Tips & Tricks To Outbounding Domains

Hey everybody. Thanks for coming in early. I opened the room just a couple minutes early and I’ll be here just after four to talk about outbounding domain. Selling domains, uh, using outbound techniques and methods. So, uh, I’ll be silent here for a little bit, as I invited some folks in and then, uh, always take some questions or do some quick appraisals at the beginning, but I’ll be back in about three or four minutes.

Hey Mike G Donna,

good to meet you. I think we’ve talked before.

Let’s see, who wants to talk domains today?

Somebody raised their hand. I, we got Lozada on the back channel.

Well, I’m going to invite a few folks in hold on.

I’m going to invite a few more people in I’ll be right back.

All right, everybody. Welcome to outbound and club. The second show of the year. I think we did a show last Tuesday. I think it was a good show. I remember it. I think we set the stage for the year to do some outbounding. And I wonder if anyone did any outbounding this week. I know there’s a Wednesday night group where I think they do live outbounding, uh, during the call or at least crowd resourcing.

I think I’ve completed my 25th consecutive week without doing any outbounding. But as I always say, I thought about outbounding this week. So I’ll share with you my thoughts and hopefully many of you can do, as I say, not as I do, I am a reluctant outbound, or I want to think that my names are good enough that I can sell enough of me each week where I don’t need to go out there.

And prospect people should just know I have the names. They should know. My names are great. They should want to pay me a big price and all that should happen without me doing anything. That’s what I was promised when I read the book on domaining actually I wrote the book on domaining. Um, So why should I have to outbound?

My name’s should be good enough. When I bought him, I said to myself, surely someone will want to buy this name. Surely there’s hundreds of people that would buy this name for the price. I want. Surely something’s happened in the past five or 10 years where this name hasn’t been available or some other domain investor owned it.

And they don’t deserve the money from selling this domain name as much as I do. Therefore, once I buy a name, it’ll say. And then somehow after we get a portfolio of domain names, because the economics are so fantastic. When we do have a resale that we convince ourselves that we can sell one or 2% of our portfolio and still make money.

And because we can make money selling one to 2% of our portfolio, we shouldn’t have to do anything that takes effort or work like outbounding. So what is outbounding of domain names? In my opinion, outbounding of domain names can be anything from simply sending a bunch of emails. Seeing if someone wants to buy your name all the way up to brokery, understanding and industry, trying to identify the key players.

Start conversations with those key players. After you’ve learned about the industry, talk about what it would look like for them to buy a domain name for thousands, if not, and take a term approach to the sale. Sometimes in that long-term approach, the buyer wants to know how much, and then when you tell them how much they want to say, how much would you take?

And of course the seller, I don’t think it’s as much that we want to know how much they might pay. We just want to know if they’re serious and the way a seller of domain names. In my opinion, defines whether a buyer is serious is frankly whether they’ll pay retail price. So we decided that if we have a domain.

I think the name I used last week was bridge clubs.com. And if I want to sell bridge clubs.com for 3000, then I want to deal with the serious buyer. And the way I define serious is will they pay me a retail price. They could be the nicest person in the world. They can be the smartest person in the world and very successful.

But if they want to buy the name for a hundred dollars, I’m going to immediately put them in the category of not serious. Now they could be a serious person, but I’m going to put them in the category of not serious, because I don’t want to talk to them. I don’t even want to talk about the range of hundreds of dollars.

So when you think about outbounding, you say to yourself, I could outbound all day long. If I knew I was only outbounding to serious buyers and again, serious meaning they’ll pay us the retail. But you send out your emails and you’re sending them to everybody. And to no surprise, you get a lot of people that want to buy the name for a hundred bucks.

A lot of people that say you’ve wrecked their day, simply by sending them that email, a lot of people feel the need to not only not ask you for the price, but to tell you if you’re asking any price at all for the domain name, that that’s too much because the domain name isn’t worth anything. And of course, for those of us who have been in business a long time, we have to think that anything like this that can create so much emotion from people who may not even want to buy the name means there must be something to these domain names.

We’ve probably struck a cord. People want to buy them for less than we want to sell them for. They want to. And they think if they impose that one and that desire that they have on us, that we might. We might end up saying, sure, you can have it for 300 bucks because for most of us that’s a profit also. So I think for all those reasons, I’m a reluctant outbound, or it’s just messy.

It’s just extra work. It’s hard work. I could even get a great list of people to send my names and then find out that none of the emails actually made it out to them. I could get a great list of people to, to buy my names. And I could find out that a couple of them have trademarks or I could send them to someone who used to own the name.

They let it expire. I bought it when it expires. And they’ve been hating me from a distance for years thinking who got that name, who got that name? I had someone call me up today, a friend of mine and wanted to buy a domain name. And when I looked it up, it was 2,500 bucks. It was owned by huge domains.

And he said to me, now this is a friend. He said, I can’t believe you guys buy all these names.

He said, and I’m like, wait, now this guy, guess what he does for a living. He’s a realtor. I said, that would be like me saying to you, I can’t believe you’re making the prices of real estate go up so much right now. I want to buy a house. And I think that house should only cost $250,000. Why should I have to pay 350,000?

I should only pay two 50, but I don’t say to the realtor, I can’t believe you’re making the market go up like that. But anyway, that’s what he thought he can say to me. So back to outbounding, it’s going to be a short show today. Really have one main thing I wanted to share. And then talk about anyone who has been outbounding this week.

Some of the trials or tribulations or successes that they’ve had. What I want to talk about this week is something that, that I’m doing, um, that hopefully will pay dividends. And what I’m basically doing is I’m setting up a second office for myself. To do more deals to do more business development and to do more outbounding on the phone.

And I feel like the skillset and the strengths that I’ve used in the past 15 years to buy expired domains have mostly had to do with hard work and diligence and research and effort. Can I look through a list of 50,000 to 80,000 names a day? Can I develop systems that allow me to pick the best possible names?

Can I maintain the energy throughout the day to be a smart bitter in auctions, not chasing names above where I should pay and not leaving auctions when I gonna regret it afterwards, because it was a really good name, not bidding up auctions, even if I don’t want the name. I’m sorry, even though I don’t want to pay the most for the name, as long as I think the name’s worth a certain amount, I should bid that to make sure that the buyers in our market, or at least paying their fair share.

And I don’t mean that to penalize them. I mean that if there was a name, like there was a name today that I think is going to go to a thousand dollars, but I said to myself, would I like this name for 200? I said, yes. So I bid 200. I didn’t think in the world I would win. But if I didn’t, maybe that buyer gets the name for 40 and they would have outbid me up to a thousand, but I at least feel like I need to put in the bid of two.

So all those skills, you know, for the past couple of years have had me working at more of a workstation, multiple monitors, big screen TV using my mobile phone when appropriate multiple windows, research data, downloading to Excel, sorting, looking for list, talking with other people. And I started to think that those may not be the skills that help me as I do more outbounding.

I find that if I have spent six to seven hours outbounding, or even talking with other domain investors, I can almost be oversaturated with the domain space. And I may not be in the best position to talk to somebody who only thinks about domain names once or twice a month. And here I am coming in to talk to them and I deal with domain names every day.

And I could tell you both sides of every argument about domain names. Do domain names matter for SEO. Do people search anymore? What does Google do for domain names? What are the values of domain names? Where are other people paying for domain names? Um, do companies need more than one website? How much does it cost to get a page one ranking on Google?

You know, there’s a lot of things that people want to talk about even having to do with domain names that I’m not really dealing with on a daily basis. I don’t know where a lot of my own websites rank for certain keywords. I’m not sitting there every day trying to manage my social media budget, like most small businesses.

I don’t know what Google’s doing right now. When it comes to a Google, my business listing to make that process easy or hard. I don’t know. What’s being offered to small business owners by lead gen companies like in the geo service space, where companies are marketing to them every day, all day saying, we’ll sell you leads.

And here I am, I’m going to jump into their world to try to sell them a domain name coming from a world where I’m looking for domain names all day, every day, looking for iOS, I’m looking for XYZ. I’m looking for a deal. I’m looking for a special, I’m transferring. I’m getting off codes, I’m setting, name servers.

And none of that is going to transfer to the conversation I need to have with someone to buy one of my domain names. So what I’ve done is I’ve almost set up a second desk in my study of my house. And it’s got my old furniture from my office when I used to be a financial advisor and we used to have the Wayne’s coding.

And we used to have the English country gentlemen with the Fox hunt pictures. When you came into the office and we had the deep leather chairs and we had the long conference table with the window looking out on Del Mar. And we crafted a place where we could talk with people about their finances, about what they wanted to do with their money, what they want to do with their family, how they wanted to do, achieve their goals with the money that they had.

And we created an environment where we can have people come in, whether it was daytime meetings or nighttime meetings. And we created a safe place for them to talk about their money. And I thought about it. And even though I’m going to be doing a lot of my outbounding over the email and over the phone, I almost need to get myself in that position where I’m acting like I was back in my old financial planning office and at two o’clock, I had Dr.

Jones and his wife, Mary, and they were going to come in and we were going to sit down and we were going to talk about what’s going on in his life. Maybe he was going to ask me some things that we talked about last time we have a conversation and relationship, and I know that’s hard to do when you call somebody right upfront, but say you were in a meeting and you were an attorney or an accountant or a financial advisor.

Like I was you’re meeting a client for the first time. Well, I’m sure you definitely have on your calendar. This is your first meeting with somebody and you’d try to put yourself in the best frame of mind. You’d read up on their file a little bit. You’d probably make sure you look good. Make sure the office looked good.

The table looked good. I have my assistant bring in some drinks and some Cokes, maybe a Danish, and you get ready to make your first impressions and have that meeting. So I’m thinking about if I am going to do this outbounding, or even if I’m not, how would I do it? And I need to try to create that environment where if I talk to somebody about a domain name, especially if I make the bold move to column that I have something besides, hi, this is Paige.

I was wondering if you wanted to buy this domain name for me.

Now I think there’s two types of ways to outbound. One is it’s a numbers game, and this is the way I’ve been trying to do it for the past 10 years. If I could just find someone to get me 50 leads for every name and send out an email who cares what it says, they either want to buy the name where they don’t, you know, they either are in the market and they understand what domain names are.

And they understand that they cost a little bit of money and they want to buy it, or they don’t. And the only thing I have to do to get over that hurdle is to send out a bunch of emails and I, and I think that’s actually true. I think that’s actually a business

I’ve tried to talk about ever since we started outbounding club is a philosophy to make outbounding club truly special and different and unique. How can we create. The same type of leverage that we would get when a customer inquires about our domain name, where we feel like we can quote them the highest possible price, knowing that we’re going to set the ceiling for our name.

And if they ever say that’s too much, or the name isn’t worth it, we can always say, well, you call me, you were the one that inquired of me and some have what we do outbound. And we lose that because we called them and the deal has to be we’ll D if you call me, you better be offering a good deal. You know what I mean?

Why would you take up my time? So I think ultimate outbounding would be, can you develop conversations and relationships with your potential customers in a way that when you get to the price discussion, you have similar types of levels. As you would if they inquired. And the reason I think this is especially important is that in the 15 years I’ve been doing domains and even the 12 years, I’ve been doing domain education from talking at different conferences to being on the early Sherpa shows and kind of, you know, coming up with the, with the idea of a weekly show of doing an interview about how to buy domain names at scale, or maybe sell domain names at scale, it’s been a great business and there’s always been this room because of the low acquisition cost of 10 or 20 or 30 bucks at auction to sell names for two to $4,000 and make a lot of money.

But I think what we’ve seen in the past year is that someone who really understands the value of a domain name, any domain. I think the minimum price should be four to 5,000 and any attributes at all about the value of a domain name. When you really start having the conversation about what this could mean in terms of future customers, the average margin that a business owner makes on a sale, the lifetime value of a customer, and the fact that they’re going to get sales each month from having a domain name, they’re going to gain new customers each month from having a domain name and the dirt potentially going to gain those customers better than their existing name, or they’re going to be able to pursue new customers that they may not have reached, or that it would have cost them more money to reach that if that’s true and you’re having pricing discussions with someone and you threw out 29 99, And they said 500 and you said 2,600 and they said 600 and you’re sitting there going, maybe I can get a thousand.

That’s okay. That’s what I do. I sell most of my names at the second price. The client offers. I don’t even wait for the third price. I would rather get them to commit and pay their second offer and make sure the transaction closes rather than push them for their ultimate price and have their response be all right.

I’ll think about it. But I’m changing. I’m changing my stripes because it’s so much tougher to buy high quality names. I’ve got to sit there and say to myself, I owe it to myself to try to sell the names I have for the highest possible price. And if I really had someone on the phone and I was really talking to them to try to get them from 600 to a thousand dollars, here’s what I’ve experienced when I’ve done that over the years, by the middle of the phone call, most of the time, the person’s telling me, stop, stop, stop.

I’ll do it. And then I’ve even had someone says, oh my gosh, you could sell anything to anybody. And I said to him, it’s not that I can sell anything to anybody it’s that this domain name has got all these attributes of value. This was a coaching domain name. And I’m like, your average engagement is $2,000 per client.

And by being this two word coach name, what if you get five more clients? Yes. That’s $10,000 of billings and you own this name for 10 years. That’s a hundred thousand dollars more a billings plus whatever you can grow by being for instance, domain code.com and then saying, and not only do you get the money from having more engagements from being, just say, the name was domain coach.com.

You can also sell it when you retire to give someone else the benefits of getting those customers and you can sell the asset. So you’d get not only the annual recurring income from having a better domain name, but you could sell it. And then I think back to the fact that I’m trying to get them from $600 to $1,400 so that we can settle at a thousand.

And I just feel that once I get on the phone, once I get in that conversation, it’s almost cheapening the name to only be asking a thousand or 1200 or 15. So that’s what I’m trying to set for my goals for this year is that I’m going to have real conversations with real people. And I have to get back into the real world.

I may have to get out of the domain name, like a compression chamber. When a diver goes from a submarine into the water, or someone goes down and then they get out of the little mini submarine. They’ve got a decompress. I may have to decompress from the domain world, even decompress from clubhouse, talking to other, domainers read three or four articles about the real world.

Listen, do a YouTube channel of an independent business person talking about their struggle and be ready to have those conversations with people about domain names. And to do that, I might not be sitting there hunched over at my computer, the same place that I’ve searched for domain names for the past 10 years.

I may want to get in my big leather chair, kick back, put my feet on the table. I may want to go to Starbucks. I may want to walk outside. I may, even since I don’t have an office, may go have lunch at a place that’s in an office park and sit there and put myself in the same place as my customer to try to have the conversations I need to have to get the two to five to 10 to $20,000.

That if, if, when talking to the right customer, I think the domain names worth, and we can do a lot on mobile these days and you can close a million dollar deal with. But maybe it’s the idea that I, that I don’t want to treat the customer that way, where it’s like, what’s the price 3000. I’ll give you one 1400.

Okay. I’ll take it. Maybe to get the best price, I need to have a conversation. So, anyway, that’s all I brought with me to outbounding club today is this idea that selling domains not only takes a different skillset than buying and searching for domain names. Selling domains might require me being in a different mindset, a different physical place to be able to put myself in the shoes of my customer and that I need to either listen to YouTube videos or talk to people that are friends of mine that are in professional service businesses, and really understand what their.

You know, what are some of the challenges that small businesses are facing right now? What are some of the challenges that a division manager or a marketing associate with a portfolio of three or four brands and maybe $20 million to spend? You know, what are the challenges they’re facing? Because if I am going to do that and I am going to talk to them, I’ve got to know my stuff.

If they’re going to trust me to tell them that they should buy a domain name for a certain price, I may have to prove that, that I know what I’m talking about in other areas, besides domains, for them to transfer that information over to domain names, I could tell them to Google me. I could tell them that I’ve sold domain names from millions of dollars.

But really, unless I can either build a trust relationship with the customer on the phone or prove to him that I’m know what I’m talking about in his industry or in his area of challenges. I may not have the respect that we all think we have when we tell somebody, oh, these domain names all go for three grand, oh, they’re easily worth five grand.

In fact, this one’s worth 15 grand and it’s only because I have to sell it that you’re getting it for two. They’re going to call baloney on me. But if during the phone call, I’ve developed some type of relationship where I’ve either, excuse me, help them solve a problem with them. Shared with them, some new bit of information that they didn’t know about, or at least planted the seed that they’re fortunate to be on the phone call with me that day.

Not just because I said it. I think that’s the way that we can get the prices that we want for these domain names. So it’s a frame of mind. It’s a state of mind, again, it’s possible that domaining is just a numbers game. And I want to make sure that I do that this year. I want to make sure I play the numbers, but it’s also possible that the each and every component of the way that I introduce and manage.

If you think about the sale, almost like it’s a con, you know what I mean? And you’re trying to position everything just perfectly then maybe I need to start thinking about that. Maybe I just can’t wake up in the middle of the day. Hey, Mike. Hey Donna. Hey bill. This thing’s totally worth five grand. If I could sell it to you for 29 99, you want to buy it.

And I’m going to realize they’re like, I don’t even know you could buy a domain name. How do I buy it? Where do I pay? And then once we agree on price or like, Hey, I heard I can make payments to buy a domain name. So I’ve got to start thinking about, do I introduce payments early? Do I wait to the end? Um, so those are some of the things I’m thinking about as I think about outbounding.

But anyway, that is my, uh, that’s my, uh, that’s what I brought today. Let’s see who’s down below. Let me see if someone can share. Does anyone ever even thought about putting themselves in a different place or a different frame of mind when they do outbounding? This may be different from the way that they go about buying names, especially if you’re going to talk to people on the phone, especially if you’re going to talk about bigger names, I could be off base here, but for me, I think I am going to create a different place to kind of take me from being a domain scavenger, maybe, or a domain, um, uh, Uh, where do they call it?

Uh, when they give a quarterback and a football team, they’re like the first, the first one in and the last one out, you know, gym rat. In other words, maybe I don’t need to be the gym rat of domain names anymore. Meaning always, they’re always about trying to learn everything about everybody and I’ve still got to do that to buy, but when it comes to selling, I may need a decompression chamber to put me in a different spot, put me in a different frame of mind.

Um, and, and what I’m calling that as my change of scenery that I need to maybe have a change of scenery when it comes to selling domain names. And so that’s what I’m looking to do in 2020 to

take a drink of water here and see if someone’s got a question. Someone’s got an appraisal. Someone’s got a question about domain names. If you’re coming to these rooms for the first time you just saw a domain room on clubhouse. Um, the domaining community on clubhouse is this is a strong and vibrant community is very supportive.

It’s been going mostly for about a year. Some of the earliest clubhouse folks and the domain space we’re on at the end of 2020, but mostly it was January of last year. And I think we’re all gonna see a lot of, uh, balloons. At this time last year, I wasn’t on clubhouse, but I was talking domains all day.

And I had taken my domain show, which was an online virtual trade show. And I created a room called the 24 7 room where we were always on. It was basically an always on place for domain investors to share, share screen. We did it on zoom and I was running it as a test bed for the first month of January and had a great time.

And I thought things were going great. We were going, were setting up a schedule and kind of right in the middle of that clubhouse came in and became this paradigm. Changing, going to be the best thing since sliced bread, take over Twitter, take over Facebook. So it was hard to get people excited about something that was just me.

It was just. Um, when everybody wanted so much more. And so for the past year, I’ve been on clubhouse for the past 11 months. I’ve been doing domain club and I’ll keep doing it. But I think even though they’ve done a good job of letting me put links up top and record the replays, um, I may do some stuff, especially when it comes to researching domains on video this year and that’ll be in the domain show.

All right. So I’m going to open this up to the audience. We might not have any questions today. This may be a short, a short show today, but one, they wouldn’t do any outbounding this week and they wouldn’t have any successes or failures to on this topic of having it be a different skill set. That may be what we do to buy domain names.

Has anyone, even in the smallest degree, put themselves in a different place, a different environment or a different mindset when they go to either email or call. And I talked mostly about calls today, but I think even for emails, you might be better off if you’re a rapid responder to emails, um, in the middle of the day that you may, I don’t know.

It’s always interesting. Some people say when you get an inquiry or get a response reply as soon as possible. Cause the person’s thinking about domain names. At that point, if you wait till later, maybe your email gets mixed in with whatever crisis they’re going on, they may miss it. And other people say no, that shows that you’re too eager.

You want to wait a while, then respond back. You want to be more measured in your response? Let them know that that you’re not necessarily playing hard to get, you did respond, but that you’re a professional. You have a professional business. You’re not looking to hurry the sale. And I think about this, like a poker player, it’s a lot of poker players, especially in Texas.

Hold’em where no matter what you bet they’re going to go through the same rolling of the chips, checking their cards, leaning back. Looking at you again, looking at their cards, counting their chips again every time. Cause they don’t want to have a pattern where if they break the pattern, you know, that their hands either really good or really bad.

So you may want to say, I always respond within 35 minutes, but what I’m really talking about is the idea that you may be too wired. You may just have gotten out of a bidding war for a domain name and you may let that carry over into your email exchanges. But, um, but I’m doing some thinking about that.

And just about the idea of the mindset of I’m going to be looking for better prices on my outbounding and to do that, I think I may be half to get the conversation to be about name and price because if it’s name and price and they don’t like the price of first glance, they’re gone and you’ve got nothing else to keep the conversation.

Anyway, Donna happy new year, I valued 20, 21 and a valued getting to know you so happy new year. Thank you page. And I appreciate your rooms and your perspective and your experience. Uh, I think we all do, and I was just thinking about what you said about a different, um, you know, like a different, uh, uh, actual physical space, you know, and I think I came to me that we tell a lot of people, especially young people, if they’re going for like their first jobs or like something like that, to make sure that they get dressed, you know, get up, get dressed, get out of your pajamas.

And, and I think that’s why like Starbucks, you know, people get out of the house and, you know, like maybe pre COVID. Okay. But you know, the idea is to get up, get out, be around people and you feel that. Better. Like, you feel like you can talk to, especially if you’re, um, you know, you’re reaching out to a business, right.

You’re sitting and maybe not a noisy coffee shop, but you’re in a more business-like setting, you know, more conducive to business instead of just laying around in your pajamas, you know, whatever, something like that. So that’s when you said that I was like, yeah, I, I, I think that’s a, you know, it’s a great idea and it’s a great, you know, we tell young people to do that.

And I think that we should, you know, definitely think about doing that ourselves. Even if, you know, we can actually do our domaining and our outbound and all of that from home. Maybe we should think of getting up, getting dressed and going somewhere that is more conducive to, um, you know, to, to conducting business.

Yeah, I, um, I was fortunate over, uh, 2018 and 2019. Uh, I promoted the.la extension, which I’ve shared with many of you. And the way that I did that a lot was I would go out to LA and I would, um, go to different meetup events. And meetup is a fantastic source for meetings. I mean, talk about a great use of the internet.

I can look and see what in-person gatherings are happening in my area and what the topic of that in-person gathering is. And I know that we’ve had COVID, but I think people are going to get back to normal. And I know a lot of the meetups when virtual, but if I see a Silicon beach LA thing called e-commerce marketing, I know that that’s probably going to be a good environment to go.

But what I realized was. Is that with the feedback of talking to people in person about domain names, I got better at telling my story because you have all the cues that we like to get when we’re in person, right. Donna, you kind of adjust what you’re saying based upon how it’s being received. And I think you end up with a better, you, you get your definitions, get better the way you describe something gets better.

Don’t you feel like maybe just doing that in person. Maybe that’s why we love conferences so much, but just doing it anywhere. Don’t you think it would help your spin on domain? I actually struggled with that with clubhouse. Um, in the beginning, I find it a little bit easier now, but you know, when you’re having a conversation and it’s like this and it’s sort of, you know, back and forth, it’s not like, you know, just a one-on-one podcast.

It’s not you talking it’s back and forth and I missed. The physical cues of, you know, you’re talking to someone and then they pause and you know, that they’re going to pause it, they’re pausing because of their physical, you know, what they do physically, you know? And, and I actually really, really struggled with that on clubhouse.

I found it very, you know, like just stopping and starting and, you know, without the physical of seeing someone and their, their cues really like, kind of put me off for awhile and I’m a little bit more used to it now, but, um, definitely. But it’s funny when you mentioned meetup. So my friend, uh, she met her husband on meetup.

It was, uh, it was, um, they’re both, uh, oh, what is the dog? It’s around dogs and their show docs. Like, um, I forgot the name of the actual breed, but yeah, it’s funny that you mentioned that. Yeah, she, uh, yeah, th I mean, she used to go to all of them and then she just happened to meet him and. Well, there you go.

Um, yeah, I’m sure they’re going to go public now for, you know, 10 or $12 billion as soon as COVID gets over, because they do do a good job of, um, uh, bringing people together, uh, network after work as a big sponsor of meetup events. And, you know, we would, we would sponsor a network after work event and, you know, we, that would at least give me a table where it wasn’t as much just mingle.

You know what I mean? But at least I could, you know, put up my big maps of.la and who uses.la and, and it gave me something to start the conversation with. But, um, but I think network after work is a good one. And then page the meetups. Now they do have those virtually no, well, it’s hard for me because a lot of people, what am I on mute?

Hold on.

I can’t get off me. I can hear you. Okay. Um, So originally you had to have an in-person event and all the virtual people tried to break the rules, you know, where you could have a, you can be millionaire like me seminar and record it and then make it seem like it was a meetup event. Right. And then you cancel the event at the last moment, and then you tell everybody, oh, you can see it online.

You know what I mean? And it was just prospecting, but through COVID they had to start making some adjustments where you could have an online meetup like zoom. But, um, I don’t know when they’re going to go back to, um, to reinforcing what I’ve done is interesting as, as some of the meetup group is usually sponsored and I’ve actually picked up the sponsorship of a couple of groups when the original person who sponsored it and they have to pay for the meetup each quarter that I went ahead and paid for that, just to be able to get the connections.

Um, so we’ll see what happens when LA opens up. Yeah, that’s nice. Do you find that you’re using more, you know, of the, uh, apps or, you know, more social media sites to reach out to people and to, you know, to use that as outbound bound? Um, you know, like a Reddit, maybe you weren’t on Reddit before, but because of COVID where we can’t meet in person and kind of make those network, you know, those connections, are you using more?

You know, and cause I hate, honestly I hate learning new social media platforms. Um, but I find that I’m doing it more. So if I want to, you know, kind of like be able to reach out to more people because we can’t meet in person. And I just didn’t know if everybody was kind of doing that or yeah, apparently I’m not smart enough to use Reddit.

So, um, someone has my name and my username and they post as me all the time and I can’t figure out how to get it back and there’s no customer support. So I had. No. And, um, And so I tried to connect with people there, you know, in terms of started room and domain names and notifications, and I really spent some effort and, and again, I, I just, I just couldn’t get it.

You know what I mean? But what I was gonna talk about was the other thing that exists in the real world are these networking groups, you know, where you have to go once a month and you have to spend a hundred dollars with one of the businesses in the group, and you got your, your, um, your real estate broker, your mortgage guy, your insurance guy, your hairstylist, you know, and all this stuff.

And it was funny. Cause I remember going to one and the guys like, I’m like, yeah, you got to spend a hundred bucks a month. You guys, yeah. He goes, everyone brings their dry cleaning. You know, mean there was one dry cleaner that sat there got in the group. And that’s the cheapest way for everyone to spend a hundred bucks a month.

Was there, was that the ones where like you had one person from yeah. Okay. One person from each industry. Yeah. And I said, I do domain names and they’re like, we have no idea where to play. Yeah. You’re, you’d be in a category on your own page. That’s I said that, I said, I’m not even a web designer. It’s dot LA.

And we actually own the registry that sells the names. And then they were just like, whatever. So I’m like, listen, just let me come. And, and I’ll, I’ll abide by all your rules and, and they, they just, you know, if it wasn’t in their little system, they didn’t know what to do, but, and the day you had to do, then lion’s club and chamber of commerce, um, what do they used to call those?

They were once a month. Uh, I think every chamber of commerce has, yeah, Donna, my answer to that is I think the world is ready for new things. Every big internet company has tried to dominate and stifle in my opinion, Any more good uses of the internet. You know what I mean? And I could convince myself that besides clubhouse and besides my domain registrars, and I go to one site to get information on, on football and world football, I can actually live without the internet.

’cause I think so many people are fed up with Facebook, fed up with Twitter, fed up with all the junk you have to put up on that. They’re looking for places to network and learn things. Um, you mean back in person, in person or even online, even if you had a group of a hundred people that were like-minded to you in your city that would share in a forum in a controlled way, you’d go there every day.

I think, you know, as opposed to the fact that a social network is polluted. You know, I’m swimming the pool, but we’re letting the sewer water into, so anyway. Yeah. Ah, yeah, I’ve definitely tried to put filters on, so I just don’t see any of that nonsense. And I think a lot of people have turned away, you know, from TV, you know, watching the, just the news.

Cause it’s, you know, it’s really just, uh, yeah, there’s just better places that are, you can filter stuff out to get, you know, news and news of the day. But yeah, I hear, and I think we have a story to tell because if you do want to bring a solution to market on the internet, guess what it starts with the name.

It starts with your connection to the entire internet that you have to pay a simple renewal fee for. And if you were to buy a premium name, just like you like buying a nice car or a nice house or nice vacation, nice clothes you bought, you might want to buy a nice name or a regular name, and you can start your own connection to the existing worldwide web right now.

Yeah. And I think decentralized or not, it all goes back and starts with a domain name for sure. And I don’t see that changing. I mean, we see more, you know, at going and maybe different directions, maybe a different TLD, you know, w whatever, that, that, that might be the case, but, you know, it’s all circling back to two domains.

Absolutely. And without the domain name system, Mo even though people say, oh, apps are taking over most apps wouldn’t work. If they couldn’t universally. No. That they could draw resources, information, and processes from other sites that exist on domain names. Right? Yeah. I think the search has changed, you know, like if you have an app, like a CVS app, right.

But it has to be attached to a see, you know, the CVS actual domain and website and w which then to the domain name, you know what I mean? That one can’t really, you know, it wouldn’t really make sense for one, at least in the bigger ones to one cannot exist without the other. But I think maybe, you know, search has changed due to apps.

Right? I think a lot of stuff has, it’s funny apps to me,

we used to have what we called software. Right. You bought a program on a disc and you installed it and your computer. And then when the internet came. And you downloaded stuff. Everyone got viruses and junk, and I think everyone got convinced to never download anything, but then you repackage it as an app.

And how much thought do we put in when we download something now? Right. Download the app. Boom. We hit it. Agree to the terms of service. Boom. We hit it. So w what I was getting to was the fact that most of the apps, if they’re making revenue, they’re probably monetizing their customers. They’re probably using internet technologies to do that.

And to do that, they have to connect to the internet sites of all those companies that they’re using to monetize themselves. I just think that it’s the, it’s the most egalitarian, is that the word, you know, the, the DNS first is what I call it. The DNS verse, the domain name system, the DNS versus open to everybody.

And everybody can connect to the DNS verse with the domain name and it is centralized and we’re glad it is. So there’s one and one and only list of everyone who owns a certain domain name at a certain time, so that everyone on the internet can build as if you are the owner of your website. And there’s one and only one list that everyone uses, unless you’re behind the iron curtain or the, the China curtain or the Iran curtain or whatever, that, that, that gets access to those sites.

And, and that’s empowering. And I think the more people have understood about the internet over 20 years, hopefully they’ll realize, wow. If you’re a small business person, you could create an online community for your local area. You can start blogging, you can do things without having to ask Google’s permission or Facebook permissions or Twitter fruition.

So it’s funny for me because what we’re selling I think is valuable and we don’t always use the power of domain names to sell domain names. And I’m not sure that the answer to that, I want to be thinking about it over the next month, but at a restaurant, it’s awesome because people are thinking about going to the restaurant and to do that.

They come and they eat and they try it out. And if they like it, they come back. So you’re able to use your food to get, you know, more customers. I want to find ways to use the power of a domain name, to start the process of selling a domain. I’d be interested if anyone has any thoughts on that, but you know, that way we have a reference point.

I’d love to be able to say to you, Donna, if you called in about a name and say it was NFT art.com and you found me on NFT art.com and you said, you know what? I just typed it in to see what was there. You know, we’ve already got ourselves to the conversation of what, you know, how a domain name is valuable.

So, anyway, thanks. I love your perspective. Well, you’re nice to say. And I think, um, I think this is where if we don’t believe we have something special because we are the distribution system of domain names, 50 50, along with GoDaddy and huge domains, GoDaddy and huge domains make up half the market and individual domain investors make up half the.

And in my opinion, we represent the distribution system of domain names to the public. And I’ve never seen it presented that way because we’ve always had to take the moniker of a Cybersquatter, but really just like Ford uses dealers and the gap uses retail stores and door dash uses drivers, independent drivers.

We are the distribution system, connecting people who own domain names, the, the, the, the wholesaler, the registry sells them to us. And then we sell them to the public. Now registrars do it to for hand registration, domain names, but in the premium domain market, we do. And I was like, you know, paid one when auto dealers, I think we’ve talked about this before, when auto dealers wanted to, you know, help people sell more cars, but help people all also, because you know, it kind of came down to, well, how much is it going to cost me, you know, per month?

Right. So I think we don’t play up the lease to own enough either. I think that we should do that. I think that we should make it. So, you know, people can, instead of trying to get that one hit and a big hit, and I get that, but you know, if you have three or four that are paying you a pretty good chunk each month on, on a lease to own, you know, and, uh, I, I think, geez, why, why the heck wouldn’t you?

You know, and I don’t think that we talk about it done enough and I don’t think we promoted enough, but I think we can learn a lot from people who actually have done that and have increased their, so their sales.

I think for me, I would be so much more ready to promote, lease to own. If one of the platforms would at least give me the option to collect two months in advance, even something as small as getting two months pop at the beginning. You know what I mean? Just I’d like to do 30%, but it’s great that Dan came out with the no money down payments over years.

And I love that as a fire, but I do not like it as a seller, but yes, I agree with you that it’s, it’s a thing. I always thought that the leasing should come in when we’ve tapped out our prices higher, where people I’d like to do leasing. When people say to me page, I liked the name. And I agree the price isn’t too bad.

I just don’t have the money. I just don’t have the budget, you know, to take eight grand, um, you know, to do this, you know what I mean? But I could, but there’s plenty of companies. I think there’s plenty of companies that are not getting big VC money, you know, or IPO money. And so they, you know, are like, okay, I’ve got this over here.

These expenses, these expensive, and you know, a domain name is one of them. But if, you know, putting down 20 grand or whatever, if, you know, for somebody that’s getting big money from using other people’s money or that’s, Hey, what the hell? You know, why not? And I think that’s why you’ve got, you know, some big sales even lately, because we know that crypto, you know, is getting a lot of VC money.

So I think that. You know, part of that, but when you just have small town, small time businesses that are trying to start, and they have a certain amount of money, but it’s not this huge million dollars. I think that leasing for them makes a lot of sense. And I don’t think it’s like, oh, I’m just testing it out.

And I’m going to, uh, you know, I don’t, I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s just the affordability. It’s just like, can you imagine if every time you went to pay for a car, you had to come up with 20 grand, no people don’t have that 50 grand or whatever you say, you know, how much per month. And that’s the way it’s that, that’s how it’s affordable.

And I know a lot of people don’t like it and they’re like, Nope, I don’t want to go into debt. Okay. I get all of that side of it. But when you think about it, you know, the affordability for small businesses to get a domain name on a lease. You know, not an extravagant least just, you know, 12 months. And I hear what you’re saying two months upfront, and maybe we bring that up to Deanna.

I don’t know, you know, maybe nobody has brought that up to them. They’re just like, you know, this is what we offer at least, you know, 12 months split and, you know, divide it in 12, you know, I don’t know if anybody’s ever talked to them about that, you know, from our side of things. So, you know, maybe that’s something that they would consider.

I don’t know. Well, I think you’re spot on. Um, I think I’m stuck. We’re in a hybrid world in that we’re still dealing with a parent sticker shock when we say 3, 4, 8 or 20,000. And

so then we lower the price, but if we get it up front, we’re having. So, I guess I got to figure out a way Donna, to get the best of both worlds, which is really to qualify the customer and say, let me ask you a question. If you were a customer, Donna, now we offer kind of two types of pricing. We have the own it, and then we have the pay over time.

And I just wanted to know, are you thinking more of our three to $5,000 pricing to own it now? Or are you looking more at the three 50 to 400 a month? Cause I really do feel. I, I need to have the price be a lot different if I’m getting the money over time, more than exactly. I agree with that part of that page of that completely page.

I do. And I don’t think that anybody, a business owner would have an issue with that. I think that makes sense. I think that you have to pay for the convenience, not astronomical, but you would have to pay for the convenience of paying for it over time. Yes, absolutely. A hundred percent. And I think maybe the way to do it is maybe the offer, the high price with the payments and.

And just offer a 50% discount for cash. I remember I’m going really going to date myself. When you used to take accounting and college, you used to literally have to do the debits and credits, and they had this concept called two 10 net 30. And if any of you are older than me at 58, you probably haven’t heard the word two, 10 net 30, and it used to be, you’d send out an invoice and it’d be, you save 2%.

If you pay in 10 days, otherwise it’s due in 30 and you have to pay the full price. So I almost feel like I want to set the price of a name at 4,000. If you’re going to do the payments and then just be clear that you get 50% off for paying it all at one time. You know what I mean? Um, because I think for me the difference in the price now, if we start doing.

And most of us are selling names and we’re raising our prices to where they get up to four to five to 6,000 all the time. Then I think that’s when I’d rather do, as you say, offer either way, you can pay up front or you can pay over time. But right now, because I’m still used to getting the one-time pops.

I feel like I need it if I only sold seven names this month and got 150 bucks for each name and I just got a thousand dollars instead of the 8,000 I need. Okay. Yeah. And I think, I think we Def there definitely should be a minimum threshold, you know, which no $100 a month doesn’t really make sense. And I think anything may be under 5,000.

I don’t know what the number is, but yeah, if you can’t afford that, you know, anything under $5,000 at the first shot, you know, I would. Maybe think about your actual, you know, your, uh, business plan there, but I’m talking about, you know, the, the bigger yeah. You know what I mean? That makes sense. Anything, yeah.

Getting a hundred bucks a month. No, that’s silly. And I don’t, I can’t imagine that. Yeah, I know it’s offered, but I think so at least I think you can like set different parameters, but yeah, that, that, that doesn’t really make sense. That wouldn’t really be fair to you as a seller, you know, that. Yeah, a hundred bucks and shameless mentions that with epic, you can custom design your payment plans and I’ve tried shameless.

I have tried to do that and, and it’s, it’s a mess, I guess I’m again, I’m just not smart enough to apply a payment profile to my marketplace listing of all my domains and have it show up on the landing page. And I just, I got stuck, but yes, I do like epics plan where you can, you can still offer the low payment, but also get 30% upfront, which for many of us is a nice profit, you know, it was a nice pop.

Oh, gotcha. Well maybe, um, Eric or Anita, they, maybe they could, you know, have a room just to explain it to us. No. I mean, it always sounds good. It’s the actual, you know, doing it. Um, but listen, I want to thank everybody for coming to outbounding. I ran over last week and I know that, um, Todd and his group have some good stuff they do on legal every Tuesday.

And I think they have really raised the bar ha ha so to speak. Um, uh, as we look at legal aspects of owning domain names, and I think it helps all of us to really have a leg to stand on rather than just anecdotally saying, well, I heard that a trademark owner can’t do that. And I heard that a trademark owner can’t do that.

So I want to make sure everyone can get over there to Todd’s room. And Donna, thanks for coming up in Sharon. Thanks. Pedro always appreciate it. All right. If you came in late, I did about a half hour talk at the beginning over the idea that I’m trying to actually make a different spot in my house. In my study to put me in a different frame of mind, to have phone discussions or even email discussions about domain names through outbounding, that’s maybe a different look and feel and a different mindset that when I’m out there scavenging the dumpster diving for expired names, competitively bidding against all you, other domain investors who want to bid higher than me.

Um, and then maybe it’s hard to, to switch gears and all of a sudden, um, you know, be an outbound or, and the second thing I talked about was I need to get out there in the real world of internet commerce. I need to understand some of the things. My customers are going through. If you’ve not been through the process of getting a Google my business, if you’ve not received some pitches from what used to be Yahoo, small business or the yellow pages or the people that are calling on them every day, I think it’s worth while to hear, um, because there is a real world out there where billions of dollars are being spent on internet marketing, billions of dollars are being spent buying advertising.

Um, billions of dollars are being spent and we just want this little tiny sliver, and we’re trying to find our way in that world. Um, but it’s changing and, and I’ll give you, please join me next week on outbounding club and we’ll keep going in this topic, but also Monday on Monday domains, um, in December one of the best articles ever.

Was produced about premium domain names. And I want to be going over the article just for what it might say about the way premium domains can be considered. So I hope you’ll all join me on Monday for Monday domains and domain club. And I’ll see you all around clubhouse. Let me see if there’s any back channel messages here.

Let’s see. Terrific, Mike, I got your message. All right, everybody have a great day. Stay healthy out there. Or what was the old line from hill street blues. Remember everybody be careful out there. See I’ll thanks, John. Thanks everybody. I appreciate your kind words of encouragement. Alrighty. We’ll see. On clubhouse.