We help entrepreneurs, founders and established businesses of all types acquire premium domain names. Run by @rob and @jarcho.
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In total this week, I’ve only heard from *one* startup that is even remotely .si curious.
For any non-mainstream TLD become a legit option, some company needs to build on it and then do very well, raise money and get a lot of traction. Which then gives other startups “permission” to use that TLD, as well.
Kind of like what @NotionHQ did for .so.
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In 2005, Bob Innes paid $9.20 for RentAHitman.com.
He had a totally legit IT-security business in mind, where "hit" meant website traffic, and the plan was to offer network penetration testing and cybersecurity.
The business never launched, but the domain did its own thing anyway.
A few years later, Bob checked the inbox tied to the site and found hundreds of messages.
Some people wanted to FIND WORK AS HITMEN.
Others were asking, in all seriousness, to have someone killed.
The site was an obvious parody with fake testimonials, a fictional operator named Guido Fanelli, and nearly 18,000 "field operatives."
And, somehow, people still filled out the request form with their own information, details about their targets, and what they wanted done.
The first request Bob treated as a real threat came from a woman who wanted three relatives killed.
He asked if she wanted to be connected with a local field operative, and she said yes. The field operatives were law enforcement, and she was arrested.
Since then, Bob has kept forwarding credible requests to the authorities, and the site has contributed to arrests, prosecutions, and convictions.
He describes himself as accidentally becoming customer service for criminals, which might be the best job description on the internet.
It's also a wild example of how much a domain can say before anyone sees the website. In this case, people read three words, decided exactly what the business was, and acted on it.
Most companies spend years earning that kind of clarity. RentAHitman.com got it for $9.20… it just attracted the worst possible customers.
Read Full Story 👇
snagged.com/post/rentahitman…
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We secured Delete.com (@joindeleteme)…and the process to buy it took a much bigger turn than we had expected.
Prior to acquiring the domain, Delete.com had been owned by Dr. Luann Linquist, a psychologist in her late 80s who was living in a care facility.
Years earlier, she had used the domain for a project called DeleteStress, but the registration had eventually lapsed and the domain ended up in the expired auction.
We thought we might be able to buy the domain for around $200,000, when we knew it was heading to auction.
But, once the auction started, one bidder increased their bids (right when time was about to expire) for four-hours straight.
Eventually, the auction ended with 356 bids from 32 different bidders, and a final price of $494,352.
The mystery bidder kept us on our toes and reminded us to keep our calendars open when we’re bidding on domains at auction – because you never know when your day is going to be monopolized by someone else trying to secure the same domain.
Read Full Story 👇
snagged.com/post/how-delete-…
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🚨 NEW DOMAIN
Compost.ai. The original way to turn garbage into something useful.
DM for details.
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We often think of movies as being “permanent,” especially after seeing a poster advertising one.
But, just like the actors in movies, the digital assets associated with them age…specifically domains.
The other day, we noticed a movie poster on the wall.
Yes, it was Zoolander.
And YES, it brought back epic memories and a few one-liners.
But it also got us thinking: Does that domain still exist?
Turns out DerekZoolander.com, (which was printed right on the original movie poster), didn’t have the same longevity that the movie has.
The domain is now for sale and simply points to a GoDaddy lander.
It’s obvi too late to go back and change all the Zoolander posters with the domain printed on them, many of which are probably still floating around the man-caves of middle-aged Millennials and Gen-Xers, but there’s something funny about seeing a URL presented as if it were a permanent part of a movie’s identity when the domain itself has already moved on.
And Zoolander wasn’t a unique case.
Back in the 90s and 2000s, studios printed URLs on posters, billboards, VHS cases and just about every other piece of marketing they could find. At the time, the domain was simply where you went to learn more about the movie.
Decades later, those little URLs have become something much stranger.
Some disappeared entirely. Others are sitting on domain marketplaces, waiting for a new owner. A few are still alive, but have nothing to do with the movies they were created to promote.
BeingJohnMalkovich.com no longer has much to say about John Malkovich. It leads to an international gambling site.
ForgettingSarahMarshall.com has moved on to hotels and travel, specifically in Hawaii.
After pondering the question, What happens to a movie domain after the movie is gone?, we went down a domain rabbit hole through Hollywood to see where it would take us.
Turns out, the internet doesn’t always remember movies the way we do.
Read Full Story 👇
snagged.com/post/what-happen…
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🚨 NEW DOMAIN
Provide.ai. Much simpler than the current lexicon.
We really did spend years saying “generate a response.”
DM for details.
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🚨 NEW DOMAIN
"Can we make this more actionable?"
Congratulations.
You just named your company.
Actionable.com
DM for details.
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Snagged retweeted
My favorite part of this saga was finally get connected to the right person internally, who said their team didn’t think Plateful.com was valuable to them and they weren’t interested in buying it.
When I helped them understand that no, they actually owned the domain name, and we were interested in acquiring it, the team came back with an asking price of almost $1,000,000. 😀
There are definitely easy ways to buy a domain name. Purchasing one from a large corporation is not one of them.
We learned this the hard way while trying to buy Plateful.com from a massive food company that, (for a surprisingly loooonng time), didn’t seem to know it owned the thing.
We were working with a startup called Plateful, and had helped them originally to secure Plateful.co. Getting the .com was always the end goal.
The problem was that Plateful.com had been sitting inside a huge domain portfolio inherited through an acquisition, somewhere inside a corporation large enough that figuring out who actually controlled it became a project of its own.
After months of emails, redirects, and corporate-domain archaeology, we finally reached a guy named “Mike” in Legal & Corporate Affairs.
Mike was a champ. He agreed to track down the right people, and eventually we got connected with the marketing team.
So we made an offer: $25,000 for Plateful.com.
Then, we got a totally unexpected response. The marketing team said “they” weren’t interested in ACQUIRING Plateful.com.
We were like, “Wait, whaaaaa??”
We just told YOU that we want to BUY the domain from you, and you think we’re trying sell it to you?? Yeeeesh….we knew this was going to be a long ride.
Once everyone was on the same page, the company confirmed that, yes, they did own Plateful.com.
And then they told us what they thought it was worth.
$850,000.
At this point, you might assume the story is about an absurdly expensive domain and a company that finally realized what it had sitting in its portfolio.
It gets better.
They sent us research explaining their valuation, and some of the material looked awfully familiar. They had found our own content about domain valuations and were now using it to make the case for why we should pay them more.
Using our own blog posts against us is honestly pretty good.
Fortunately, we didn’t pay $850,000. After some more back-and-forth, we eventually acquired Plateful.com and the defensive typo domain Platefull.com for $87,500.
Nine months of trying to find the person who knew they owned the domain, followed by an $850,000 valuation supported in part by our own advice about what domains are worth.
Buying domains is weird.
That’s why we love it.
Read Full Story 👇
snagged.com/post/they-owned-…
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There are definitely easy ways to buy a domain name. Purchasing one from a large corporation is not one of them.
We learned this the hard way while trying to buy Plateful.com from a massive food company that, (for a surprisingly loooonng time), didn’t seem to know it owned the thing.
We were working with a startup called Plateful, and had helped them originally to secure Plateful.co. Getting the .com was always the end goal.
The problem was that Plateful.com had been sitting inside a huge domain portfolio inherited through an acquisition, somewhere inside a corporation large enough that figuring out who actually controlled it became a project of its own.
After months of emails, redirects, and corporate-domain archaeology, we finally reached a guy named “Mike” in Legal & Corporate Affairs.
Mike was a champ. He agreed to track down the right people, and eventually we got connected with the marketing team.
So we made an offer: $25,000 for Plateful.com.
Then, we got a totally unexpected response. The marketing team said “they” weren’t interested in ACQUIRING Plateful.com.
We were like, “Wait, whaaaaa??”
We just told YOU that we want to BUY the domain from you, and you think we’re trying sell it to you?? Yeeeesh….we knew this was going to be a long ride.
Once everyone was on the same page, the company confirmed that, yes, they did own Plateful.com.
And then they told us what they thought it was worth.
$850,000.
At this point, you might assume the story is about an absurdly expensive domain and a company that finally realized what it had sitting in its portfolio.
It gets better.
They sent us research explaining their valuation, and some of the material looked awfully familiar. They had found our own content about domain valuations and were now using it to make the case for why we should pay them more.
Using our own blog posts against us is honestly pretty good.
Fortunately, we didn’t pay $850,000. After some more back-and-forth, we eventually acquired Plateful.com and the defensive typo domain Platefull.com for $87,500.
Nine months of trying to find the person who knew they owned the domain, followed by an $850,000 valuation supported in part by our own advice about what domains are worth.
Buying domains is weird.
That’s why we love it.
Read Full Story 👇
snagged.com/post/they-owned-…
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Congrats to the team on finally making the .com happen! Know what a process it's been.
🚀
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