Buying Domain Names

The last week of the year is usually pretty slow for domain investors. Decision makers are traveling and people are not focused on domain name acquisitions if they are in the office. This is great because my family always heads south the last week of the year. Because it is slow for many investors, it may be a great time for startup founders and CEOs to lock in a deal on a domain name upgrade.

When I receive an offer or inquiry during the final week of the year, it usually gets my full attention. I may not be working from the comfort of my home office, but I am not balancing 20 other negotiations either. I imagine other investors also have a lull in negotiations and can be available to focus on one important deal.

I have owned DogWalker.com for quite some time. I previously operated a website on DogWalker.com to help dog owners find local dog walkers. Dog walkers paid an annual fee for a listing, and visitors to the website could search for a dog walker in their city, neighborhood or zip code. I later expanded and operated similar websites on DogPark.com, DogGroomers.com, and CatSitter.com. I focused less on those websites, and they didn’t do as well as the original.

For quite some time, I tried to buy DogSitter.com. I thought it paired up better with DogWalker.com than the other domain names and websites. Many dog walkers are also dog sitters, but not many are dog groomers or cat sitters. Having DogSitter.com would make a more logical cross-sell for me.

DogSitter.com had been long owned by Frank Schilling. While his mid five figure asking price wasn’t crazy for a dog sitting service to pay, it was too high for me. With my directory model, it would take a few years to earn that much back if things went as well as DogWalker.com. Over the years, i communicated with Frank and Uni brokers about the domain but never really got close enough to make a strong offer.

I wound down DogWalker.com in early 2021, so DogSitter.com was less appealing to me – particularly at mid five figures. In 2021, I sold DogGroomers.com. At the beginning of 2022, I sold CatSitter.com to someone else.

As you know, GoDaddy acquired Frank Schilling’s domain name portfolio. A couple of weeks ago, GoDaddy listed some inventory from its NameFind portfolio via GoDaddy Auctions. A few domain names caught my attention. One of those domain names was DogSitter.com. The auction concluded yesterday, and I prevailed. Ironically, I most likely would have paid this amount several years ago, but I did not get that chance. For now, it will go into my portfolio and be listed for sale.

Throughout the past couple of years, there have been numerous tech companies that laid off staff. Discussion about these tech layoffs amongst domain investors centered around the idea that these laid off employees would start new businesses and acquire domain names via the aftermarket to jumpstart their business.

CNN shared a video interview with Alphonzo Terrell, a former Twitter employee who was laid off from the company in 2022. Terrell then co-founded a new social media platform called Spill. As you can see from this LinkedIn post, the platform started off with a less than ideal domain name – Spill-App.com.

My eyes bulge out of my head sometimes when I see a somewhat obscure term in a domain name coming up for auction. Oftentimes, the term isn’t well-known by others, and even with the ease of searching Google to understand why it has bids, people won’t understand its popularity as much as someone in the know.

Yesterday, I came across a tweet from someone who shared a graphic of a domain name sales email from Afternic: