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Two Simple but Valuable Pieces of Domain Investing Advice

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At a high level, domain investing appears to be a simple money making activity. Buy great domain names at good prices and sell them profitably to buyers who want to build businesses on them. In practice, profitable domain investing is a capital-intensive business with considerable nuance.

This morning on Twitter, I came across two very good pieces of advice new domain investors should consider.

The first is from AbdulBasit Makrani:

Get[Brand].com or [Brand].ai/.io/.etc?

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James Booth tweeted about acquiring Nomos.ai on behalf of a company called Nomos that uses GetNomos.com for it domain name. The acquisition cost was reportedly $55,000. James did not share how the domain name was acquired or any other details about the acquisition.

My question is whether a startup or established company is better of using a call to action + brand 2 word .com domain name like GetNomos.com or an exact brand match non-.com domain name. In this case, the .AI domain name was acquired, but it could be whatever the popular extension of the time is – .IO, .LY, .ME, .XYZ…etc.

Share KYC Requirements When Moving to Contract Phase

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One unfortunate speed bump and occasional roadblock I encounter when closing deals is the KYC requirements at Escrow.com. Oftentimes, it can be a minor inconvenience to get the other party verified. Sometimes, particularly when dealing with large corporate entities, it becomes impossible and it can complicate a deal at a critical time.

Let’s say I am selling a domain name to Example Company, a multi billion dollar organization that is traded publicly. At closing, I often deal with a senior legal counsel or CTO to paper a deal and close it. With the Escrow.com KYC requirements, not only does Example Company need to be KYC’d, but the individual closing the deal also needs to submit documents. Getting someone who has no vested interest or benefit from a deal to submit personal ID and documents has been problematic.

Sharing Sales Can Give Away Opportunities

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I have a “policy” of not sharing my sales for numerous reasons that I shared before. Others like sharing their sales for their own reasons. As an industry participant and publisher, I am always willing to highlight and/or report on a domain name sale I discovered or learned about.

Earlier this week, someone shared some details about a fantastic domain name sale that could have gone under the radar. According to the tweet below, ABiologics.com was sold via Squadhelp for $26,499. Impressively, this was reportedly a hand registered domain name as the seller needed to wait until the 60 day ICANN lock:

The seller could have kept this sale private and used this internal data to secure additional, similar domain names. If it were me, I would probably think that if ABiologics.com sold for more than $25k, perhaps other letter Biologics.com domain names could have substantial value to someone else. I would have gone through the alphabet and registered whatever was available and put those up on Squadhelp. That may have been a lightning bolt sale, but it would have been worth up to $250 to register other available domain names.

Plunge Upgrades to Plunge.com for $250,000

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In April of this year, David Clements, CEO of Brannans, congratulated the founders of a company called Cold Plunge on its acquisition of Plunge.com. The company had been using TheColdPlunge.com for its website, and acquiring Plunge.com was a great domain name upgrade:

When the domain name upgrade was announced, the acquisition price of Plunge.com had not been revealed. Thanks to a podcast called My First Million (and thanks to Braden Pollock for bringing this to my attention), we now know the cost to buy Plunge.com was $250,000. The company reportedly acquired the domain name from a jazz band in New Orleans.

GoDaddy Auctioning Some NameFind Inventory

In a tweet this afternoon, GoDaddy announced that it will be auctioning some short domain names from its NameFind portfolio. These domain names will be auctioned in 7 day auctions without reserve prices on GoDaddy Auctions. These are private seller domain names rather than expiry domain names:

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