(1) Love, & (2) Gratefulness are the 2 most basic qualities we all should have as a human. Love everyone unconditionally, & being grateful to all those who played important role in our life. I will try my best to put some efforts to improve on these gradually.
Thread 👇👇👇👇👇
Join @DNAcademy
Watch @DomainSherpa
Join @NamePros
Plenty of other good investors here on X who does shares lots of value added content on regular basis.
First study before investing. Just hand registering anything left and right does not generate any kind of results automatically. If I buy small lot in middle of Sahara desert and start complaining after a year why nobody is buying my lot. One need to buy piece of land where there is demand for it. Land in Manhattan downtown has absolutely high probability to sell for decent ROI in long term than small piece of land in Sahara desert where nobody is living.
We're finally shedding the .so (thank you Somalia!), and using the .com for @NotionHQ. And for this beautiful moment, I want to share a fun story:
Back in 2018, I had just joined Notion, and one of the first things @ivan asked me to do was figure out how we could own https://t.co/BxoFvc83VG. I had never done a big domain purchase before, so I reached out to a few domain brokers to understand the landscape. We tried different brokers, kept things anonymous, and attempted to surface a price the seller might consider.
A year went by… nothing. Meanwhile, it was pretty clear this was only going to get more expensive as we grew. We needed a different approach. A fellow founder connected me to a broker who took a very different tack. Less transactional, more long-term relationship builder. He spent months getting to know the domain owner. Turns out owner was a fellow entrepreneur in the west coast… and a huge Grateful Dead fan.
So we figured, why not get creative? Something beyond just price. So I called up our investor Ronny Conway and asked if there was any way he could help set up a private meeting between the domain owner and the Grateful Dead. Ronny is one of those people who somehow makes impossible things possible. A week later he calls me back: “New York City. Halloween. 15 minutes after the concert. Done.”
The broker went back to the owner with an offer: some cash, some equity, and a private meeting with the Grateful Dead. That got his attention. He didn’t take the band meeting in the end, but he did lean into the equity (great call, in hindsight). We shook hands, and a few weeks later, the deal was done.
I’ve been waiting years for the day we move our product to https://t.co/BxoFvc83VG. Looks like 2026 is finally the year. Safe to say I’m unreasonably excited about this update!
First of all, thank God. Sold https://t.co/rNS0vXVxn6 last month. Thanks to @atomHQ
I like to share story behind that.
In 2023, I hand-registered https://t.co/tnwJ51SCEh and submitted it to @atomHQ Premium. It was initially approved at $3,499, but I felt the AI market was just getting started, so I removed it. Later, I resubmitted it and Atom approved it in the $22k-$45k range. After further market research and a pricing review, I listed it at $77k.
A buyer came in at $50k. Following a negotiation strategy I learned from @TonyNames , I kept my floor at $50k and asked the broker to push higher. The buyer ultimately agreed to $70,000.
Huge thanks to the #domain community for all the knowledge shared along the way, and special thanks to @MichaelCyger , whose comment on my first sale gave me the confidence to keep going.
Sometimes the biggest difference between a $3,499 sale and a $70,000 sale is having the patience and conviction to hold the right asset.
Just bought our .com for $25k from a public NYSE-listed company, cold-calling its CEO.
> realize the domain name belonged to a public company (shit).
> cold-call all board members then CEO
> follow-up everyday
Six years have passed since I went full time into domain names... so this convo with @DomainNameWire seemed like a perfect place to share some of the things I've noticed along the way.
My brain was going faster than my mouth during recording, but afterwards I took a bit of time to think about some additional tips for new investors or anyone else thinking of making the leap:
1) Don't quit your day job! Do whatever it takes to delay going full-time as an investor. Once you need those early profits for living costs, you lose out the advantages of reinvesting and compounding. You can also balance out the volatility of domain sales with a steady income source - it's a lot less pressure/stress, especially during dry spells.
2) It takes time ... to learn, and time for capital to compound. Maximising time in the game is half the battle. Some domainers give up before they reach a critical velocity - and others don't get off the ground because they haven't made enough effort to learn before buying names. Prioritise long term survival over trying to get rich quick with luck-based outliers.
3) Keep learning. There's a ton of awesome content out there - podcasts, blogs, investors here on X and domaining forums too. We're lucky to have so much data and information available to us. There are more tools out there than ever before too - filtering and finding names has never been easier.
4) Make friends. Find yourself a small cohort of similar like-minded investors you can chat to... people at a similar level and maybe who've started at a similar time. Learn together and sharpen each other. Question, support and inspire each other. Go to conferences and meet other people in the industry too - you'll be surprised how much you'll learn in person that you won't online.
5) Health is wealth. It's cliche, but the grind takes its toll - mentally and physically. Long hours sat at the computer. The isolation of working alone, often late at night. The ups and downs of the game. The constant burden of 'hindsight'. It all adds up... so looking after yourself is priority number one. Without that, it all means nothing.
Hope you enjoy listening. Thank you to Andrew - it's always a pleasure chatting with you.
https://t.co/JCtVQToHxe
In 1985, only 6 .com domains existed in the world.
The first was https://t.co/Mgcf1mMlpA, registered March 15, 1985 by a Cambridge AI hardware company spun out of MIT's AI Lab.
Registration meant FTPing a plain-text template from SRI-NIC, filling it out and emailing it to [email protected]. A human reviewed it. Approval took days or weeks.
The other five that year were: https://t.co/5heZFYFO5D, https://t.co/kSpRVwjvMJ, https://t.co/k4PTkdRte1, https://t.co/9omNWVmdyq and https://t.co/lMvo003ixl.
Symbolics, Inc. went bankrupt in 1996, they held onto the domain.
In 2009, @FirstDomain (Aron Meystedt) acquired it. Not to flip, not to park, but to preserve it as a digital museum.
41 years later, https://t.co/Mgcf1mMlpA is still resolving. The first commercial domain on the internet still points somewhere.