in my opinion right now is just to drop it. If you say, well, I’d be willing to sell it for 300. Somebody will say, I’ll give you two. If you say, you know what, I hate to sell this name, but I can sell it for one 50. Someone will give you a hundred. Um, you know, we sell a lot of names on domain and outlet every year.

    But the times when I sell the most names are when, instead of being at two to 300, I price every. And what I’m really saying is even if you’re wondering on domain outlet, man of page is selling this name. Why should I do. You know, I’m going to price it so low that you can’t help buying it. Cause all I’m really doing is I’m selling it for maybe twice.

    What I paid for it at a wholesale price, just to get the money back, to pay for my lifestyle, to pay for my living expenses. Cause I do domaining as a full-time job. So anyway, I look at 2022. I love domaining still in 2022. If you’re cutting out a 32nd clip to share about this talk today, I am still a huge Homer for domaining and domain name assets in 2022.

    I think domain names are unlike any asset in the world. I think domain names have the power to make money and to create wealth. And what I mean by that is I think in a good domain name, investment and the place where domains have the biggest power in. Is to take what you would normally spend buying lunch for $10 and potentially create 500 to a thousand to 2000 to $3,000 of value based upon predicting what might be desirable in the future.

    And I don’t know if there’s another way to do that. The other ways you might have to do might be operating a business, patenting, something, trademarking, something betting on a stock. But I love the fact that you can take almost no money. When you your mind. It was an expense eating, just like buying something from the store, just like going out to dinner, you spent that money.

    And in my opinion, just the fact that it might sell in the next year is worth the money you paid for. It. That’s a fair. You know, you ask yourself, why did I buy that piece of clothing? Why did I buy this antique? Why did I buy this NFT? It was fun to buy. And I think in domain names, you spend money and you get a fair return on your money.

    If you’re spending less than 50 or a hundred bucks, just because you bought the chance that something could be valuable in the future. You’ve given yourself the chance to enter a business based upon that domain name. So in that way, I love domain. Now domaining gets a little tougher when you’re trying to come in with money and either preserve your wealth or take 10,000 or 20,000 or $30,000 and invest it and grow it.

    Because I think most of the time, if you invest 10 to 30 to $50,000, You have to take a step back before you go forward, you have to outbid other people to buy domain names. And really once you buy them, you probably would have to take a loss to get out of them. So it’s not going to be like a stock or an NFT where you’re like, well, I bought it at the floor.

    If I need to sell, I probably won’t lose more than 20 or 30% or 10% or 5% on a crypto or something like that. It might be more than that. And even worse, you might not be able to liquidate if you came into domaining with $30,000 this month, and you bought like 10 names at names at 600, and you bought a 300 hand ridges at eight bucks.

    And then on January 25th, you said, you know what? I don’t want to do that. I want to get out. You probably couldn’t get out for a third of what you put into those things. And that’s why domaining is different than almost than a lot of other asset classes like crypto, like NFTs, where you could immediately look and see what you can get out of your asset on any given day, because there’s liquidity.

    So you’re saying page, where are you going with all this? I wanted to spend some time going into 20, 22 with the reasons I love domain name investing one, because I think it has the possibility to create wealth and to take advantage of the future in ways that not too many other assets have. And the three big things I want to talk about are one domaining is an online business that you can do.

    No matter the weather, no matter the COVID no matter the pilots, no matter the airplane travel, no matter whether you can drive to work, no matter you have an office it’s a virtual business. And one of the first that you could operate completely virtually out of a coffee shop out of your house, out of a laptop and increasingly for new domain investors on their smartphone, where they may only know domain investing on their smartphone.

    So the first thing I like about domain investing is it’s a virtual business. I don’t have to have a storage unit like I do in sports collectibles to store everything I want to buy. And when I sell it on eBay or Beckett, I have to go to the post office and I have to ship that off. And I have to hope that the buyer, uh, you know, pays it and receives it and it doesn’t get damaged and it gets delivered.

    I don’t have to pay for storage. I don’t have to pay, uh, as of yet. And I think this is something that might change. I don’t have to pay business taxes on the value of my inventory. Um, you know, there’s a lot of things in a physical business insurance that you have to pay that you don’t. So I love that domaining is a virtual business.

    Second great thing about domain investing or the returns you can get based upon the perceived value at wholesale versus the value you can get at retail. And I’ll say it again. Hopefully someone will flip it. The essence of domaining to me is that a domain investor buys a domain name at the time it’s available for sale and weights based upon time.

    Or events to sell it at the time that somebody wants to buy the domain name for the market price, you buy it competing with other domain investors that are looking across the whole universe of domain names. Every domain name possibility that exists today is competing for our dollars. And we’re only going to pay where we see the best opportunity.

    And what that means is we’re less likely to get carried away in one group and one auction site in one place because there’s other places to spend our money. And so we’re going to only pay a little bit more than another person paid, and that person is looking at all the domain names they could possibly invest in.

    So I think we get to buy it for a wholesale price and then we have to hold. Now you don’t have to hold all domains, but most cases you have to hold it to get the best price. And then you wait until someone wants to buy it in a fair transaction where they want to pay the market price and we get paid the difference.

    And the difference is usually based upon the quiddity. Now the difference in price between wholesale and retail in a stock is infant Tessa really small. These days it’s like 0.03. If I want to buy apple today at $300 a share, I can sell it a minute later at $299 and 87 cents. So the difference between wholesale and retail in a stock is very small in real estate.

    If I can, you know, find a way to buy a house in my market area for $300,000, most likely if I needed to turn around and sell it, not including realtor commissions, I could probably get two. So there’s liquidity there because there’s a lot of demand, but with the liquidity comes a very small spread and because money has an essence been free for all kinds of investors around the world.

    Those spreads on various assets have become very, very small in domain names. We used Red’s and low price names. One to 200 times on one word dot comes, maybe you’re buying your name for a hundred thousand. You’re hoping to sell it for a million on super premium.com. So you could buy a name for 500,000 and potentially be able to launch a company for 10 million.

    We still have based upon the illiquidity, these huge spreads and the in a world where it’s hard to go, you know, make money based upon the spread. I think that’s unique. Last thing I’d like about domain names and this is more important in the next 10 years. And maybe it’s been the last 10 years. Cause I think domain names are part of a group of assets to have the opportunity to do well in an inflationary environment.

    Now this isn’t going to apply to all domain names. If we have a lot of inflation and the purchasing power of our money is reduced and that leads to a recessionary times that leads to less and less jobs, less and less economic activity, that’s going to be bad for low price domain things. You’re going to be more worried about keeping a hundred or 500 or a thousand domain names.

    So we’re not inflation proof. We’re not recession proof. But here’s where, what is exciting about our domain name, the most successful investor in the last 30 years, Warren buffet, there’s a book written about his style. How did he make it through the seventies and the eighties? This time of tremendous inflation inflation.

    So high that banks were paying you 18% for a one-year CD. So you had to be your dollars that you gave a bank $10,000. You needed to get back $1,800 in one year, because that was to compensate you for the fact that inflation was going to suck up the value of that $10,000. And you needed $12,000 after one year.

    In most cases, if you have stocks declined during that period, Because if they weren’t growing their, their earnings, at least as fast as inflation, they would lose money. So how did Warren buffet make so much money? And the analysis that was done on what he had done was that he invested in brand names where the brand name of a company like Coca-Cola or the brand name of a company like see’s candies or the brand name of a company like the Washington post that even though it wasn’t a piece of hard asset, like gold or like real estate, or like a bond or a guaranteed payment from the government, it was a soft asset.

    It was an intellectual asset. It was a, it was a, um, an amortizable asset of intangible property. But what they discovered was if the Washington post brand name had valid. That they could get back to the days of newspapers, people that continually advertise in their paper because of their brand name and of Coca Cola to continue to sell their syrup to bottlers nationwide.

    And if see’s candy could still have you go into their stores and buy at Christmas time, their candy, that if prices went up, here’s the important factor. If prices went up, the differential that those companies got from their brand name also kept going up. And what I think that means in domain names when it comes to inflation is that I think domain names give benefits to their.

    If you’re a small business, your brand name is going to, you’re going to be more recognizable. You’re going to get more customers. You might have your website convert better. If you’re a large company, it might be easier for you to raise money or develop joint venture partnerships. If you’re a company spending a lot on e-commerce marketing and advertising, I think your advertising spend is going to be incrementally better with a good domain name and all those things.

    All the value that goes to your domain name is going to continue to be valuable, whether the cost of the advertising you’re buying or the cost of your goods and services. Go up because you’re going to be making more money from selling those services. And again, your domain name is going to be giving you a benefit.

    That’s going to translate into you making more and more money as your price is going up. So I think the intrinsic value of an intangible asset, like a domain name is a good investment to potentially own and an inflationary situation for the next five or 10 years. Now, again, I don’t think we’re going to not be effected by recessions and by stagflation, you know, where you have inflation going up and the economy is not growing.

    I think that will shrink what people want to spend on a discretionary purchase. But I think the core value of what a domain name is can do well in an inflationary economy. So for all those reasons, I enter 20, 22 positive on domain names for what domain names are. So then what’s the negative. The biggest negative I see in domain names continues to be that we allow the companies in our space to dictate the education that’s given out to the marketplace.

    And because of I can embarrass signs, lack of any clue as to what they can be doing to grow the value of dot-coms. There is no one advocating and advertising and promoting, owning domain names. And if you think about it in a world where every other thing that we can spend our money on is being advertised is being promoted, is being hired.

    Is being, um, blockchain is being talked about as, as an asset with an unquantifiable value in the future. The fact that domains aren’t really means that we’re losing value compared to other ways of investing when it comes to us getting higher retail prices, because there’s no one out there advocating for domain names and every other asset is being advocated for, I think we’re losing ground.

    And I think it’s been one of the reasons that domain names are only worth one to 5% of what I thought they’d be 20 years ago. So those are my three big benefits. You can do domain investing as a virtual business from anywhere. There’s high profit opportunity for your successes, which we use in this space to pay for a lot of mistakes and a lot of shrinkage and a lot of spoilage.

    And I think it’s a, it’s an, it’s an asset that can work well in an inflationary environment offset by the fact that we don’t have anybody promoting domain names in general. And that’s why I’m so excited to do it on domain club. And we plan to grow our footprint this year, where hopefully more and more people will hear me talk about domain names in general, not just when I have a domain name for them to say.

    Hopefully more people will hear me talk about million dollar domain names. Not because I have a million dollar domain name that I want to sell them. And when I have a million dollar domain name I want to sell you, I will answer every question you ask only in the sense that it helps me sell you a million dollar domain name, but I have not done anything to simply increase your awareness of what the value of domain names are in general, but because we rely on GoDaddy and because we rely on hosting companies and because we rely on articles that were written 10 and 15 years ago, and frankly, we rely on the successes of other people.

    And the last 20 years to still promote these assets that we have, you know, I think that’s our biggest fallback. So that’s a lot, I know this is recorded. We’re going to go ahead and publicize these recordings more in 2022 on domain.club in a way that we can bring more people into these talks, bring more people into the space.

    But when I think about this first day of 2022, I’m still positive on domain names for the reasons I mentioned, I’m still, I still have energy to cry, to grow our space so that we all can make more money and I can make more money personally. Um, and so that’s, that’s kinda my monologue, I guess. Um, did any of that spur on any questions?

    I got a question about an NFT I’ll cover that later. I hope that when I sit down on one, one of 23, that I can say during 2022, that we did a better job of an aftermarket right now. If you had to say, how’s, that’s going to happen. I think hopefully it’s going to happen from innovation of people using the Dan API to, to do what Dan Warner from fabulous had done 12 years ago, which is create a domain distribution network where there’s a third party that sits in the middle between all domain owners and all those companies that are marketing or promoting premium domain names to the public.

    So you have a universe of companies that are good at marketing to the public. Up to now, the only people that we’ve relied on to do that have been registrars for us to sell our domain names. Especially if they’re listed on afternoons, we need someone to go to a registrar, which we assume everyone does, but they really don’t type in our name.

    Then they’ll see it through the afternoon system and we’ll sell it. Other than that, maybe they’ll go to domain tools or another who is site and they’ll type in to get who is information. And if that site has a relationship with say to her after Nick, they’ll be able to promote that lead and say, this name’s available for sale.

    Most people will say they want a domain name. We think that those simply type it in the browser bar. It’s not easy to type anything in the browser Varonis. Google and Android Napal, they’ve taken that over. They want you to use apps. They don’t want you to use the browser bar and Google many times you can type in the exact name of a domain name and it won’t give you any search result of that domain name.

    I think that’s where Dan and squad help. And I think even the FD Landers have done a good job where at least your name will come up. But I hope when we start 2023, that I can say that through the Dan distribution network or some other third party that aggregated all the domain listings out there with companies that are good at marketing to customers, all kinds of products that we now have more exposure for our assets.

    And what I can tell you as a domain name investor is to prepare for that time. It’s going to be more and more and more important in my opinion, that you have your own database, you have your own data, you have your own hooks and tags and categories for your domain names. So you’ll be ready to do e-commerce marketing with people that want to take domain names and categorize them, and they want to rank them and they want to provide stats or information or related keywords or meta-tags for those names that if we can grow the amount of places we sell domain names, we need to be ready to provide that information to those platforms so they can use their artificial intelligence and things like that to better sell our domain.

    Yeah. It would be great if we could just sit back like in the parking days and upload a list of names to a company and they would take care of everything for us. But I think for most of us, we’ve seen a hint of this. Yes. Squad help once to do things, to help market our domain names. But most of the time they’re simply providing a platform that we have to actively manage.

    We can pay someone, a dollar to categorize our name or $2 to create a logo. But whether it’s keeping up to date with our pricing, selecting, whether we want payments making auto images and auto descriptions, there’s still going to be effort there. And I think we should all plan on investing more effort and investing more money in the selling of our domain names.

    So as I look at 2022, I have to be ready for. No longer can I maybe spend 95% of my time doing the fun part, searching the buy domain names, searching for the next great thing. Looking on forums and threads and social media groups and discord groups to see what’s going on. What should I be doing? What should I be doing?

    What should I be doing? I’m going to have to say no. There’s going to be a fixed amount of time each day that I need to spend merchandising my portfolio, structuring it for sale. Like this shop owner would, when you’re walking around your store, you’re straightening your product on the shelves. You’re making sure your price tags look good.

    You’re putting different pieces of merchandise on special. You’re taking inventory to see what you have, you’re recording and the domain space. When you sell something, did you take it off everywhere? I think we should plan on spending more time. Merchandising and selling our domain names than we have today.

    So anyway, that was my take on 2022. Can you believe all that came from just thinking about domain names? We’ve got a great group here. Um, for the recording that I put on domain club, I’ll be ending the recording now for the people that get replaced, they’ll still be able to hear this after chat that we’re going to do right now, but in terms of what we do on domain club, where we put links to our shows like we do on start up club that’ll end right now.

    But if anyone goes on clubhouse, they could have been in the room. They just didn’t happen to be here. And they want to listen to what we talked about then that part of the recording will still be up as a clubhouse replay. All right. Let’s see if we got any questions or comments on 20, 22, what to do now, either anything I said or anything you’re thinking about, or you’re wondering about the year, the big takeaway I want you to get is you get to depo.

    Yeah. And if you won your domain names, that means you need to take what you sold last year, um, and ask yourself, was it 1%? And if it was 1%, but they were mostly wholesale sale and you probably didn’t do it like you need to do. I believe most of us what I try to do, I try to sell 10% of the trendy names that I buy.

    So if I’m buying NFTE now, I’m trying maybe half at wholesale and half at retail. Um, and at the same point, some trends I’m going to sell 0% and I’m going to get rid of them. And a lot of times, when you look at your sales for last year, you’re going to see a wide variety of miscellaneous names bought for miscellaneous reasons.

    And when you’re buying names, you think, oh, this is great for every a hundred names I buy, I’m going to sell one to somebody. But when you look back on it, I’m not sure distribution those really in that opportunity anymore. Um, and I’m not sure what to do about it, but anyway, those are my thoughts for 2022.

    Let’s see who’s down below. I’m pretty old, wants to publicize anything they’re doing new for 2020 to any new businesses, any innovation they’re doing. Um, any new companies they’re starting a more, if you want to talk about a clubhouse for whom you’re doing this week, this will be a great time to do it.

    Or if you just want to say hi and wished me a happy new year, go ahead and raise your hand to be a speaker. Or ask me a question on the back channel.

    Yeah, your pitch. How you doing? Good. How are you? Certainly have enjoyed participating in these rooms and chats with you starting all the way back to the domain, social and, uh, hope you had a good last year and happy new year. I saw we’re continuing on with these Tuesday nights, uh, talks at 6:00 PM, Eastern three, o’clock Pacific about EDRP cases.

    There’s a lot of them, a lot of recent decisions that came out and, uh, Todd, Ryan and Jeff Newman and myself are hosting. These shows every Tuesday evening. And, uh, we’re talking about the latest cases and the ins and outs of winning these cases and making sure that you don’t get a case filed against you.

    David, that’s a great topic. And I would say one of the biggest topics that you’ve probably dealt with all year and I’ll cross it over with, with Monday domains here is what do you think the current thinking is on? I’ve got a one word generic, like say American and I own american.net. And I’m worried that someone’s going to buy american.coach and say that they’re the American coach.

    And they’re going to try to get my american.net, um, by saying, well, you know what? Let’s not do American cause that maybe is not trademark. We’ll say it’s a word like, uh, like, uh, Joe domains, someone goes and buys Joe domains.coach. They start a business called Joe domains. I bought Joe domains.com. I never trademarked it.

    I bought it a long time ago. What is the kind of the current thinking on someone using an alternate TLD to try to get your dog. So as generally considered RD and H uh, because you did not register your name in bad faith, you registered it way before they existed, or before they started doing business under that name, although the lines are getting blurred sometimes when it’s a close call and the dates are very close.

    So, um, yeah, you have to careful there, there was a big, uh, lawsuit involving, uh, Prudential assurance that one cylinder appeal in the Eastern district of Virginia. And then there is another case that was settled recently in, um, Chicago. What was it called? It was, um, another insurance empowered. Yeah. Some power.

    So they settled that case. We don’t know what the terms are. Um, but you know, all of these lawsuits are filed generally to weaken the owner of the domain name and put ’em under the gun to sell. Unless you have a diamond hands and a huge bank account, sometimes you give up. Um, I know that, um, in the scratch.org case, um, a domain investor who bought that domain in 1998 was sued by the MIT lab that was funded by Jeffrey Epstein and they stole his domain name by following it in Ram action in Virginia, even though he lived in California and they knew his name.

    Wow. It is a murky world. Well, I’m great to hear that the idea that the debt, that the YPO is still concentrating on this word, wasn’t a bad thing. Registration. And I think that’s a big part of what you talked about in terms of just because the world didn’t work out the way a litigant or a plaintiff once or two doesn’t mean I made a bad faith registration, uh, you know, going back in time, but, uh, really thank you for all the work you’re doing.

    All right. Hey mark. How are you? Happy new year. I’ve been doing this year on clubhouse. Yeah, it has been, it’s been a year and I have to say thank you so much for all of your Monday domaining rooms. Cause it’s like, that’s where I’ve learned a lot. I mean, I really love listening to you. It has a great perspective.

    You’ve been doing this well, I’ve been doing it a long time. I just haven’t been doing it aggressively. And uh, you know, COVID kind of shut things down and allowed me more time to spend on clubhouse allowed me more time to really kind of focus on domain. Because my primary business is kind of like stellar stalled a little bit, just because of, you know, COVID but, uh, yeah, we’re all coming up on.

    Our, most of us are coming up on our year anniversary. I started at the end of January on clubhouse and that’s when I really started thinking about domains more. Whereas in the past, I mean, I bought my first domain in 1998 and I just bought them if I wanted to do something with it, like for my business and stuff, I wasn’t looking at the business until I sold a couple of domain names.

    Actually, I was just looking the other day, I sold sweet green to the guys that did the salad place and they just went public the other day. So I sold them a domain name for $5,000 in 2006, I think it was. And, uh, they, they went public the first day at $5.5 billion. So that was kind of a, that was just a nice little marker just to kind of see what the power of a domain name could at least be part of.

    And then, but listening to you, I’m always trying to figure out how to accelerate it. And you know, one thing that you said a few minutes ago, which was, you know, we, we buy these domain names, you know, we’re, I, I like buying domain names that I know I can give you either. I think, I think it was yours users dropping out a little bit.

    Can everybody hear me? Okay, David, can you hear me? Oh yeah, we can. Yeah. Okay. So, um, the, uh, what you were saying earlier is that we, you know, we buy these domain names and then we have to sit on them. And what I want to do is I want to kind of shift that thought because that’s all I’d ever done is I just bought a domain name.

    I didn’t even throw up. They would have to find me through who is, or some other way to try and figure out. I, I used to list on after Nick once in awhile and that’s how I would eventually sell a domain name, but I wasn’t really interested in selling domain names, but since COVID, I’ve really kind of, you know, doubled down and, you know, I’ve spent good six figures this year on domain names, just to kind of see how big a portfolio I can build up and where it might go.

    But now, now comes the, the, the, the job I look at as not sitting back and waiting for. But going out and finding the right buyers for them. Um, and, and that’s what I’m kind of looking forward to is putting together a team that does nothing but outbound. You know, when we buy a domain name, let’s say we buy it for $100.

    We’d like to sell it for a thousand dollars. You know, at least a 10 X, that would be nice. Put together a team. You pay a 20% commission on everything that’s sold and you put together a team that you kind of, you know, get behind and start directing. So that instead of waiting two to three years, maybe on a good domain name and just waiting for the right person to come to you, you go out and find the companies and tell them why they need this domain name.

    And to me, all that comes down to is do you have enough people? You know, if your portfolio is a hundred domains or a thousand domains or 10,000 domains is just how many people can you put on the pro on the, on the portfolio to get the information out to the. Potential buyers, because I think when I, when I buy a domain name, I want to at least know that I’ve got at least four or five people or at least industries almost that could use the domain.

    And that way I know that, okay, it’s worth spending a thousand dollars on it. Cause I know it’s worth at least 10,000 and now I just have to put together the team to go out and find those those brands and tell them why they need a better domain name than maybe what they’re using now. So, um, that’s kinda my thought and that’s eventually what I wanted to talk to you more about too.

    So, uh, I look forward to, uh, you know, our conversation in the future here. Well, super, um, we had a good year with our Tuesday show outbounding club, which took a hiatus in December, but really the impetus behind that show was exactly what you shared, which is what, if you could change the equation of the illiquidity.

    If you’re a domain names to bring forward a sale, And then that’s normally meant discounting the price. But what if you said with between energy and creativity and tactics, I’m going to do outbound and I’m going to use it to create the same type of leverage that I would gain. If the person woke up in the morning and said they wanted to buy the name and I was in a position of strength, quoting them the price.

    So down deep, that’s been the goal of outbounding all year was how to flip the script on traditional outbounding from, you know, I’m chasing you down on the street to say, Hey, you want to buy this gold watch for 50 bucks to, Hey, how are you? Are you looking for a gold watch? I seem to think you are either because you’re standing in front of a jewelry store or you posted online that you wanted to buy a gold watch or your company is called gold watches.org, you know, but then you can still create some pricing leverage.

    And what I’ve said to everybody on outbounding club is I just don’t like doing it, but if I could find people that want to do it, I think I can help equip them with everything that I’ve learned over 20 years on how to do it better. And then the last thing we learned, and I think Mike Gilman has been the best one for that this past week is it may not be about tactics and it may not be about strategy, although there’s great strategies.

    I think it’s just about the doing of the thing, the sitting down, and I know Andy did this in the past week too, and said, I’m going to try to sell a domain name and we’re not promised that we’re going to get a sale. If we put the. But I don’t think there’s any way for a sale to happen without putting the effort in.

    And there seems to be something about when you pick a name and your portfolio and you turn your attention toward it. I think that all the movies of the Lord of the rings and there’s this star on character who has this all seeing eye that goes around the world. And when you stop and focus on one of your names and you focus on reading about the industry and you focus on seeing who else has names in the industry, and you focus on Facebook groups or LinkedIn groups or LinkedIn articles, and you look at them and it leads you to another one and it leads you to another article and it leads you to something else.

    I think that in the same way, that looking on expired domain names for more domains to buy. The digging down into your name that you already own to explore why yours could be uniquely valuable, can also pay off for you. And then you start listing it and you really focus on where you’re listing it and for what price and whether it’s make the offer a buy it now, and whether you’re advertising your listing and whether you’re retargeting your listing and whether you’re buying sort of sponsored ads for it.

    And whether you’re paying to feature it and go daddy and say to whether you’re buying an ad on named bio, you just start giving a name energy, and we’re not promised that that’s going to lead to a sale, but I just think that that type of focus, and maybe back to Mike Wing’s question about, is it better to own a few names of high quality or lots of names, this strategy then when you do go look to sell, um, with higher value names, You’re probably gonna hopefully be asking yourself how much money should I ask now I’ll get to real life.

    One of the fears I think people have for outbounding. You tell me if you think this was true, mark, is that if I don’t outbound, I can still tell myself there’s a buyer out there for my name. But one of the things that can happen when you outbound is you could contact 31 likely buyers and they could all say they don’t want to buy your name, or they only want to pay 50 bucks.

    And now it’s a lot harder to tell yourself, oh, this name is going to be valuable someday. So I wonder if some of the hesitancy we have the outbound is we don’t want to maybe have the name go up on the auction block and have nobody bid or, or, or contact a likely buyer and have them say, no, I really don’t have any interest in mind that, whereas we’d rather just think to ourselves.

    They want to buy it. They just don’t know. How, what do you think about that, mark? Well, you know, I think we all buy domain names that we think are good, but I think if you get feedback from, let’s say, you know, I’d even say, you know, five or six people, companies that aren’t really interested in it, they don’t see the potential that maybe you have, over-exaggerated it in your head that it’s valuable.

    Um, you know, we all need to put the margarita is down when we’re buying domain names. Um, so that we’re thinking clearly, um, I, I think that if I got five or six people that just said, no, I’m not interested or you’re crazy. Um, I have to sit down with my team and say, okay, did we miss the point here? Or are we going the wrong direction?

    And if it’s not selling, then, then just dump it, get rid of it. Just like you said, there’s no reason to hold it in the portfolio, especially if it’s a.io or something like that. So I would just, I just get rid of it. I want to, I want to try and buy the best ones that I can if I don’t get any good movement on it, move on to the next one.

    Cause I’ve got enough in the portfolio that we just want to keep the, keep the flow going so that I can keep a, I can keep it a team of outbound people really aggressively hungry. If they’re constantly getting a 20% commission week over week over week on really premium domain names, they’re going to be incentivized to find buyers.

    And if we got a flee, get rid of it, go to the next one. Interesting. I think it also opens up a chance to ask your customers. It seems like this would be great for you. Um, Can I send you a Ruby Tuesday gift card. And could you tell me why it’s not, you know what I mean? Or at least learn from it, or as you say, just know that it’s not and Hey, I don’t need to be buying in that area anymore.

    I think it’s okay. That even opened up some relationship, building questions with customers about it. I agree with that. That’s great. Yeah. If you don’t, if you just get to know and they just dismiss it out of hand, I think that you might be missing out on something. I think the patient might be on to something there because some people use that as a negotiating tactic.

    No, I don’t need it, but then they they’re going to want it in a month or maybe they see, gee, it looks like it’s going to expire in a month. I’ll just pick it up when it deletes possibly. And I know that might be an outlier, but if you really don’t know, I think they’re getting five rejections just because you thought those were the five only prospects.

    You kind of want to be sure about that. Cause if you bought that name with a reason in the first place, there’s probably still a reason out there and yes, you may not sell it for awhile, but I’m one to always be a little bit reluctant to just say, ah, I guess I was wrong. Cause five people said I was wrong.

    I think you really need to maybe dig a little bit and, and, and, or if you’re, if you’re familiar with that particular market, um, you know, maybe it’s going to mean more if you’re not familiar with it, then maybe yeah, let it go. But I I’m reluctant to, to, uh, let five feet, you know, and I understand what you’re saying, mark, but I’d be a little bit reluctant to just say, well, that’s automatically a loser.

    Well, Mike, thanks for sharing. I’ve enjoyed working with you this year on the 24 7 show and, and all these shows and happy new year. Um, as you sit here on the first day, you taking it, easy working, trying to think about the whole year or just this.

    Uh, you know, I’m not one to typically make new year’s resolutions, but you know, you know, uh, at the new year. And, uh, he definitely outbounding a little bit more this year because my other business is sort of on the rocks. So we’ll, uh, we’ll definitely be putting effort into a domain name. Fantastic AAJ happy new year.

    We got a little snow here north of you in Tennessee. Did the snow get down to Georgia? No. Um, heavy high winds overnight. Um, but, uh, didn’t see any snow, but uh, yeah, happy new year. How’s it going? You have something to share with us or anything about what I said or 2022? Well, if, if mark is able to build the team, as he described, I would love to know, um, how he did it.

    And I think he could sell that information. So I’d be willing to pay for Holly. He built a team of people that would, you know, sit there and outbound all day for 20%. Um, cause I’m in. Um, great, well mark, if you’re free and you can join tomorrow, I know you might want to do it. And if you’re free tomorrow at five Eastern for outbounding club, we’d love to talk about that specifically and maybe just share with you those of us that have tried to build.

    When I say build a team, I haven’t been able to get beyond one or two, so maybe we can give you some insights into those of us that have tried what we’ve learned. I love that I would love that. It seems, it seems simple in my mind, but it’s obviously different on, you know, when you go out and execute it.

    So yeah. That’s why I’m looking forward to chatting with you. So beyond. That’s an idea, mark, to have a team because some people are good at pulling information together. I can find information, but then I get it in a pile and I, I can make some phone calls, but sometimes I’m not so good at, you know, going down and checking, checking off.

    Did I email, did I, you know, I might make some yellow notepads. Yeah. Getting a good CRM and getting, um, you know, just a good organization because I, what I love about sitting down with a team is you just start spitballing on where we can go with it. It’s funny. I had a, there’s a, a woman that I know she’s really, she’s very, she’s very motivated.

    She’s really sharp. She’s never even thought about domain names before. And so I started pitching on this idea. I said, look, you know, maybe you might want to come and work with me and we’ll, we’ll, I’ll teach you how to sell domain names. And so I sent her some domains or I just started talking about it and she picked domains.

    That to me were like the biggest fleas on the. And she said, oh no, this is going to be perfect for my friend. She does this. She wants to build a website. I was like, wow. Okay. That’s fantastic. So everybody has a different perspective. And just because you think this is what it should be used for someone else is going to have a different perspective.

    And that’s what I love about a team because you know, what kind of spit ball and throw it around and, you know, figure out a way to essentially get rid of it. And we’re we’re we want to buy these. We want to get rid of them as fast as we can. We don’t want to hold them for two to three years. Why can’t if you, if you just let and wait for people to come to you.

    Yes. It could take two to three years or maybe never, but if you really push on it, you could sell it in a month if you found the right company. So it’s different ways to look at that. Well, what I would hope to mark is, is I think that the reason I always thought I wanted to do this, and I thought I was going to do with Jason Eisler, but we didn’t was that the companies that are doing this as a business and I’ve talked to four or five of them, they want to be the intermediate.

    And they want to make money as the intermediate charging the domain owner 20% pay

    RM, and they want to ascribe all the value to them as the intermediary. And, but it’s really off putting to me as the client to have before they’ve even showed me who they’re going to hire for me before they’ve even started marketing. One of my names they’re already going into, do you want to buy the annual plan?

    Do you want to buy the monthly plan? Now it’s a six month lock in, you know, and, and it’s almost like the intermediary has gotten in the way of the essence of it, which is connecting the client who has the asset and the people that are going to sell it. So that’s the first thing. I think that as a domainer group, we can.

    Not have to please a venture capital company by having the intermediary make so much money. You know what I mean? It just needs to make sure it’s funded. So, yeah. And then the second thing is I always thought that if we built this in the good time, That it would be there when times aren’t so good. And what I mean by that is there’s a movie about poker called rounders if anyone’s ever seen it.

    And it was about these poker players, you know what I mean? And you could be on an upswing or a downswing, and it’s like, if you ever just got blown out of all your money, all your stats, you did, what’s called the route. And what the route was, was you had to deliver whether it’s chips or candy bars or something, you had to do a real job.

    You know what I mean? You had to do the route, but at least that paid your bills, paid your rent, you know, when you had lost everything playing poker and what I, the reason I say that is I always wanted to have something for the, for the person who might want a broker to say, you know what I wonder. Domain owners are putting up that they would like to have brokered forum.

    Maybe I don’t want to have to go out there and spend all my capital this week. Maybe I keep getting out bid everywhere. Someone could say, I could make a thousand dollars or I can make $1,500 in domaining this week by selling other people’s names. And that, that, that may not be something a lot of people feel now when the good times, but that if we built it, we would be ready for when a lot of people said, yeah, I’ll do that.

    You know what I mean? I’d like to make a thousand a week

    anyway, Dave, David, my friend, happy new year or AIG wanna say something? No, I was going to say, I just had ever seen that movie and I just watched it like literally like two weeks ago and I’m kind of far-fetched but it’s, it’s a good movie, but, um, I think too, I mean, it’s so funny. Like, um, w when I was listening to mark is just, it’s just, I don’t know, dude, it’s it just reminds me of all the conversations that people have.

    Like, I’ve a very, very close friend, Les, and last night he texted me and said, what is digital real estate? And how do I get in involved? And I was like, well, do you mean the metaverse? Do you mean domains? Do you mean decentral land? I mean, what are you talking about? Did you know, first of all, what, what are you talking about?

    And they did, he said, what the fuck is metaverse? So I was like, okay, it’s not metaverse. Um, so, and I said, did you read something? And he said, yeah. So I’m hoping he’ll send me whatever he read. Um, So to me, this is, you know, uh, this is where the, when the cab driver is telling you that they want to get involved in it domains.

    So I don’t know if that means if that’s a good thing or bad, honestly, but, but as mark was describing his team, I thought, oh wow. You know what I would ask, or what I would recommend is that, you know, if you’re outbounding domains, um, yeah, if you only have a hundred, it’s a hell of a lot easier quite honestly, because what happens is sometimes, you know, you get to a level where you’ve got so many, you just don’t even know where to start.

    And then you ended up just kind of grabbing one honestly, and go, okay, let’s try this one. And it’s like pulling up, you know, ping pong ball out of the, you know, the lotto spin and seeing what happens. And maybe it’s not the best way to do it, but, uh, But I would encourage you before you hire anybody to do it, or try to tell anybody to do it, do it yourself for two weeks.

    Um, you’ll get called, you know, some of the worst names you’ve ever been called. Um, you’ll get it, you know, even if you get a chance to get anything out, um, you’ll be told that their name, you know, uh, uncle Pete’s plumbing.biz is the best freaking domain name on the planet. And you don’t know what you’re talking about.

    You have no, you know, you’re not, uh, not in their business. So why are you trying to advise them on what they should be doing? Um, people defend their decisions good or bad, right? So a lot of times in domains, I feel like, um, you know, we’ve, we buy a domain and then we defend buying it for a long time. And then the is coming and you’re like, dang it.

    You know, I, that was not a mistake. I’m going to renew it again for another year. And then another year comes by. I know it wasn’t a mistake. I should, you know, I knew that was a good name. And you kind of get into this situation where you’re always defending. And then I think to page’s point, when you call somebody up and they tell you that your baby’s ugly, you know, um, just some people’s personality for whatever reason we take it personal.

    And some people don’t people that don’t take any of this stuff personal. I can tell a cell all day long, and if you didn’t buy the name and register it and re and renew it for five years, you’re not nearly as emotionally invested in it and you don’t take it, you know, you don’t get maybe angry or as frustrated.

    So, um, if you do build a team, I think it would be interesting because they’re not going to be necessarily emotionally invested in whatever the name is. Um, and then you really have to bifurcate the names as to like brandable or non brandable names. You know, selling brandable names to me would be incredibly difficult, um, because the names maybe don’t mean anything, you know?

    And, um, so, um, but if you get into a situation where people are buying. You know, uh, salt lake city, uh, real estate. Well, you know, you’ve got a diff there’s a defined group of people that might want that name. And if you go through and go from a technical standpoint and look at the way they’ve structured their domain sometimes, or their existing stuff, social media, et cetera, they’ll give you signs that they would want that name.

    Now you still have to convince them that that’s a better name than they’re on, but that’s the challenge. And, you know, I don’t want to turn this into outbound room, sorry, page. But anyway, um, I would encourage you before you go out and hire anybody or do anything, mark, just try to sell one or two domains, um, and see, you know, you know, ride the ride a little bit.

    Cause it’s not, it’s not a lot of fun. At least I, I haven’t found it to be that fun. Well, thanks a J I think that’s great stuff. And we’ll, we’ll pick that up tomorrow and outbounding club, because when I thought about the programming for domain club, I wanted to focus on innovation and bulk management. I wanted to focus on outbounding.

    I wanted to focus on multi-site development and I wanted to focus on million dollar names. I never got around to doing the multi-site development. So I hope to start that here in 2022, but outbounding, I think is one that, um, that there’s traction there. A lot of people have tried, you know, when Frank schillings started Yuna registry, it was really built on the fact that you could take your names and you could send your leads to any broker you wanted.

    And then anybody in unit registry can be a broker and anyone in utero registry to go outbound people’s names and make money. And that turned into something else. Um, named silo, couple of years ago, they were on the domain show. They started something seminar. You can sign up to be a broker. You could look at all the inventory on named silos marketplace.

    You could go sell stuff and make money. And that didn’t work. That didn’t mean. It’s dangerous to say, oh, anybody, like, if you say anybody can go sell this name, then you go poison the well on that. When, when somebody with, you know, whatever kind of practices goes to try to sell your name and then the person that should be selling it, picks it up and tries to sell it.

    And they, you know, slam the phone down on them because of what somebody earlier said. I think that that’s incredibly dangerous. Right. And that’s, and I think every one of these had flaws and that’s why they didn’t work, you know? Um, because if you would have told somebody, um, I just heard from someone selling your name to me, they said they were from name silo.

    You’d be like, okay, get all my names off name silo. So I think all these had flaws. I think Rob tried to build up at epic. He tried to build up an ecosystem where people around the world could sell other people’s names and just never, you know, never got to go in. You know what I mean? Cause it’s so easy to focus on big names.

    Um, it’s so easy for brokers to only focus on big names and, and I think that no, one’s had to focus on being a broker of smaller names because you know, my experience has been when I’ve had brokers work for me and I pay them a lot more than 20%, they sell a couple of names and then they have the money and they want to go by their own names and sell them.

    You know what I mean? So I think that’s a chat. But I’m sorry. I’m sorry. If it brings up, you, you talked about growing the domain market, everything, and I think it’s more important to grow the awareness that the retail side, because like you said before, the prices are going up in the wholesale market. And when, when that, that, that margin starts to shrink and shrink and shrink somebody like me doesn’t have that arbitrage opportunity like I had, and, and I don’t have the corporate sensibility to be able to systematize and beta set everything.

    And, and that takes somebody, at least like me, and, you know, I, I imagine others, but, um, puts us at a disadvantage. So growing the, you know, there’s, there’s plenty of domainers now. And, and, but, but the awareness on the upper end, like, you know, for mark to say, okay, you know, here, here’s an example. Somebody started a public company, the domain, they got, you know, they paid five grand.

    Yeah. They got, you know, a multi-million dollar company or whatever in the future that awareness to the retail side, I think is way more important than growing the us in this, you know, our, our domainer ecosystem. Yeah, no, no doubt. Um, and, and, and the way I’ve described that is if we had a clubhouse group called DN NFTs, and we talked about domain names overall, like it was a new NFT.

    And you started talking about a company paid $5,000. And of course they had to execute their business plan. They had to execute the strategy. They had to do a bunch of stuff, you know what I mean? But that singular thing that they paid that now allows them to be associated with that name. They paid $5,000 for, and now what is it worth to them?

    You know what I mean? Hundreds of thousands, you know what I mean? In terms of, you know, what, if they had to value it when they sold the business, what price do you want to allocate to the domain name itself would be then, then I think we have all those stories and something like what Mark’s talking about, I think allows us to, and this is what you and I are doing in the 24, 7 room a little bit too, is the ability to get those stories together so that we could have people advocating for domain names using the same six to seven stories so that when someone was in another clubhouse room or another discord group, they’d be like, Well, I’ve heard this and don’t, you know, this, and that’s one of the amazing things about clubhouse in January of this year was that people got it.

    People were like, oh my gosh, I can buy this domain name and start a business. I can buy this domain name and be in this business. I can buy a domain name and have the respect that this domain name gives me, you know? And we got advocates. So that was like a little spark that died out because it was, you know, fan by people with other intentions.

    But the idea that thousands or tens of thousands of people could be telling the story of why domain names are popular, man. I’d love to get to that. So yeah, I think that getting those stories out there to help retail is a big thing, but I wanted to say hi to David and wish you happy new year. Thank you, David so much for what you’ve contributed to these rooms this year.

    Happy new year, my friend, how you doing? I actually have been going around these morning with a cab, so I wouldn’t have to drive and taking care of things. And, uh, it has been very good. Eh, definitely. You are the one to think who are always trying to make this industry better, helping people in new commerce and old commerce.

    And, um, definitely outbound is something that, uh, has the huge potential. Now the problem we have, we have people like Mike who are very humble Friday. I was talking to Mike on the phone and then he tells me, David, you know what, I’m going to go out and make up a couple of calls and sell some domains. I say, go ahead.

    And my friend, half an hour later, he comes back and he says, I sold the name. So Mike don’t be so humble. Help us sell. And do outbound domains out here and get some domains out of our portfolios. And the other thing is that I don’t do outbound. I really have never, I probably have called on, I don’t know, under five people or companies, but I do remember one year, some, uh, four years ago I had a very good security name and actually it was a three word domain, but it was exactly the name of the business.

    And the business had a horrible domain. That was this, this was the exact match domain for their business. That’s what’s how, how they were incorporated. So the guy tell me, no, I’m fine with my domain. I don’t see the benefit. And my domain I think is better than yours and I’m not going to buy it. And I was asking $5,000.

    He’s not that I was going to sell it for 1000 or, or, or whatever. I was asking $5,000. He said, well, I have no problem with my friend. I wanted to give you the first chance to buy the domain. But I think you have a number of competitors in your business line. And if you don’t want it, I’m going to call them and offer it to them.

    They, they going to see an advantage because online people are going to look for you, but they’re going to go to them. Oh, wait a minute. Let me understand. So you can sell these domain to whoever you want. I said, yes. I decided to call you because you’re the, the, the top suitor for these names. But if you don’t want it, I can sell it to anyone who wants to buy it from me.

    How much you said you were asking for these domain? I said $5,000. I said, well, okay, I’m going to buy. And I know that doesn’t happen every day. And, uh, like a J say, that’s not what usually happens when you’re outbounding domains, but the guy trusted me. He sent the money actually to a PayPal and, uh, within 15 minutes he had his name in his account.

    So, you know, sometimes we get lucky also. So Paige and everybody here, I wish you all a great year. We should see sales, like nonstop inquiries nonstop. And I really still think that domain is one or domains are one of the greatest things out there to do business with and grow and develop them. So, Paige, thanks for bringing me in and I’ll be here listening to everyone.

    Okay. Well, thank you, David. I think you bring up a couple really good points. I’ll note, which is.

    The misconceptions or the ignorance of most people about domain names is real. And what I mean by that is you can hear something or you can know something. And I think a lot of people know that domain they’ve heard domain names are for sale, but, but what do they really know? And I think David’s example was really, was really poignant in that you could tell somebody, you can buy this name, but he really didn’t focus on the fact that wait.

    Most of the time, things like domain names, in my opinion, or like government licenses, they’re held by a government they’re held by a bureaucracy there they’re held by a, you have to petition a committee to get them they’re given out as spoils to political parties. Um, you know, you, you have a, an ongoing cost that’s high.

    You continually have to grease the palms of, uh, of, uh, of, of politicians in an area, you know, to get a license, to run a cable television system or a cell phone network, or have a TV station. And a domain name requires the payment of an annual renewal fee. And that’s it. And anybody can possess the guaranteed right to continually renew that name under the, then current, you know, terms and conditions.

    And I said that specifically to say, that’s how I define owning a domain name. And just that simple fact hasn’t resonated deeply. So even if we think people know it, the question is, do they know it deeply and hopefully we’ll get better at that. So that’s what I took from your comment, David, thank you about.

    So Monday domains, we’ll continue to try to bring you the news of the week he tweaked, uh, normally on the first show of the month, we’ll focus on discounts and offers. And I didn’t have any for you today. Although I will say, be careful in some registrars because some specials expired at the end of last year.

    And. I’m especially thinking about dinah.here for IO renewals. They bumped up to 48 bucks and I’m hoping it’s just because they haven’t put in their pricing for this year. But that’s an example of, of just being aware that we’re in a new year and there might’ve been specials or pricing that was effective until the end of last year.

    And you should just maybe pay a little attention to your renewals, pay a little attention to your expenses of the others. And then so Monday domains, I’ll try to talk about deals and in this case, negative. Um, I’ll try to talk about the news of the week and it was kind of a quiet couple of weeks over the holidays.

    And then I’ll try to talk about different tips and tricks or things that I’m doing. And the last thing I’ll leave you with today is kind of a tip that maybe all of you can do to save money. As I think the beginning of the year is a time that I also try to look at all the services I’m buying and paying for monthly, you know, am I paying for three FD stores?

    Am I playing for a Shopify store? I’m paying for domain IQ and Esteban. You know, a lot of us are like, well, Hey, you know, I may need it one day and I don’t want to have to pay for it then, but what are you really spending money on each month? Um, if you’ve got domain names on payment programs, you know, review them right now and say, rather than just letting the charge go through automatically are the prospects for that domain name, still as good as the remaining payments I have to make, or would you rather make those payments on a new name and a different name?

    So I think it’s a good time maybe to check your, your budgeted expenses, not a renewals, but, um, but, but of all the other services that you buy. So that’s what I’ll try to do on Monday domain names, just talking about the news of the week, some tips and strategies, but definitely with an eye to. Toward promoting the domain namespace and encouraging innovation.

    This is the place. If you’ve got a domain name, product, or service during the year that I want to be able to show it off in a way that, that you can have a third party critique of it. Cause I’m not saying endorsement. I may find that I don’t like it, but especially if you’re bringing innovation to the space, I want to be able to, um, to help, uh, illuminate what you’ve got, uh, to the biggest possible group.

    So that’s what we’ll keep doing on Monday domains. Um, thanks to AIJ and David and mark and David and Mike, did you guys want to share anything else before we, before we closed?

    Take that as a negatory. I know there’s lots of great groups, um, on clubhouse today. Uh, hopefully this group will, will, will merge into someone else’s to be kind of an open social chat. I’ll try to pop in, but thank you everybody. I appreciate you coming to domain club, continue to follow domain club. Uh, look for some more information on our site, domain.club, uh, sign up for our newsletter and then, uh, and then we will have this replay available.

    I talked the first 40 minutes about my view of domain names from 30,000 feet. Why I liked domain names and what I’m doing here on the first day of 2022. Thanks everybody. And we’ll end the room in 5, 4, 3 99. 2 59, 1 29. See you all tomorrow for outbounding club five Eastern.

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